From the Basque Country to the Bouches-du-Rhône, from the Landes to the Gard... bullfighting towns are mobilizing to defend bullfighting, a "living culture" with significant economic weight, which a bill by deputy Aymeric Caron (LFI), examined this Wednesday in committee, wants to abolish.

In Alès, Arles, Auch, Bayonne, Béziers, Dax, Istres, Langon, Mont-de-Marsan, Nîmes, Pau, Perpignan marches by elected officials of all stripes, aficionados and lovers of local traditions, are announced on Saturday in a dozen prefectures or sub-prefectures.

The goal?

"Submit a motion in defense of cultural freedom" in these regions "to the ancestral bullfighting games", explains André Viard, president of the National Observatory of bullfighting cultures, co-organizer.

A proposal that has little chance of succeeding

Although it divides the majority, the bill of the Parisian parliamentarian Aymeric Caron, submitted to the vote of the Assembly on November 24 if the agenda allows it, has little chance of succeeding.

The fact remains that it goes very badly in the cities of ferias, these festivals in the south of France steeped in Spanish culture which drain bullfighting enthusiasts, inhabitants and tourists.

“The deputy Caron, on a very moralizing ground, wants to explain to us - seen from Paris - what is good or bad for the people of the south.

However, the deputies are not elected to dismantle the diversities of the territories but to defend them ”, castigates the mayor (SE) of Mont-de-Marsan, Charles Dayot, vice-president of the Union of bullfighting cities of France.

In the heart of the Landes department, which has the most arenas in France (about fifteen hosting bullfights/novilladas and dozens more for the Landes races), around eight shows are organized each year in those of Plumaçon.

For the Madeleine celebrations in July, “we lost a few subscribers, as in theaters, since the Covid.

But bullfights remain surplus, one of the rare live shows not to cost money to the taxpayer, ”continues the city councilor.

" The situation is serious "

With "several million euros in revenue" in the centenary arenas of Dax (8,000 places), they make it possible to "finance part of the ferias" of August 15, which attract 800,000 people, confirms the mayor (Various center) of the city , Julien Dubois.

In 2020 and 2021, when the Covid canceled the parties, bullfights were held there in half gauge.

Bullfighting is “our identity, a living culture.

Let us live with our traditions!

“, pleads the chosen one.

Same story in Orthez (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), whose mayor (PS) Emmanuel Hanon sees in the bill a "first cog", before "attacking the force-feeding of ducks with foie gras, hunting , the Peach… "

“The hour is serious”, proclaims a municipal motion adopted in Nîmes, where modern bullfighting has been present since 1853 and where the ferias generate “nearly 60 million euros in spinoffs”.

“Bullfighting carries universal values: social, aesthetic and even ethical.

It is neither a sport nor a game. It is more than a show.

It is not quite an art, nor really a rite.

It borrows from all these practices and values ​​that make it its very culture,” say the elected officials.

“An unworthy and morally unacceptable practice”

An inaudible speech for anti-bullfighting, such as Sophie Maffre-Baugé, president of the Biterrois Liaison Committee for the abolition of bullfighting, who castigates the “unwavering support” of the mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, “for this unworthy and morally unacceptable”.

“And if it was a dog, would you accept that it be killed “in the name of tradition”?

», Asks a poster against the bill distributed by the Society for the Protection of Animals.



"Whoever loves bullfighting does not see a suffering animal, but an animal that has lived free and fights to the death to defend its freedom", answers the philosopher Francis Wolff, professor emeritus at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and author of a book defending bullfighting, “a culture very difficult to understand for anyone outside”.

For him, if such a law passed, "the people here would have the feeling that a part of themselves would be taken away from them".

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