Playing at Monarchy: Sport as Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century France

2. The Spanish Bullfight in France

The Spanish Bullfight in France Goya, Gautier, and Mérimée Le Scandale est après tout une assez bonne arme dans un pays constitutionnel, qu’il ne faut pas négliger. Prosper Mérimée, Correspondance générale Following the Spanish War of Independence (fought against French imperial troops from 1808 until 1814), Francisco Goya moved from Spain to France, where he lived for some four years prior to his death. While in Bordeaux he added to his artistic output by completing a series of engravings, La tauromaquia, focusing on the bullfight, or corrida. Enrique Ferrari describes this bullfighting series as “a novel aspect of Goya and his oeuvre as engraver , an interval of rest following the satirical and tragic themes of Los caprichos and Los desastres de la guerra. The human spirit cannot continuously withstand the tension of high drama and polemic . And so with the Tauromaquia, the artist pauses in his labors .”1 But if Goya was less overtly political in La tauromaquia than he was in his Caprichos and Desastres de la guerra, it is not clear that he entirely abandoned “the tension of high drama and polemic.” Indeed, a close “reading” of his Tauromaquia engravings reveals many similarities with his earlier works and points to the engravings’ covert political intentionality. In fact, in his bullfighting engravings Goya creates a visual two allegory between the corrida and revolutionary Spain, the primary subject of his Desastres de la guerra. In the Desastres series French soldiers are generally depicted in a physical position similar to that of the bulls in Goya’s Tauromaquia: their heads down, rifles menacing , bayonets bared—like bull horns—while members of the Spanish plebe stand in front of them, exposed to danger, lances ready. I am thinking specifically of Goya’s engraving Con razón ó sin ella (figure 2), but other engravings share the same motif (e.g., Y son fieras), as does Goya’s famous painting of the 3 May 1808 shootings in Madrid. In this painting the heroic revolutionary— like the espada, or matador—exposes himself to the danger of the rifles and bayonets lowered at him by the faceless French soldiers. In Goya’s Tauromaquia the bullfighters, or toreros—like the revolutionaries in Con razón ó sin ella—brandish spears to gain control over the menacing bull. Like revolutionaries the toreros, too, are depicted by Goya at the moment they are being killed by their enfigure 2. “Con razón ó sin ella” (Rightly or Wrongly), engraving by Francisco Goya, 1810–14. Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France. figure 3. Pepe Hillo, by Francisco Goya. Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France. figure 4. Tauromaquia, by Francisco Goya. Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France. | The Spanish Bullfight in France 26 emy (as in Goya’s Pepe Hillo engravings) and at the moment of their triumph (see figures 3 and 4). In Tauromaquia Goya capitalizes on bullfighting as a symbol of resistance to the dominant order, of a popular Spain battling tyrannical control. This reading of the bullfight as a symbol of popular revolution in the nineteenth century is supported by François Zumbiehl, who, in the preface to La tauromachie art et littérature, writes that “Goya’s fascination for bullfighting at the time of the Revolution allows him to forcefully depict popular exuberance through it.”2 One reason that bullfighting can be seen as an allegory for popular revolution, as Zumbiehl explains, is because of a significant rules shift that came at the end of the eighteenth century: “When the rules of bullfighting were established at the end of the eighteenth century, they consecrated the people’s rise to power.”3 This shift in the ring moved the champions from horseback (the noble position) to foot, not only making the spectacle more dangerous (and, by extension, more entertaining ) but also turning the man on the ground into the bullfight’s most heralded participant, thereby inverting the noble/commoner hierarchy. This change infused bullfighting with political, class, and revolutionary subtexts that were present whenever the corrida was represented. Although bullfighting came to symbolize the power of the people during their fight for independence in Spain, once the absolutist Ferdinand VII was back on the throne, he saw fit to bring the sport back under monarchical control (via a May 1830 royal...