“We were taught as children that bullfighting is great fun, and we repeat it as an indisputable truth, so that our children can repeat it later. No Spaniard has been able to form a proper and rational concept of this festival. Very few remember when they saw the first bullfight. They take us to the bulls many times before we can speak. Then the parody of this diversion constitutes one of our children's games. Total: that when we begin to realize what surrounds us and want to explain its causes and virtues, respect for the bullfighting circus and faith in its delights are already anchored in us, as something prior that escapes all reasoning and all criticism. ”.
This is how Vicente Blasco Ibáñez tried to explain in 1917 the sociological meaning of bullfighting in Spain in the prologue to the novel Los toreros de invierno, by Antonio Hoyos y Vinent, who probably would have wandered ingloriously through the limbo of Spanish literature of not to mediate the reflection of the renowned Valencian author and politician.
Blasco Ibáñez questioned a tradition questioned by an incipient anti-bullfighting social movement that had had an unexpected awakening in Gijón just a few years before. Around 4,000 people, according to local chronicles, then demonstrated against the festival coinciding with the Begoña fair.
Various political and cultural entities of different sign began to join their voices to those of intellectuals such as Unamuno, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Pío Baroja, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Francisco Pi i Margall, Joaquín Costa, Clarín, Azorín or Antonio Machado. , oblivious both to the cruelty of the bullfights and to that black Spain that they represented for regenerationism.
Coinciding with the loss of the colonies in 1898, Blasco Ibáñez himself published in the newspaper El Pueblo, which he himself had founded and edited, how only two weeks after the Cavite disaster, that same month of May, thousands of fans came to the Patriotic Bullfight, an unavoidable event for an atavistic Spain oblivious to its tragic destiny.
It was in this same newspaper where he published, on June 6, 1900, the article "Universal Brutality", from which we reproduce some fragments.
Blasco Ibáñez was referring to the first bullfight with matadors that took place in Paris and that ended with serious altercations. Among them, the shooting of a Swedish citizen against the bullfighters. The author did not only focus on the cruelty of the celebration, but on all the cruel festivals that were celebrated beyond the Spanish borders, such as boxing or cockfighting, as the historian Juan Ignacio Codina collects in his thesis on the anti-bullfighting thought in Spain.
Although Blasco Ibáñez's most notable allegation against bullfights would come in his work Blood and sand, in which his detailed descriptions of the death of bulls and horses in the ring and the cruelty in the lines reveal what they were for the writer the bulls.
“They mended the horses as if they were old shoes; they exploited his weakness until the last moment, prolonging his agony and death. Cut pieces of intestine remained on the ground to facilitate the operation of the arrangement. Other fragments of its entrails were in the ring covered with sand until the bull died and the young men could collect these pieces in their baskets. Many times, the tragic emptiness of the lost organs was remedied by the barbarian healers with handfuls of tow introduced into the belly, ”he explains in one of the numerous fragments in which he describes the celebration.
“I will return to the bullring and attend even more punctually if they guarantee that the six bulls will jump the barrier, putting their horns lying on top. I am a bad student of the 'school of courage', I have been skipping classes for years, and I can run away without any shame. But I would like to see how the thousands of students who fervently attend the lecture hall every Sunday have taken advantage of the heroic lessons learned on the hard seat of the stands, chewing peanuts and calling the professors sons of fleas", he concludes in the prologue of Los toreros de winter.
“I am not enthusiastic about bullfighting.
”Seeing a cattle slaughtered by a young man dressed in silk and gold like the priests at high mass and to the sound of music, is a good spectacle to be seen once. Repeating itself three or four times in two hours, the same annoyance dominates me as if I spent the afternoon in the slaughterhouse watching cattle and more cattle being slaughtered, without music or bright uniforms at the slaughterhouses.
”In Paris there was an audience hostile to the bullfighting festival, which dedicated itself to whistling and even stoning the bullfighters, and there was even a Swedish citizen who, armed with a pistol, wounded two bullfighters.
”This protest, due to its brutality and injustice, almost makes the bullfighting festival good and turns it into a cult spectacle; Because if the bullfighter is a brute, what will that Swede be then who, in cold blood, from the line shoots his revolver at two poor devils who go out into the ring to earn their bread?
”My disagreement with all those who detest bullfighting in the name of civilization, saying that it is a school of brutality and the main cause of the decline of our people.
”The country that is free of brutal amusements, shame of the human species, that advances and says whatever it wants against bullfighting. All these shows are the shame of the human species. But we tolerate this universal brutality that makes men amused by the sight of blood, like an invincible evil.
"Those bloody spectacles today seem inevitable as long as this part of humanity exists, weak in thought, cowardly in spirit, incapable of other emotions than those that the savage can feel, sensitive only to blood and carnage. As long as that exists, bulls will be run in Spain.
”Do you want to fight human brutality in a balloon? Well, to it, without making a distinction between shows. End all entertainment contrary to intellectual culture, which only flatters the beast that we carry coiled within us.
"And if any distinction should be made within the universal brutality, it should be in favor of bullfights, because they are the least dangerous spectacle for the public, since nobody is ruined with them, nor are there suicides like in horse races. , where the jacos take between the legs the fortunes of the families and perhaps the honor.”
