In a roundup from late September, there flashed a line easy to scroll past between sanctions and rocket launches: the mayor of the French town of Marmande had officially issued an order forbidding residents from getting sick. Those who did fall ill were instructed, in the document’s wording, to “take steps to postpone it until a later date.”
The temptation is to immediately joke about ludicrous bureaucracy—and miss the point. Because the mayor was neither mad nor joking. His name is Joël Hocquelet, and he signed a deliberately absurd legal act to draw attention to his hospital, which is falling apart before everyone’s eyes. This is not an oddity but a genre with a seventy-year pedigree. What caught me was not that an absurd order exists, but why its existence is allowed: an order no one can obey turns out to be far more durable than an order that tried to change something.
On 28 September 2026, the mayor of Marmande (Lot-et-Garonne, southwestern France) signed a document titled “Order Prohibiting Being Sick Within the Territory of the Commune of Marmande.” In its press release, city hall did not pretend it was serious: the text of the order is explicitly called volontairement absurde—deliberately absurd—and immediately acknowledges that forbidding people from falling ill is, of course, impossible.
The reason an adult with administrative responsibilities signed it is much more serious. The local hospital—the Marmande-Tonneins joint medical center, serving a catchment area of roughly 110,000 people—is under temporary outside administration by the regional health agency. On the night of 9–10 September, its emergency department shut down: there was no doctor on duty. In July, the health ministry circulated an order under which, from 2027, hospitals within a single territorial network must “share” services among themselves. The mayor reads that as: “In the end, the laboratory and emergency room will be concentrated in Agen, while Marmande will be left with the role of a first-aid post.”
That is exactly how he puts it: “We do not want your postcode to determine how long you live.” The wording about an order pour interpeller—“to shake people up”—is the whole point of the act. Here, absurdity works as a banner.
The most worn-out fact about these orders is that they “defy common sense.” Less boring is the fact that the first known case in the genre was pure marketing. In 1954, the mayor of the wine-growing town of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Lucien Jeune, banned within the commune “the overflight, landing, and takeoff of aircraft known as ‘flying saucers’ or ‘flying cigars,’” on pain of having violators impounded. The handwritten text is kept in the town hall archives, and the village constable, if the document is to be believed, was required to fine aliens.
The ban made no more sense than a ban on getting sick. But it worked: at the height of the UFO craze, journalists from around the world came to interview the mayor of a town whose wine is now known far better than his stunt ever was. The genre was born as a PR gimmick long before the word “virality” had time to appear.
Next on the list: people forbidden to die. Cugnaux (Haute-Garonne) in 2007, Le Lavandou (Var) in 2000, La Gresle (Loire) in 2019—the last one on weekends and public holidays, when the funeral home was closed. The reason was always the same: there was no room left in the cemetery, and the town either could not or would not expand it. In the commune of Sainte-Colombe-sur-Seine (Côte-d’Or), the mayor forbade women from giving birth—a protest against the fact that the nearest maternity ward and gynecologist were in another town. In Briollay (Maine-et-Loire), mosquitoes were forbidden from entering the area; in Feuquières (Oise), dogs from barking too loudly; in Montreau (Loiret), couples were prescribed “Viagra pills” to stimulate the birth rate. In Malemort and Avesnes-les-Aubert, municipal orders recommended smiling, while one commune in Vendée decreed that “sunshine be made mandatory.”
The list is long, but its logic is one. An order is the cheapest and most visible way for a mayor to say out loud what they cannot fix. Ouest-France states the motivation plainly: “a spotlight on the home commune, plus a political or even activist message.” It turns out the genre even has its own competition: in 2022, the website “Legal Curiosities,” together with France Bleu, held the first showcase of the most ridiculous municipal acts, with former prime minister Édouard Philippe chairing the jury. What began as despair had grown into an award category.
