The debate on bullfighting enters Parliament with a bill tabled in the National Assembly by La France Insoumise deputies. The opportunity to question the meaning of this practice.
franceinfo: Is it time to ban bullfighting in France?
John Viard: Corrida is especially in some regions a great popular practice. I didn’t often go to bullfights, the first time was still a huge emotion, even if I find it a bit difficult. I wanted to see, to understand. Bullfighting is deeply part of the local culture, like hunting.
Of course, the world is moving forward and changing, there are fewer and fewer hunters. Here, it’s the same problem: the staging of the death of the animal by man, whether it’s the rabbit that we shoot and finish or whether it’s the bull. All this remains very badly accepted by urban populations who, basically, have never seen a chicken killed.
The relationship to death is a real question: the fact of playing with an animal that is about to die poses an ethical problem. And then there is the fact that, more and more, we see ourselves as an animal among others, in other words the suffering of the animal is our suffering. We have tens of millions of cats and dogs, pets. The animal enters into everyday life, into the intimate, into the house. So inevitably, these scenes of violence hurt.
And yet, you say, bullfighting is popular?
I am a great defender of popular cultures. When they go out little by little, maybe you have to push them a little to go out. For example, we stopped the guillotine in Place de Grève, which was nevertheless extremely popular, it was a great show, there was an extraordinary crowd. On the other hand, you have to be careful: working-class rural people can feel rejected and always have the impression that we are no longer at home.
If you take away my culture, if you take away hunting, me, my dog, you replace my culture with another culture. I believe that people in cities must be very attentive, and avoid this kind of destructive bohoization of popular cultures, which we must surely help to unravel: we modify the regulations, we tighten up a little, we reduce the days of practice. Bullfighting will eventually disappear on its own, but it will probably take one or two generations.
To return to the more political dimension, what is at stake?
These are not the same social backgrounds, nor the same electoral geography, depending on the parties. When you look at Nupes, its electoral geography is very urban and peri-urban: I haven’t seen any bullfighting in the center of Paris! It seems logical that France Insoumise is against bullfighting. Otherwise, a culture of prohibition is rising in France: swimming pools are prohibited for reasons of private hygiene, we want to ban bullfights, etc. The world we have to rebuild is a low-carbon world towards which we are all moving forward together. It is useless to want to ban everything. I have the impression that some want to replay 1917 forgetting where it got us. You have to be very careful. Let’s stop the ayatollahs from the stands.