Paris (AFP) - French MPs debated a ban on bullfighting on Wednesday for the first time, with a vote due later this month that has enraged lovers of the blood sport in the south of the country.
The issue has split the ruling coalition of President Emmanuel Macron and the biggest opposition party, the far-right National Rally, which is led by animal-lover Marine Le Pen.
Despite having widespread public support, most observers expect the bid to fail as a majority of MPs fear a backlash in rural areas and bullfighting heartlands where the practice is a cherished cultural tradition.
During a first debate by lawmakers on the parliament's law commission on Wednesday, a majority voted against the proposal by MP Aymeric Caron, a vegan former journalist from the hard-left France Unbowed party.
He denounced the "barbarism" of the tradition and "the hypocritical ceremony in which an animal that is supposedly honoured is massacred with a precision and refinement that is borderline sadism."
A full vote is scheduled for November 24, which would be the first time the national assembly has pondered outlawing a tradition that was idolised by artists from Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso.
Caron has proposed modifying an existing law penalising cruelty to animals to remove exemptions for bullfights when they can be shown to be "uninterrupted local traditions."
These are granted in towns such as Bayonne and Mont-de-Marsan in southwest France and along the Mediterranean coast including Arles, Beziers and Nimes.
The law would also ban cock-fighting which is permitted in some areas in northern France.
"What will be the next regional tradition that we will outlaw?" ruling party MP Marie Lebec asked ironically during Wednesday's hearing, denouncing a "caricature" of bullfighting presented by Caron.
Spanish import?
Lovers of the practice and bullfighting towns which depend on the shows for tourism are organising a fightback, with demonstrations planned in a dozen areas on Saturday in southern France.
"The MP Caron, in a very moralising tone, wants to explain to us, from Paris, what is good or bad in the south," the furious mayor of Mont-de-Marsan, Charles Dayot, told AFP.
Bullfighting is "our identity, a living culture.Leave us alone with our traditions!" added Dayot, who is vice-president of the Union of French Bullfighting Towns.
Macron's government has urged ruling party MPs to vote against the law if it is presented next week, fearing that it will deepen a widening urban-rural divide and anti-Paris sentiment in many provincial areas.
"It will disappear on its own.There is less and less of it," Jean-Rene Cazeneuve, a ruling party MP elected from the southern Gers region, told AFP this week."There's no point banning it and humiliating people who see it as a tradition."
When running for president earlier this year, Le Pen made animal welfare a plank of her manifesto, promising to give animals a constitutional status and declaring that "wanton mistreatment of animals was intolerable in our society."
She has proposed restricting bullfighting audiences to over-18s.
Judicial attempts to outlaw bullfighting have repeatedly failed, with courts routinely rejecting lawsuits lodged by animal rights activists, most recently in July 2021 in Nimes.
After Wednesday's setback, there is a chance that the bill might ultimately fail to make it to parliament on November 24 when the France Unbowed party must decide which of its proposals to present for a vote.
And, even if approved in the lower house, the draft legislation would face a struggle to pass in the conservative-dominated Senate.
The debate in France pitching animal rights' defenders against traditionalists is echoed in other countries with bullfighting histories, including Spain and Portugal as well as Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.
In June, a judge in Mexico City ordered an indefinite suspension of bullfighting in the capital's historic bullring, the largest in the world.
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