Legally, it is simpler than it looks. A mayor issues an order alone, without a prior vote. Some acts are then sent to the prefect; from that moment, the document becomes enforceable, and the prefect is required to review its legality. Lawyer Fleur Jourdan explained to Ouest-France why that review fails to catch them: “An enormous number of acts pass through legality review, and some simply escape the prefect’s attention.” Formally, these orders are unlawful—the basis of a mayor’s police powers is limited to public order, safety, and public health, and banning death does not fit inside it. But the lawyer puts it even more precisely: “These ridiculous orders are unlawful not because of their content, but because they cannot be applied.” There is nothing to annul—an act that cannot be enforced harms no one.
That is where the answer lies to the question the order raises. The absurd can always be carried out, at least symbolically. The real thing—never.
Take the loudest counterexample of recent years. In 2019, the mayor of the Breton commune of Langouët, Daniel Cueff, banned the use of agricultural pesticides within the town’s boundaries. Not a “message,” but a working order: behind it was a genuine attempt to protect residents from fields being sprayed. It lasted a few months and was annulled.
What followed is the most telling part. The mayor took the case all the way to the Conseil d’État, and on 31 December 2020 France’s highest administrative court issued a ruling that reads here like a verdict on the genre. The court explained that combating pesticides is a matter of “special police powers,” assigned to the state and its agencies; a mayor, exercising general police powers, has no right to issue general rules governing the use of these substances. Even though the state order of 4 May 2017 did not protect people living near fields as it should have. Interestingly, the court made a move that spared Langouët an idiotic defeat: this ruling was not about “impossibility of application,” but about “this is not your business at all.” The difference is fundamental. In the first case, the order looks powerless; in the second, defiant.
And there is the central paradox. An absurd order forbidding illness lives on quietly for years and attracts the press. A serious order forbidding people from poisoning their neighbors with chemicals dies in court. The mechanism is the same: what changes nothing is lawful; what tries to change even something small runs up against the real boundary of power.
France is not unique, and that is the best proof that this is not about national character. In the United States after the Parkland shooting, hundreds of counties declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” promising through resolutions not to enforce state gun laws that local councils considered unconstitutional. Legally, this is nothing: in Virginia, for instance, the law explicitly forbids local authorities from regulating firearms, while only a court can declare a law unconstitutional. As The Washington Post wrote, these resolutions, “because they conflict with state law, have no legal force”—but they do exactly the same job as French orders: they turn dissent into a document.
And in 1980s Britain, there was a case that turns everything upside down. Up to 200 local councils, from Manchester to Greater London, declared their territories “nuclear-free zones.” Defense was not a local matter, and the designation was purely symbolic; its legal basis was Section 137 of the Local Government Act, which allowed small sums to be spent on anything “in the interests of the area.” Yet these same councils refused to take part in civil-defense exercises for a nuclear war, and the national “Hard Rock” exercise in July 1982 had to be canceled: of 54 county councils, 24 refused outright, while another seven half-heartedly sabotaged it. The symbolic declaration did not change defense policy—but it derailed a specific event. A rare case in which an order absurd in substance managed to do something tangible.
To avoid losing the scale behind the elegant tricks, it is worth putting some dry figures alongside them. According to the Court of Auditors’ 2026 report, France has around 2,380 hospital sites, and 75% of patients reach a hospital no farther than 43 kilometres from home—roughly 48 minutes by car. The distance is shorter for maternity care (25 kilometres), longer for organ transplants (119 kilometres, almost an hour and a half each way). According to the mapping service Toposanté, 12.3 million people—18% of the population—live in communes where access to general medical care falls below the threshold of 2.5 consultations per person per year; in 26,000 communes, there is not a single private-practice GP.
This is the soil in which such orders bloom. In the Gironde town of Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, the emergency department was shut for two and a half months in the summer of 2026; only sixteen of thirty doctors remained, and patients were redirected to Bergerac (20 kilometres away) and Libourne (40 kilometres away). One local resident put into words the same thing Marmande’s mayor had said, only without the legal form: “Our emergency is not getting sick.”
Meanwhile, politicians trade texts. A bill regulating where doctors may set up practices was passed by the lower house as early as May 2025, but in June 2026 the Senate rewrote it into “freedom to establish a practice, with conditions” and postponed it; a competing Senate bill is still waiting its turn in the Assembly. Two bills are bogged down between the chambers, while mayors sign bans.