French novelist Agnès Ledig returns Legion of Honour medal to protest agricultural emergency law

Agnès Ledig at her home in the Vosges, January 2025. P. LAVIEILLE/"LE PARISIEN"/MAXPPP

Best-selling novelist Agnès Ledig, who raises goats in the Vosges, announced on Sunday, July 26, that she is renouncing her Legion of Honour in protest against the agricultural emergency law, which authorizes the conditional reintroduction of certain banned pesticides.

"To keep my honor, I return my Legion to you," the author of Juste avant le bonheur wrote in an open letter to the President of the Republic, three years after receiving the medal.

"For years I have been questioning myself in the face of health scandals, ecological disasters, and the weakness of political decisions in the face of the climate emergency," she explained in the letter, published on Instagram. "The pesticide drop of the agricultural emergency law made the cup of my anger and indignation overflow."

'Power Seems to Serve Other Interests'

Agnès Ledig, who describes herself as "a mother of three children, a midwife, and now a farmer," opposes the law definitively adopted last week by Parliament and subsequently submitted by the left to the Constitutional Council.

"More than 2 million of us said no to the Duplomb law, (...) but power seems to serve other interests more attracted to money than to life," denounced the novelist, who runs an organic farm in Biffontaine, in the Vosges.

Ledig, who began her writing career following the death of her son Nathanaël from leukemia at age five, said she does not understand "how a republican state can accept that hundreds of chemical molecules are found in the umbilical cord blood of its children without taking urgent and systemic measures to remedy it."

Agnès Ledig was the second-best-selling author in France in 2021, behind Guillaume Musso, and received the Maison de la Presse prize in 2013.

Le Monde with AFP