Yves Lebas is president of the Pays d'Arles bullfighting school.
Ever since bullfighting first appeared in 15th century Spain, heated controversies between “for” and “against” have marked its evolution.
Already the confessor of Isabella the Catholic urged her to forbid it.
Pope Pius V, in 1567, signed a bull of excommunication for participants or organizers of bullfights.
Later, Charles III dissuades the nobles from fighting the bulls on horseback, hoping to make her disappear.
But the Spanish people refuse these prohibitions coming from above and gradually transform bullfighting into a unique cultural object.
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The practice spread in France during the 19th century in the regions which already celebrated, through their own bullfighting games, the same cult of the bull.
Exciting process which integrates and makes its own a culture “from elsewhere”.
The popular and territorial rooting of bullfighting is its strength.
The crowd of Provençals gathered in Nîmes in 1894, during the “race of protest” chaired by Frédéric Mistral, led to a locally differentiated interpretation of the Grammont Law of 1905. This localism is also its weakness.
Many of those who criticize it, even hate it, are unaware of the continuum specific to bullfighting, from the extensive breeding of wild animals in a preserved habitat to the staging of a ritual as well as aesthetic confrontation between men. and animal.
Bullfighting is born from the toro.
Without bull farms intended for bullfighting games and rites, the Brave or Camargue breeds would have disappeared long ago.
These breeds being insufficiently productive, their indomitable strength could not bend to domestic uses.
Fruit of passion rather than an uncertain economic profitability, these farms are essential for the preservation of fragile natural areas.
The Camargue, a unique biosphere reserve in France, is the emblematic example.
these farms are essential for the preservation of fragile natural areas.
The Camargue, a unique biosphere reserve in France, is the emblematic example.
these farms are essential for the preservation of fragile natural areas.
The Camargue, a unique biosphere reserve in France, is the emblematic example.
The art of bullfighting allows young people to express fundamental questions.
Those who assail them, a complex interweaving of feelings where aspirations to greatness, friendship and beauty collide with the impulses of violence.
yves lebas
Toréer consists in diverting then taming the gross load of the animal and requires knowing and respecting the toro, other irreducible, accomplice of beauty and adversary of combat.
Bullfighting confronts man with the inevitability of death.
It illustrates, beauty and cruelty mixed together, how much the involvement of death is a hymn to the risk of living.
Mystery that seizes Albert Camus celebrating at the end of a bullfight
"the six magnificent thrusts of the afternoon […] masterly demonstration that killing the toro is killing death, killing destiny"
.
Bullfighting is
"that last place in the world where one represents, not like a play or a circus show, this 'mortal reason' of life, the question of the mortal destiny of man at the origin of any work of art”.
We understand García Lorca when he proclaims it
“the most cultivated art”
where dark sounds join luminous lights.
By learning to tore, young people, often from modest backgrounds, grasp a language, their language.
The art of bullfighting allows them to express desires and fundamental questions.
Those who assail them, a complex interweaving of feelings where aspirations to greatness, friendship and beauty collide with the impulses of violence and domination.
By learning to master the body, the rigor of the rules, the need for effort, the importance of courage to face danger and reflection to overcome fear;
by managing to say to themselves and by expressing to others what they feel, by giving meaning to their worries, they accomplish this first civilizational act which makes the individual in the midst of others, unique and similar to the time.
There are many of these
kids saved from social exclusion and delinquency by the bullfighting schools of Nîmes, Béziers or Arles”
!
Accepting to be moved, disturbed or questioned by bullfighting would only come from a “barbaric pleasure” specific to sick minds.
It should be eradicated.
Stigmatizing is the first step.
Prohibiting will be the punishment.
yves lebas
There is another dimension of bullfighting, less known.
The public is, after toro and torero, the third actor in the bullfighting act.
Decisive role when
"all the spectators are equal in their appreciation of the
faena
- as much to celebrate it as to protest it - erasing social differences and providing a political, living and practical lesson in social consensus".
This practical illustration of democratic principles will lead Enrique Tierno Galvan, the iconic mayor of democratic transition Madrid, to claim the role of social integrator of the bullfight.
Read alsoAt the Arles bullfighting school, eleven students dream of being a bullfighter
A few years ago, when asked about the ban on bullfighting, Jean-Luc Mélenchon felt that it
“would not be legitimate to organize a parliamentary debate”
on this subject
.
He added that it seemed to him
“more logical to let the local authorities concerned deal with this question”
.
However, the LFI group is now proposing its ban.
Wouldn't its true objective be a way of asserting an ideological and political preeminence?
First on its allies who had explicitly opposed the measure in what served as their common electoral program.
We can suspect it when Aymeric Caron affirms, peremptorily:
“We cannot be on the left and support bullfighting”.
So, rage on bullfighting!
Even if it is in the name of a very particular ideology claimed by the Parisian deputy: antispeciesism or the negation of the specificity of man in relation to animals.
Accepting to be moved, troubled or questioned by bullfighting would only be a “barbaric pleasure” specific to sick minds.
It should be eradicated.
Stigmatizing is the first step.
Prohibiting will be the punishment.
Police of minds that haunt ideologues.
And if a few “useful idiots” accompany the LFI group in its approach, they will be welcome.
It doesn't matter whether they participate, unwittingly or not, in an additional division of the country between a rather “pro-bullfighting” south of France and a rather “anti-bullfighting” north.
They will be made to believe that they voted “in conscience”.
Even if it is in political inconsistency.
Because it is a metaphor for life, bullfighting raises questions, it questions.
"It gives food for thought,"
confided Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, a great lover of bullfighting.
It can cause scandal.
No doubt this is why the death of bullfighting is a question as old as that of death in bullfighting.
Let us conclude Francis Wolff, philosopher in love with freedom:
“Perhaps, like all human work, bullfighting will die.
But let it be his beautiful death and not the victim of an assassination!”