There is no question that visitors to Fance are suprised by the differences in attitude to equestrianism and stablemanagement. This article where Jérome Garcin shares his thoughts, may go some way to explain how some French people perceive riding. It needs to be remembered that France is a country where change, if it happens at all, is very very slowly implemented. Therefore the strict 'art' of riding which is instilled through tradition and heritage has come a long way towards meeting what we may see as usual. It may be a suprise to readers to see how the author perceives the 'English' art of riding!

With the transition from a society of order and tradition to a society of leisure for all, the way we ride horses has also changed. A passionate horseman, writer and journalist  Jérôme Garcin tells us why horse riding, in his view, has an inestimable value as an art.

By Jérôme Garcin

Since the mid 1960s, Paul Morand had felt the wind changing. His fine principles were swept away. His great illusions carried off. Let us remember that the author of Milady, member of the Académie Française and advocate of the "vrai équestre" (true equestrian), was a lover of the haute école, the fundamentalism of Saumur, the austere example of the horsemen and the choreography of the carousels straight as a die. Until the day he attended a trekking, years of sores and aches, at the Pellier riding school, taught by horsemen in top hats and black riding habits."

School of individual perfection or group recreation?

Forty years later, riding in France has indeed gone British. Horse riding has become accessible to all, and of all the disciplines, only pony trekking has seen an increase in the number of those taking part. The new amateur is no longer prepared to suffer, he wants to have a good time. He would rather trek through the woods than endure an indoor riding lesson, prefers fun over achievement, communion over competition. Even in Normandy, the ’western’ dream holds more attraction than the style of the Cadre Noir. With their games on horseback and their picnics, riding centres are more like holiday camps.

A channel for individual perfection, the horse has become a source of group enjoyment and the direct consequence of the fashion for ecology. Where once we shut ourselves up in the riding schools, now we ride outdoors for the fresh air.

As for the English, they have never seen it any other way. There is no sign there of academies or schools of equestrian art. With the exception of Newcastle and James Fillis, they hardly have any theoretical treatises either. On the other side of the Channel, there is a refusal to go against nature, a belief in the virtues of the open air and even of the drizzle. And the horse has always been thought of as the ideal partner in endurance, the sound ally of the hunt, the best way, too, to roam the countryside without spoiling it, to enjoy it by immersing oneself freely in it.

In France our tradition has been to work our horses in the sense of the "collect", vertically; the British, on the other hand, want them to go forward, horizontally, "Epsom derby" style, to have the bit in their teeth, their reins long, their noses to the wind, their ears pointed and to be put off by nothing, to be capable of flying over streams, stone walls and tree trunks, to be able to help chase the stag or fox out of the bushes.

Rural, sporting, practical, rough, more interested in comfort than aesthetics, this tremendous outdoor horse riding, which could not care less for dogma and produces the finest all-round horsemen, is gaining ground these days all over Europe, to take over, duty and bridle free, the leisure civilisation.

You now have to go to Vienna, Jerez or Saumur to remember that, long before it became an entertainment or a hobby, riding was an art for which the École de Versailles decreed imperious laws and imposed royal glamour. In the offices of the head equerry of the Spanish school of Vienna, it is still the treatise of La Guérinière, dating from 1735, that is the Bible. And the curvets, caprioles, croupades, done by the horsemen of the Cadre Noir, in the saddle or working the horse in hand, have hardly changed since the carousels performed to music by Lully before the Sun King.

This art, based on an exact science, spread in France over the centuries, thanks to exceptional horsemen but also to the aesthetic arguments in which our country excels. The conflict in the middle of the 19th century that set the Comte d’Aure, chief equerry at the Saumur riding school, against François Baucher, who presented haute école exercises at the Cirque des Champs-Elysées, was every bit as serious, in its form as in its content, as the famous battle of Hernani.

The Comte d’Aure mistrusted theories, recommended everyday, vigorous outdoor riding, (it prefigured the sports riding of today), the continuous use of the hand and legs, and the use of the coercive means of the bit and spurs. Baucher, in contrast, wanted to make his horse excel by destroying any form of resistance in it by skilful curbing of its will. D’Aure was a soldier who believed in the virtues of force and in the vigorous heritage of the Ancients. Baucher, a true modern artist: after having refuted everything that had been written before him, he sought that point of equilibrium where the horse gives itself to the rider and in which the rider governs him subtly without breaking him.

The “exception française”

We have just experienced in France, in these early days of the 21st century, a debate of the same ilk: which one was it going to be out of Michel Henriquet, disciple of Nuno Oliveira, or Bartabas, head of the Zingaro "tribe" (see article Versailles: the equestrian show academy breathes new life into the Great Stables), who would be responsible for founding an academy of equestrian art at Versailles? The rider or the centaur? The meticulous theoretician or the artist of genius? It was Bartabas who won in the end, after both camps had clashed in the press. Here too, on horseback, it seems there is an "exception française".

While, unlike Paul Morand, I do not miss the military training of the old days, nor the unrewarding sitting trot lessons, and while it would never occur to me to condemn an indisputable and irreversible sociological change that has, in horsemanship, promoted leisure over work, I do however continue to believe in certain principles, in the importance of certain treatises on riding, in the deeply moving beauty of the equestrian art and, in this field, in the virtues of tradition.

A dressage rider and show jumper, owner of a simple trotter which, after years of hard work together and complicity, today gives me a collected gallop, with delicate half-passes and melodious changes of the lead leg, I know what I owe him, and what I owe to equestrian civilisation: better than a sport, more than relaxation, a form of philosophy. Its values are known, they have not changed since Xenophon: sensitivity rather than force; authority, but without violence; the amalgamation of firmness with flexibility, of patience with self-denial; temperance in the saddle, equity on foot; the innate justice of the horse, the infinite gratitude of the rider.

Based on the secret and mysterious harmony between two living creatures that nothing predisposed to any merger and likely, for this reason, to constantly disappear and to constantly be reborn, the equestrian art leaves no trace, and that adds to the purity of its challenge, to the humility of the centaur, to the beauty of the act. And to the quality of life.