Versatile public opinion speaks about a mobile coast line : a case study in Brittany, western France

Abstract EN

The coastal landscape of France is highly mobile, especially where the tidal range exceeds ten meters, like in Northern Brittany, on the English Channel.

This mobility is strongly enhanced by storms, some of them having been exceptional during the last decades.

The reaction of the local authorities to these storms is also highly variable.

Some are getting used to cope with the changing coastline and do not make a great point of having such a mobile feature managed.

Others react differently, and declare that storms are dangerous and create new risks along the coastline.

The reason behind this difference is a political one.

Some local communities use the storm in order to build an image of their coastline.

They describe their coasts as vulnerable because they want to refuse the use of new equipment, or new industrial activity.

In France the coastline is defined by a law (dating back to 1986) and building within a hundred of meters of the coast is strictly limited.

The French policy is to avoid any new building within this 100m zone because the coast is known to be mobile, with changing features which provide no solid grounds for buildings.

At the same time, most of the coastline is used for tourism and beaches (either sandy or gravelly) are considered as local resources for many local communities (communes, which are the smallest governing body in France).

In the French tourist culture a large beach is a better resource than a small gravel flat one.

These two points of view form a paradox.

While local communities mostly accept the idea that the coast line may change, they do not accept that a beach is depleteable by it very nature.

This means that some morphological changes are thought of as natural processes while others are seen as simply natural catastrophes.

We argue that this is a cultural issue, not related to actual morphological behaviour.

In order to make our point clear, we shall first describe how storms most often bring sediment to the coast and how they should be considered mainly as building the coast, not as destroying it (though this also sometimes happens).

Our second point will deal with the local communities who use damages created by storms as political tools in their fight against a coastal management plan they do not want.