Murder on the Canal du Midi: When Television Preserves a Vanishing Landscape (#712)
There is an unexpected pleasure in watching a television program set somewhere you have recently traveled.
Suddenly the murder matters a little less.
Instead, you find yourself looking beyond the actors. You recognize the locks. You study the towpath. You watch the péniches moving slowly through the water. You notice the villages, the bridges and, above everything else, the trees.
That was my experience watching Season 7, Episode 5 of the French television series Murder In. Its original French title is Le Canal des secrets - The Canal of Secrets - which seems more appropriate than the English title - The Canal du Midi.
The episode was directed by Julien Zidi and stars Annelise Hesme as Parisian police captain Izia Moreno and Aurélien Wiik as local gendarmerie captain Maxime Fabre. A woman's body is discovered in the Canal du Midi, and the investigation brings together two police officers with very different personalities and approaches.
It is a familiar television formula. But the real star is the canal.
A Murder Among the Plane Trees
The program opens into a landscape that anyone who has traveled the Canal du Midi will recognize immediately: still water, locks, narrow towpaths, boats moving at walking pace and those extraordinary avenues of trees disappearing into the distance.
The canal appears peaceful, timeless and almost impossibly beautiful. Which, of course, makes it an excellent place for a murder.
The contrast is deliberate. Murder mysteries have always benefited from beautiful settings.
There is something particularly unsettling about violence intruding into a landscape that seems designed for contemplation.
But visiting The Canal du Midi in 2026 as I did recently, reveals something the filmmakers could hardly have intended.
The episode has become a historical record.
Many of those magnificent trees have disappeared.
Where Was It Filmed?
Filming took place from August 21 to September 17, 2019, principally in the Aude and Lauragais regions of Occitanie. Production records identify Castelnaudary and Montferrand, while contemporary accounts add Labastide-d'Anjou, Saint-Félix-Lauragais, Salles-sur-l'Hers, the Écluse du Roc at Mas-Saintes-Puelles, the péniche Kapadokya, and Toulouse.
The geography presented on television is therefore not quite the geography a traveler would experience by boat. Film editors can accomplish in seconds what takes a péniche hours to accomplish.
Several different stretches of the Lauragais were assembled to create one apparently continuous fictional landscape.
And some of the locations can be identified quite precisely.
The body in the lock - Écluse du Roc
The discovery of the woman's body trapped at a lock was filmed at the Écluse du Roc, near Mas-Saintes-Puelles, just east of Castelnaudary.
This is a real double-chamber Canal du Midi lock, about 58 kilometers along the historic canal route from Toulouse.
Contemporary canal documentation specifically notes that scenes from Le Canal des secrets were filmed here in 2019. (
The filmmakers could hardly have chosen a better opening. The stone lock, water, lock keeper's building and vegetation provide an immediately recognizable Canal du Midi setting.
In the fictional story the body is described as being discovered at Marseillette.
But the lock on screen is not at Marseillette. It is the Écluse du Roc.
Television geography has already begun its sleight of hand.
Castelnaudary - the centre of the fictional world
Much of the outdoor filming was concentrated around Castelnaudary, the great canal town of the Lauragais.
Castelnaudary is particularly photogenic because of its relationship with the canal and its Grand Bassin, one of the largest expanses of open water anywhere on the Canal du Midi.
The town and its canal approaches provided a number of the waterside landscapes, roads and establishing views used throughout the investigation.
The péniche - Kapadokya
The barge appearing in several sequences was not a studio prop. It was the real péniche Kapadokya.
Several sequences involving life on the canal and the investigation around boats were filmed aboard it.
That contributes greatly to the authenticity of the episode. The interiors have the dimensions and slightly confined character of an actual canal boat rather than a generously proportioned television set.
For anyone who has spent several days traveling the Canal du Midi by barge, those scenes have an immediate familiarity.
Labastide-d'Anjou, Saint-Félix-Lauragais, Salles-sur-l'Hers and Montferrand
Together these villages supplied the roads, houses and rural backgrounds that allow the fictional investigation to wander through what appears to be one community.
In reality, the actors and film crew were moving around a considerable portion of the Lauragais.
Toulouse - the gendarmerie that wasn't a gendarmerie
Perhaps the best piece of cinematic deception occurs indoors.
The police and gendarmerie interiors appear to belong naturally to the community in which the murder takes place.
They don't.
All the interior scenes were filmed in Toulouse.
More specifically, they were shot in the Hôtel de Lestang, the historic former rectorate. The Toulouse film office reported that the building was completely transformed into a gendarmerie for the production.
So when Izia and Maxime walk inside their supposedly local police headquarters, they have effectively traveled all the way to Toulouse. The viewer, naturally, notices nothing.
That is exactly what good location filming is supposed to accomplish.
A Television Map of the Murder
The principal identifiable locations can therefore be imagined as a loose arc through the Lauragais:
Toulouse → Montferrand → Labastide-d'Anjou → Écluse du Roc/Mas-Saintes-Puelles → Castelnaudary, with excursions northward into places such as Saint-Félix-Lauragais and Salles-sur-l'Hers.
The story compresses all of this into one apparently intimate neighbourhood surrounding the canal.
It is a reminder that the Canal du Midi we see in the episode is both real and imaginary.
Every tree, lock and village is real.
Their relationship to one another has been rearranged by television.
The Canal They Filmed in 2019
What particularly caught my attention were the trees.
