That is an option but a burner can use a separate exhaust flue.
Such a system is called ‘étanche’, as in chaudière ou poêle à granulés étanche.
There are room sealed poêles à bois which have no forced ventilation. Poêles à granulés will have fan driven exhausts & inputs.
The beauty of fan driven devices is that they can use much shorter & potentially convenient balanced flue systems. I’m actively looking at moving my large poêle à granulés which currently uses a chimney that I want to get rid of. This move would replace the present 7m vertical system with a 3m run of balanced flue. WARNING; the placement of such outlets must comply with a lot of regulations in order to avoid exhaust gases potentially entering the property via windows or doors.
We had a “similar” fireplace in our previous french house, mainly built with those thin bricks. It was horrible and the open fire was very inefficient and dirty/dusty. We ripped the whole thing out and replaced with a free standing woodburner (Hunter Herald 14 I think). So much more efficient, clean and safe. The added advantage was that you could use the top surface for heating stuff up, and a stove top fan.
I’m with @Mark on this one. We had an open fire and my goodness was it smokey! We replaced it with a free-standing stove like the one Mark has and it’s brilliant. You don’t generally get smoke as there’s a plate across the opening of the chimney to prevent a back-draught. We cook on ours too, from time to time.
We love looking at the warming glow coming from our pellet stove, situated in the fireplace, which previously contained a Godin oil burner when we arrived. The former is very heat efficient, and cheap to run. The latter was ‘condemned’ by my wife for burning fossil fuels, and removed…
I have an insert with twin fans that circulates the heating to the rooms upstairs through a series of tubes and vents, and that makes upstairs nice and toasty, but my insert puts out almost no lateral heat, and so is useless at heating up downstairs.
It’s heat that would have been lost up the chimney, so it’s great in that respect, and there are optional fans that blow laterally, but it simply doesn’t put out enough heat downstairs, whether the fans are on or off.
We have an insert, but it was already in place when we arrived, and it has a purpose-built firebrick surround with beams top and below to add some decoration and a fake chimney breast. It is, in both my and my wife’s opinions, ugly as…, but unless we take the whole thing down including the chimney surround, we probably won’t be changing it any time soon. Doing so would also leave a massive space which, at the moment, at least would make the room feel even more like a hangar. On the plus side, it works really well, gives out masses of heat, and I’ve gotten the hang of using it so that it doesn’t smoke the room out.
If we did decide to redo the whole thing, I would have a stove put in instead. Better heat radiation all round, plus the ability to put a convection fan on the top if really needed. Since we had the central heating put in, we hardly ever use the insert these days anyway, but it is handy to keep around for those days when the power goes down.
We have an Insert by a company called Stovax - they are based in the UK, but do have dealers across france;
we have the Studio 3 - kicks out around 13kw ! easy to light and burns very slow if needed…
We had a Jotul wood burner in the first house we bought in the mid 80’s and it was fantastic. After selling the house, we drove past a few months later to see the Jotul stove in a skip outside the front of the house. Who on earth skips a Jotul
