Laughter erupted inside the Inattendues bistro as the church bells struck the aperitif hour of six and a cork popped off a bottle of local Chardonnay in the rural French village of Vouécourt.

It was a picture-postcard scene of La France Profonde in a village on the Marne river just a few miles from champagne vineyards and Colombey les Deux Eglises, the final resting place of wartime hero Charles de Gaulle.

Yet the great general would surely be turning in his grave to learn that the number of France’s bistros, seen as a key component of the country’s social fabric, has plummeted tenfold since the Second World War and now hovers at the worryingly low 30,000 mark.

So dark is the hour that this week France’s notoriously fractious parliament for once clubbed together to approve a bill to bring back bistros, along with cafes and bars, to remote countryside areas.

The man behind the new law, Guillaume Kasbarian, until recently president Emmanuel Macron’s minister in charge of the civil service, told MPs: “Two-thirds of French towns today no longer have any shops. Logically, even more have neither a bistro nor a café.”

“This is a way of revitalising rural areas, since cafés and bars are often the only places in these villages where people can meet up. Reopening them means bringing French villages back to life.”

Under French law, a type-4 alcohol licence allows the consumption of alcoholic beverages, including those containing more than 18 per cent alcohol such as spirits.

The rules drawn up by the collaborationist wartime Vichy regime in 1941 barred any new such permits from being created, so aspiring bistro or bar managers must often wait until another type-4 bar closes permanently to acquire their licence from them.

However, the new legislation will allow those in rural towns and villages with less than 3,500 inhabitants that do not already have a type-4 bar to request a brand-new permit instead of waiting for an old one to become free. The local mayor can then sell it for a modest sum rather than the €10-20,000 price tag existing licences can go for.