History of hemp in France: from 176,000 hectares to 632

A genomic study published in 2021 in Science Advances compared 110 plants from around the world. Its authors conclude that Cannabis sativa was domesticated in the early Neolithic in East Asia, and that all current varieties, fibre and drug types alike, descend from a single gene pool still found in feral plants and local landraces in China.

In Europe, hemp became above all a fibre and seed crop. FranceAgriMer, the French agricultural products agency, notes that it was grown for textile fibre, used by the sailing navy (ropes, sails) and for clothing, and for its seeds. Today the word "hemp" refers to industrial varieties low in THC; our article on the differences between hemp and recreational cannabis explains the distinction.

In 1661 Louis XIV's fleet was down to about thirty ships in poor condition. Colbert was put in charge of rebuilding it. At Rochefort, the naval intendant Colbert de Terron decided on 25 March 1666 to build the ropeworks, the first building of the new arsenal.

The building is 378 metres long, according to the educational file of the Corderie Royale: it needed room to lay, that is, twist together, very long hemp cables. Bales of hemp arrived by sea or by river, then were combed, spun and laid into ropes. The ropeworks closed in 1862, when steel cables replaced hemp on ships.

The geographer Jeanne Dufour traced this decline in 1961 in L'Information géographique, under an unambiguous title: "A dying crop: French hemp". Hemp covered roughly 176,000 ha in 1840 and still more than 100,000 in 1862. The area fell to 26,000 ha in 1900, 12,500 in 1914, between 2,000 and 3,000 ha until 1953, then 935 ha in 1959 and 632 ha in 1960.

By the late 1950s the crop survived only in a few pockets. Sarthe, long the leading hemp department, accounted for 47% in 1960, and the Loire between Les Ponts-de-Cé and Ancenis for 42%. Le Mans had been chosen, on the eve of the 1939 war, as the seat of the national interprofessional hemp committee. On the island of Béhuard, near Angers, hemp still covered 38.7% of the arable land.

The causes are well known. The FranceAgriMer sector sheet cites the arrival of motor ships, then cotton and synthetic fibres in textiles. The two main outlets for the fibre, the sailing navy and textiles, thus disappeared at almost the same time.

International cannabis prohibition could have swept away farm hemp. The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs exempted it explicitly: its article 28 states that it "shall not apply to the cultivation of the cannabis plant exclusively for industrial purposes (fibre and seed) or horticultural purposes".

That split between fibre plant and drug plant is what allowed a small sector to survive. In France, breeding moved towards varieties rich in fibre and low in THC, according to FranceAgriMer. Our article on the European variety catalogue explains how these varieties are registered and checked.

For thirty years, French law allowed only fibre and seeds. The order of 22 August 1990 restricted the growing, import and industrial use of hemp to those two parts of the plant. The Court of Justice of the European Union challenged that framework on 19 November 2020 in the Kanavape ruling: a member state may not ban CBD lawfully produced in another member state from the whole plant. Our article on the Kanavape ruling walks through its reasoning.

The order of 30 December 2021 repealed the 1990 text and set the ceiling at 0.30% Δ⁹-THC. It still banned the sale of raw flowers, a ban the Conseil d'État struck down on 29 December 2022. The current threshold is explained in our article on the legal THC level in France.

The area is growing again. FranceAgriMer counts 4,000 ha in 1990 and 19,500 ha in 2022, farmed by more than 1,500 growers; the same sheet ranks France third in the world after China and Canada. The Eurostat database, updated on 10 September 2026, gives 22,930 ha in France for 2025, out of 37,830 ha in the EU, or 61%.

French hemp remains first and foremost an industrial crop. According to the FranceAgriMer sheet, which uses InterChanvre figures, the fibres go into paper (50%), insulation (29%), plastics and textiles (10% each); the hurds, the woody core of the stem, are used for animal bedding (51%), mulch (28%) and building materials (20%). The flower accounts for only 5% of the uses listed, going to the pharmaceutical industry. Our report on hemp area in Europe breaks these series down country by country.

CBD sold in shops, as flowers or resins, is only a recent outlet for this sector, and the most tightly regulated.

The two classifications by ANSM, in 2023 for HHC and in 2024 for other derivatives, target semi-synthetic molecules: they affect neither hemp growing nor CBD. Our article on the HHC timeline covers them in detail.