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THE FRENCH BULLFIGHT ZONE  This statue of a bull and bullfighter in mortal combat sits in a public street in the village of Mont-de-Marsan, where it is a source of controversy. |
Bullfighting in France:
The protests are growing
of TheColumnists.com
BORDEAUX, France
I was scanning the menu at an upscale restaurant called “Didier Garbage” south of Bordeaux recently when I decided to try the daube de tareau (bull rump stew in red wine sauce). It was okay but I’ve had better Garbage. It was a bit tough and stringy, as you might expect.
Bulls had always interested me, though, and I had wanted to take a closer look. Eating one was the closest I would ever get, I thought.
The best was yet to come, however. I didn’t know it but I had just entered the French bullfight zone, the Landes and Basque country, just an hour south of civilized Bordeaux, where I was to learn a great deal more about bulls and how they are treated in France.
Pressing on southward, I arrived in Mont-de-Marsan, a town so immersed in matador culture that a monumental sculpture of a nude matador confronting a giant black bull adorns the town’s main traffic circle. I nearly collided with a big truck as I took in this towering creation.
The locals love it but not everyone believes it offers a positive image to the world. Few issues in southwest France raise tempers as fast and as high as a discussion of bullfight morality. The corrida has been a controversial activity here since it was imported from Spain in the 1850s.
Aficionados say it is a graceful contest between man and beast. Opponents say it is a sadistic, bloodthirsty blot on French claims to high culture.
French grandees such as President Nicolas Sarkozy, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Roselyne Bachelot, minister of health, youth and sports, are avowed fans. In Spain, King Juan Carlos is a prominent supporter.
“It’s a paradox,” Patricia Zaradny, president of the Radical Anti-Corrida Committee (CRAC in French), told me by telephone from her home in Périgueux in the Dordogne. “France is capable of the best and the worst. Bullfights are the worst.”
Her organization last month convened a
“world summit” in Lisbon, bringing together anti-bullfight
groups from 11 countries, including Spain, for the first time
to step up campaigning against the practice. She is now pressuring
the French Parliament to ban children from attending bullfights.
“Silent France” is on her side, she says, and a nationwide
poll indicates 83 percent of the country wants it stopped.
As most English-speakers would, I turned to Hemingway’s
“Death in the Afternoon” for illumination. Published
in 1932, this book is still in print and still serves as the
basic reference work in English for Spanish bullfighting. I was
surprised to find Hemingway writing: “I suppose, from
a modern moral point of view, that is, a Christian point of view,
the whole bullfight is indefensible.” He goes on for
350 pages, however, to describe in laudatory terms what makes
a good macho bullfight that ends in the grisly death of the bull.
Not everyone admired Hemingway’s paean to the corrida when it appeared. Critic Max Eastman called the book “Bull in the Afternoon”. Hemingway took his remark so badly that they ended up wrestling on the floor of Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins' office in New York, with Hemingway claiming to have more chest hair than Eastman.
I knew bullfights took place in France near the Spanish border but I had no idea they were such big business and so popular. About 73 French towns now stage corridas, up from about 30 just 10 years ago. Dozens of toreador camps and schools in the south offer toreador training to youngsters.
A friend had told me the French bullfight involved only the clipping of ears and tails, not the Spanish-style kill at the end, because of a legal ban. She was misinformed. About 80 percent of the bulls in French corridas are selected for their aggressiveness on Spanish breeding farms and exported to France where some 1,500 are killed in French bullrings annually.
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garbage dump where slain bull carcasses are taken for disposal. It's actually a restaurant that sells the public meals made from bulls slain at the corrida. |
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French law prohibits cruelty to animals but an amendment in 1951 specifically allowed bullfights and cockfights in towns that have traditionally staged them.
France today has become a popular stop on the international matador circuit, with arenas featuring big names from Spain and Mexico, and mimicking all the pageantry and tradition of the original Castillian spectacle. Specialized journalists cover the major performances for the sports pages in the south and local supermarkets sell cuts of the dead animal the following day.
A weekly television program brings closeups of the glitter and gorings into the home as earnest commentators weigh the pros and cons of a matador’s style. No one mentions the bull, which is largely incapacitated by pain and confusion, with pike punctures in the neck and six flowered banderillos, or harpoons, twisting in his back muscles with each movement. Finally he stumbles to a humiliating death in the dirt and the crowd cheers the man in the tight pants.
Cries of “Olé!” erupt for the matador’s performance, his comic opera gold suit, his prideful strutting, his bizarre pelvic thrusts and his twirling of the cape to happy music from the band.
“We fill up our arenas with an enthusiastic public,” Steven Mégard, an organizer of a bullfight festival in Bezouce, near Nîmes, told me. His spectacle last weekend closed out the current French season with four demonstrations by retiring local matador Denis Loré. Also offered were a paëlla feed, liters of sangria, a brass band and flamenco dancing. “We didn’t kill off the bull this time,” Mégard said. “This was just a lesson in techniques.”
Bullfight culture came to France via the Spanish wife of Napoléon III, Empress Eugénie, in 1853, when she ordered up a corrida in Bayonne while vacationing in nearby Biarritz. There followed a period of Hispanomania during which French writers and other artists discovered and adapted Spanish themes into their works. Georges Bizet produced “Carmen” in 1875, basing his libretto on Prosper Merimée’s earlier novel of the poor cigarette girl from Seville.
Bizet’s term “toréador”, a more rhythmic Frenchified version of “torero”, became the accepted word for bullfighter except in Spain, where it refers, usually disparagingly, to a French bullfighter.
Despite 150 years of tradition, Mrs. Zaradny see signs of growing opposition as mainstream media such as the daily newspaper Libération take up her cause and French celebrities sign anti-corrida petitions. Such major cities as Marseilles and Barcelona have banned bullfights altogether. Her arsenal of argumentation includes rare video footage shot inside French arenas showing the taunting and stabbing of wounded bulls. These practices, she says, brutalize public sensibilities.
She acknowledges that the over-all spectacle has a certain entertainment value for the public but her point is what it conceals - tormenting of a defenseless animal for the pleasure of the crowd. “Take something dirty and wrap it in gold,” she says. “It might look good but it’s still dirt.”
©2007 by Michael Johnson. The photos are courtesy of the author. This column first posted Oct. 3, 2007.
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