Marseille, Octobre 12th, 2005

Dear Sir :

At the Fiesta des Suds 2005 which is scheduled to take place at the Dock des Suds from 20^th to 21^st Octobre a "capea" show is to be performed from Thursday 20^th to Saturday 22^nd Octobre. Professional toreros are to take part as well as "young sprouts" from torero schools, in moveable arenas set up on the boulevard de Paris, precisely where, 40 years ago, the piteous history of bull fight in Marseille had come to a end by lack of audience as a consequence of reversals of fortune and of municipal bans.

We do ask you to ban this performance of "capea" which is but a Spanish bull fight.
We would like to remind you that bull fights are illegal in France except in cities which can claim a local unbroken tradition (article n° 521-1 of the Code Pénal.)
There is no such tradition in Marseille.

By authorising bull fights whose main goal is to create a fake tradition, as was recently done in the region of Toulouse (Fenouillet / Rieumes) as well as in the department of Aude in Carcassonne, you would become an accomplice of a tentative to reintroduce bull fights to Marseille, and even, depending on the details of these shows, accomplice of severe cruelty to animals, which is sanctioned by the above mentioned article of law.

Besides your responsibility as an elected official, you would also be putting our city's reputation at risk.

Marseille's public image could not indeed be but besmirched: bull fight, a barbarian pratice, already anachronistic, morally and legally condemned since its introduction to France 150 years ago, is nowadays rejected by the large majority of the French people and, increasingly so, including in the cities that still host bull fights.

You certainly know of the bill introduced in June 2003 by the MP of Alpes-Maritimes, Madame Muriel Marland-Militello (from the UMP party), which requires an amendment of the law 521-1 of the penal code, i.e. to ban the exception that was introduced by the law of April 24th, 1951, in order to reinstall the complete ban on bull fights.

Yielding the battle field to the supporters of bull fights would hamper Marseille's application for the title of European Culture Capital in 2013. Most European countries condemn bull fights. Let's bet - and we will participate, if necessary - that they are going to discriminate between the need to defend cultural diversity on the one hand (at the European and the global level: UNESCO rather than the WTO!), and on the other hand, the attention that would be drawn on bull fights by Marseille's election.

In June 1999, on the occasion of a previous attempt by " tauromaniaques " (bull-maniacs, the supporters of bull fights), you displayed an evidence of wisdom and banned it, and of course we echoed it. Thus in Septembre of the same year we demonstrated to express both our satisfaction and our vigilance. It is far more than an anecdote to remind that this was the last public action taken by professor Théodore Monod. A year before he passed away, aged 98, he had come with other VIPs to support the citizens of Marseille in their battle against bull fights and to highlight it's ethical stake by his presence - the evidence of a life of coherent dedication to so numerous noble topics, whether human or animal.

More than ever we will not fail to publish your answer ; all the more so as this news labelled "Fiesta des Suds" has come up in the context of a malicious project. Indeed, Toros Méditerranée, presenting themselves as an "association", has been discretely diffusing a claim in favour of the construction of arenas in Marseille for six months and pretends that this "cultural project" would allow to host, besides bull fights, numerous "cultural and sporting entertainments".

Actually it is the bull fight club Paul Ricard, which groups a few aficionados (of which some are linked to Latinissimo, the woman organising the Fiesta des Suds) and which has been campaigning for a few years in favour of bull fights and a feria in Marseille, assisted particularly by aficionados from the city of Arles.

Thus, beyond the Marseille issue, we are addressing the Member of the Senate.
The cleavage between the citizens and the representatives is deep and deepening: suspicion, corporatism, retreat within one's community or selfish on the one hand, short-sighted policies, electoralism culminating in populism and corruption on the other hand. The republican values have decayed, a vicious circle is being generated.

In order to break it a face lift for "Marianne" (the symbol of France) is not enough.
Political courage and a call for lucidity, responsibility, and common welfare are required from those who manage society as well as from politicians.

Particularly as to this political and social crisis is added an environmental crisis which will worsen permanently and require fast and important changes of our way or life.

As far as we are concerned, from an ethical and philosophical argument where the argument of the majority's opinion prevails (the latter can only be considered secondary in a progressive democracy in which minorities should actually be acknowledged and allowed to express their opinions), we will keep the following in mind:

• Bull fights constitute a severe trivialisation yet even implicit valorisation of violence which is promoted among the children and youths in the audience and all the more so when these participate as pupils of the torero schools. In which case, influenced by exalted or interested adults, cruelty is more or less denied by the child, repressed by the training of technical movements, emulation, their desire for acknowledgement, the need to be courageous (to be manly) and, often, the burning remembrance of the hits and wounds by the young bulls who are considered exclusively according to their degree of dangerousness and their involuntary contribution to the aesthetic of "faenas".
• How many young bulls breathe their last for being hit by the banderillas and because of the horribly repeated and naturally clumsy beats? This necessary step in the training of a young torero is well hidden from the public while the preceding step, the one when they practice with a so-called "careton" (an artificial substitute: a bull's head on a wheel, moved by a fellow student) is readily exhibited with pleasure.
  
• Can one reasonably exclude that young people during their process of psychic structuring be traumatised, however little or severely, whether agent or witnesses, by such violence? There is undeniably for society the delayed risk that these people's free will might be annihilated to the benefit of the group's violence, especially in the course of confusing mass events.
  Let's note casually that the terrible fate of these young animals behind the walls of the bull fight schools is concealed when the pro-bull fight argument, which is already delusive for the adult bull, used with formal bull fights, is brandished, the argument of his "nice life" during four years before he is allowed "to die gloriously in the battle".
• The bulls and the "toros bravos" (the courageous bulls) are concerned, whatever specific breed they belong to and according to whatever specific genes and behaviour they have been selected, they can not speak, they do not vote, but for thousands of years and various harvests they have drawn the plough for us humans (and they still do so literally in some developing countries.)
  Etymologically: domestic, they belong to the house and we owe them gratitude and ease rather than turning them mad - be it by BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy: mad cow disease) or, more intentionally, by the "olé's".
  Furthermore, the horror of slaughterhouses and of the dark concentration-camp-like cattle-breeding must not serve as an excuse for violence with the alibi of daylight, particularly from non-vegetarians.
• Bull fights must be banned for what they actually are, behind the bull fight-friendly lies, and for what they stand for : the subjugation of the other to satisfy one's strive for power, one's vanity and for deathly irresponsibility in an henceforth fragile world; a world in which mankind - at least in it's modern western version which has almost become universal - must cease to assert it's control of nature and of life and ask itself the essential question as to the limits of this control.
• For the time being, we must take every possible action to prevent bull fights to be reintroduced to Marseille. Hoping that you will take a decision accordingly, dear Mr Gaudin, we remain