Again and again, the detectives drive or walk beneath enormous plane trees. Their trunks stand like columns beside the water and their branches meet overhead to create the famous voûte verte - the green vault - that became one of the defining images of the Canal du Midi.
Those trees were not part of Pierre-Paul Riquet's original seventeenth-century canal.
Plane trees were planted extensively along the canal during the nineteenth century, eventually becoming inseparable from its visual identity.
At their mature best, they produced something close to a living cathedral. Water below. Branches above. And a long green nave stretching toward the horizon.
That is the Canal du Midi we repeatedly see in Le Canal des secrets.
But it is increasingly a Canal du Midi that exists only in photographs and films.
The Killer Outside the Murder Mystery
There is another killer in this story. And unlike the murderer in the television program, this one is real.
It is the microscopic fungus, Ceratocystis platani, responsible for canker stain of plane trees, known in France as chancre coloré du platane.
The disease was first detected beside the Canal du Midi in 2006 at Villedubert in the Aude.
Once a plane tree becomes infected, the fungus invades its vascular system. There is no effective cure. An infected tree eventually dies.
Worse still, the canal itself helps the organism move.
Spores can be transported in water. Boat hulls can injure exposed roots. Maintenance equipment can transmit infection. And because the roots of neighboring plane trees may contact one another underground, infection can move from tree to tree.
An avenue of genetically similar trees planted closely together is therefore almost the perfect environment for an epidemic.
The great strength of the landscape - thousands of magnificent trees forming continuous avenues - became its biological weakness.
Have the Trees in the Television Program Been Cut Down?
Many certainly have. Others remain.
It would therefore be inaccurate to say that every magnificent plane tree visible in The Canal du Midi has disappeared.
But there is another detail that makes watching the program in 2026 particularly poignant.
The difference between the landscape shown in the 2019 television program and the Canal du Midi we see today is real.
It is not simply the result of the director seeking out unusually beautiful, tree-lined stretches for filming.
By the time the episode was filmed, the epidemic was already well underway. Yet many substantial avenues of mature plane trees remained along the Lauragais.
Since then the removal program has continued.
Consequently, some of the very avenues recorded by the camera in August and September 2019 have been thinned dramatically or disappeared altogether.
The television camera inadvertently caught the canal during a transition.
You Can Plant a Tree but You Cannot Plant a 150-Year-Old Tree
The Canal du Midi is not being abandoned to treeless banks.
An enormous restoration and replanting program is underway. The intention is not simply to recreate another monoculture of plane trees and repeat the biological vulnerability of the past.
A more diverse landscape is emerging. Different species are being planted so that the future canal will be more resilient to disease.
But herein lies the problem.
You can plant a tree in an afternoon.
You cannot plant a 150-year-old tree.
The young trees beside the canal may eventually recreate the great green corridors that generations of travelers knew. But those of us traveling the canal today are living through an extraordinary interval between two landscapes.
One is disappearing.
The other is still growing.
This is described as shifting baseline syndrome. (Read more below)
Television as an Accidental Archive
That is what makes Le Canal des secrets unexpectedly fascinating. The filmmakers set out to make a murder mystery. Instead, they also made an environmental document.
The camera lingered on the canal because it was beautiful. It recorded the great trunks beside the towpath, the shade across the water and the tunnels of foliage through which boats passed.
Nobody watching the program when it first appeared in 2020 needed to think very much about those trees. They were simply there.
Watching it six years later is different.
We now know that many of them were living on borrowed time. Many of the very trees under which Annelise Hesme and Aurélien Wiik walked in 2019 may no longer exist. And that gives the program an emotional quality it never originally possessed.
A Canal of Secrets Indeed
Perhaps the French title was more prophetic than anyone realized.
Le Canal des secrets.
The canal contains many secrets.
There is the fictional secret surrounding the body in the water.
There are the historical secrets of Pierre-Paul Riquet's extraordinary seventeenth-century engineering project.
And there is another story written quietly into the landscape:
Disease, loss, adaptation and renewal.
Having traveled the Canal du Midi myself in 2026, I found the television program strangely unsettling.
I remembered stretches of open sky where the film showed a tunnel of leaves. Young trees where the screen showed giants. Banks exposed to the sun where detectives had walked in deep shade.
The difference was not my imagination. Nor was it merely clever location scouting by the filmmakers. The landscape itself had changed.
Look again at those enormous plane trees in The Canal du Midi. Look at the deep shade beneath them.
For a moment, forget the detectives. Forget the corpse in the lock. The camera is showing us something else.
A landscape in the process of becoming history.
We tend to think of landscapes as permanent and ourselves as temporary.
Sometimes it is the other way around.
A television crew arrived beside the Canal du Midi for four weeks in the late summer of 2019. They recorded some actors, a fictional murder and a police investigation.
Quite unintentionally, they also preserved a portrait of a landscape that was already beginning to disappear.
And seven years later, that may be the most compelling mystery in The Canal du Midi of all:
How could something that looked so timeless change so quickly?
Shifting Baseline Syndrome
Inter-generational changes in perception of the state of the environment, or the tendency for people to define pristine nature as nature the way they first saw it, rather than the way it was in the beginning
I highlight the concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome on my website, defining it as:
The inter-generational change in how people perceive the state of the environment.
Under this phenomenon, each generation accepts the degraded nature they first experience as the pristine baseline, completely unaware of how much richer and healthier the ecosystem used to be. Read more: https://www.ricklecouteur.com/general-4
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