Through the early morning mist on the edge of a forest west of Paris, Denys de Magnitot stood observing the hunt. Bugles sounded, dogs sniffed the ground and hunters followed on foot. A roe deer darted across the field and a shot rang out.

“We’re feeling positive,” said De Magnitot, a farmer, lifelong hunter and mayor of a village in the Val d’Oise. Hunters in France had reason to be happy, he said, because the president, Emmanuel Macron, had given his unabashed support to hunting, promising to strongly promote and protect it as a French way of life.

Macron has gone further than any other French president in 40 years to court the hunting lobby and he is pushing through a raft of changes in favour of hunters, including reducing the price of national hunting permits and fixing a new system of monitoring species for hunting.

As the gilets jaunes protests hit rural areas, the hunting lobby remains one of Macron’s key links to the countryside and he has refused to give in to environmentalists who criticise his pro-hunting stance.

Macron’s popular environment minister Nicolas Hulot quit the government in protest in August, saying he was disgusted that a hunting lobbyist was allowed to attend Élysée Palace meetings. But Macron has insisted there should be no shame in supporting hunting and he has prepared laws to make hunting cheaper and easier, hoping to attract a new, younger generation.

“Hunters can now say we have a president who understands us,” said a digital startup developer from the outskirts of Paris who was in the woods hunting wild boar and deer with a bow and arrow.

For Macron, who has an image as a moneyed Parisian ex-banker with a city-centre voter base, courting the hunting vote is seen as a way of connecting with the countryside, particularly before European elections next year and local elections in 2020.

“Unlike in the UK, hunting in France is not a class issue,” said Thierry Clerc, head of the hunting federation in Île-de-France.

The French revolution stripped nobles of their exclusive hunting rights and today many of France’s more than one million hunters are working class, particularly in the south-west and north-east. Hunting in France varies from wild boar and deer to many bird species. Horseback hunting with packs of hounds, although a minority sport, is not banned, unlike in the UK.

Macron’s most surprising and symbolic pro-hunting gesture came after dark in a muddy forest during his 40th birthday celebrations last year. The president and his wife, Brigitte, were celebrating at a cottage in the grounds of the vast Renaissance Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, which has long been associated with royal and presidential hunting.

The Château de Chambord. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

During Macron’s stay, top hunters from French federations were stalking deer and wild boar on the estate. One night after the hunters had laid out their kill to admire it, with large wild boar carcasses arranged on beds of leaves, a black car drove up and Macron got out wearing wellies. He spent an hour with the hunters, telling them hunting was a “terrific asset” for French biodiversity. “I am the president who will develop hunting, you can count on me,” he said.

It was the first time in decades that a French president had dared to openly attend a display of animal carcasses after a hunt. Willy Schraen, head of the national hunters federation, later said Macron had seemed totally at home “even with the mud and blood of dead wild boar”. He added: “It’s a breath of fresh air for our hunters.”

Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron. Photograph: Alfonso Jimenez/REX/Shutterstock

Macron does not hunt himself, but he was born in a region where hunting is popular, and his wife’s family are reportedly keen hunters.

As well as reducing the cost of national hunting permits from €400 to €200 and changing rules on monitoring species for hunts, Macron has suggested he could reinstate the tradition of presidential hunts at the Château de Chambord. There has been speculation this could begin next year during the French-Italian commemorations of the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his final years in France.

But the idea of bringing back hunting diplomacy and including a hunt in the Leonardo commemorations has outraged animal protection groups. Allain Bougrain Dubourg, head of the French League for the Protection of Birds, said: “I have warned the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, that [Leonardo] was likely a vegetarian and that he wrote in favour of animals and was a friend of nature. To stage a presidential hunt to mark his death would frankly make him turn in his grave.”

Bougrain Dubourg said he feared Macron’s changes to the way hunted species are monitored could result in more species being killed: “It’s unacceptable and undemocratic for Macron to be doing this without consulting biodiversity groups.” He said France already allowed the hunting of several bird species in danger of dying out.

Thierry Coste, the hunting lobbyist whose presence at an Elysée meeting sparked the environment minister’s resignation in August, was unrepentant. Sitting in a smart cafe in Paris, he said he had previously advised the former presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, “But Emmanuel Macron is the only one with whom I have this kind of incredible complicity – he understands everything: that hunting is part of French rural identity and that it’s not a taboo.”

Coste said France remained an “Eldorado for hunting” and Macron’s new rules would not endanger species.

Jérôme Fourquet, a political scientist from the pollsters Ifop who has studied the hunting vote, said: “Macron, who comes across as a representative of city people with university degrees, has a support deficit in rural France. Hunting representatives convinced him that one way to reach the rural population was through hunting.”

French hunters and their families make up a significant pool of voters and they once fielded their own candidate in presidential elections. Some hunters historically voted Communist, but now the vote is spread between the left, the mainstream right, and increasingly, Marine Le Pen’s far right.

But Fourquet said the difficulty would come when Macron was forced to reconcile the need to reach out to centre-left, Green voters in cities at the same time as hunters. “They are complete opposites and that’s where it becomes a challenge.”

The hard-left France Insoumise group in parliament has been pushing to ban hunting on Sundays, citing accidents in which people have been shot. But hunters have many allies among different parties in the parliament and senate. Two of Macron’s current cabinet ministers are hunters.

Meanwhile, Macron knows he cannot take the hunting vote for granted. “I’m not sure Macron knows what a gun is,” said one sceptical rightwing hunter in the woods west of Paris. “He seems to be listening to his wife, whose family hunts. That’s good for us hunters now, but we’ll stay vigilant.”