Toro Time in the Camargue

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The setting is classic.    The sun pounds down on the yellow sand of the crowded and flag-draped arena. The excitable crowd shouts its “Olés” of approval. The bulls snort and paw the ground. The picadors, astride their superbly trained horses, skillfully blunt the toro’s initial charges with their long wooden lances. The banderilleros dance around, deftly weakening and enraging their foe by planting their barbed shafts in his shoulder muscles.   Finally, the matadors, resplendent in their sumptuously braided and tighly-fitting costumes, strut and posture gracefully as they face their opponents in a battle in which the bull almost always is destined to be the loser.   Are we in Spain here?  In Mexico?    No. We’re in France, where bullfighting, although not the national sport it is in neighboring Spain, still draws sell-out audiences of hundreds of thousands of fans to the series of corridas that dot the summer-season calendar throughout much of the nation’s southland.   Aside from the language in the stands, French instead of Spanish, the bullfights themselves, and the entire culture known as tauromachie that surrounds it, from the training of young future matadors to the careful and lucrative breeding of the bulls they encounter, easily could be in a Spanish setting.   There are a few local variations, of course. Much, although far from all, of the tauromachie culture centers around the region of  Provence and the bull-raising farms of the swampy Camargue region west and north of Marseilles.   There, annually during the season, are myriad local tauromachie-oriented events such as La Course Camarguaise or La Course Libre, where the bulls are turned loose in the streets, much as they are in Pamplona in Spain each July. The event provides an opportunity for the local men and boys, dressed by tradition all in white, to test and affirm their manhood by trying to snatch away or attach various ribbons and emblems to the horns of bulls on the loose.   Although roughly 90 percent of the bulls in French arenas are raised in Spain, real bullfighting afficionados can easily distinguish those from the Camargue region because their horns point upward rather than forward as do those of Spanish bulls. Towns like Nimes, Arles, Dax or Bayonne get much of their notoriety from their bull-fighting ferias and pageants, which run, in general, from April through October. However, well more than 40 other towns or villages in southern France still stage some form of bullfighting. In all, the number of corridas–some on horseback, some on foot, some permitting and others not permitting the slaying of the bull–and many in makeshift arenas quickly constructed and capable of being just as quickly taken down after the event, run close to a hundred each year. .. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and painters such as Pablo Picasso often were spectators at the corridas in France, which are scarcely minor-league affairs. They long have attracted–and still do attract–some of Spain’s top matadors. Legendary stars such as Louis Miguel Dominguin, a friend of Picasso, often appeared in France, and equally famous El Cordobès was injured during a corrida in Nimes in 1964.   Nimes, which sports a bull-fighting arena constructed as a coliseum during Roman times, recently opened a nearby museum devoted to bullfighting, Le Centre français de tauromachie. The city also is sponsoring, as a main tourist attraction this year until September 7, an artistic exposition suitably designated “Toros, Women and Artists,” Des Taureaux, des Femmes et des Artistes.   Of course, it is the men who dominate the bullfights. But a few women–a very few–have managed to pierce the inner circle.  France has one with its blond and attractive Marie Sara, one of the rare women bullfighters of international prominence. She announced her retirement from the arenas not quite four years ago in Arles after a last fight executed with particular panache to mark her adieu. But this summer, unable to resist, she returned in style to open a weekend of bullfighting on horseback near Toulouse, where corridas have begun again for the first time since 1976.   Man’s fascination with the strength and symbolism of bulls is well documented back through antiquity, particularly in Greek and Roman mythology. In France, the earliest recorded contests between man and bull date back to the 13th century. There are documents noting running-of-the-bulls events in the city of Bayonne as early as 1289.  That has led some historians, if not necessarily all, to attribute the roots of modern-day bullfighting to France. But bullfighting in its current form with the matador face to face with his adversary and on foot dates back only to the 18th century.  Before that, although combat with bulls was a well known pastime and challenge for the French nobility, the confrontations were conducted only with the human contender on horseback. The descent into the ring on foot, in that sense, was a sign of a trend toward a more popular and more accessible bullfighting culture.   In recent years, that culture has been marked in France, however, as elsewhere in the world, by the growth of a robust movement to protest bullfighting’s cruelty to animals.   Already in the middle of the 19th century, although they later were rescinded, French governmental decrees forbade fights that put the bull to death anywhere north of a line running roughly from Bordeaux to Avignon.  At their historical height, such combats had taken place throughout a much larger sector of the country and extended as far north as Paris.   Although it often faces opposition from bullfighting fans and local merchants and officials who view the activity as an income-producing tourist attraction, the anti-bullfighting movement in France keeps militating steadily today for laws that will end the practice altogether. Among the most vocal in that regard is France’s one-time sex symbol, the actress Brigitte Bardot. Since her retirement from films some 20 years ago, she has devoted her life to various animal protection causes.   So far, French legal decisions in the matter generally have held to the thesis that bullfighting, particularly where the animals are put to death, cannot be instituted in places where it is not already a “well-established tradition.” But in places where the tradition holds, the judges have ruled that it can continue if local governmental administrations, in particular the mayors of the communities concerned, give their assent.    That of course has triggered a new flood of anti-bullfighting lawsuits mainly centered on questions of whether a tradition…
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