The bear is charging towards me. Old man that I am, I know that I cannot possibly outpace him, but I run anyway. To my surprise, I escape.
He has been distracted by a young woman. He pulls her to the ground, and they tumble down the slope, intertwined. A nearby hunter fires his gun. Kids throw bangers.
The bear waves his snout from side to side sniffing the air, then scarpers. Sprawled on the cobblestones, the woman is filthy, yet she is laughing.
Clearly, this is not a real bear. I am visiting Prats-de-Mollo in the eastern Pyrenees for the Fête de l’ours carnival, for the first time.
It will be many years before I realise that I had misunderstood the scenario. I thought I was being chased. In fact, I was being invited. Only later will I really grasp what the ritual means… and how it is being challenged.
Each February, in villages like Prats-de-Mollo near the border between France and Spain, men disguised as bears will rampage through the streets. Later they will be captured and shaved. But in the last few years something unexpected has happened. Women have started playing the bears. In 2022, the glitter bears burst upon the scene.
At the same time, real bears are quietly returning to the Pyrenees. More than a hundred now live in the forests thanks to a 30-year rewilding programme, though none near here.
Yet, the festivals themselves have little to do with biology. They celebrate not wildlife, but the myths attached to it.
Prats-de-Mollo hosts one of the best-known festivals. As I drive up the valley from Perpignan in France, the music on the car radio suddenly stops. A kidnapping alert interrupts the programme. The police are looking for witnesses.
It is a curious coincidence. The festival that I am returning to see today has a bear attempting to kidnap a maiden. He fends off anyone who might come in his way, and it is only the swift intervention of a posse of hunters that saves her.
The scenario is rooted in the folktale ‘John of the bear’, which is particularly popular in the Pyrenees. The tale starts with the kidnapping but in this version the hunters are not available to save the girl. The bear drags her to his cave, blocking the entrance with a boulder that only he can move. In time she gives birth to a son, half man and half beast — a child torn in two directions.
In Prats-de-Mollo the story is transformed into carnival. This time I have come back prepared to be caught.
For me, the festival is a welcome break from the storms and floods which have marked our winter. Traditionally, bears too have had enough of winter by now. They wake up and poke their muzzles out of their dens. Is it spring yet? In Pyrenean legend, if the sky is clear the night will be cold. Winter is not finished, so they will go back to sleep. If it is cloudy, spring is on its way and they will eat breakfast.
Today, although the sky is blue, the three bears are not thinking of returning to bed nor indeed eating. They are thinking of sex. The bears – men wearing a sheepskin fleece, with a tall fez of the same material – look rather laughable at first. But once their faces and arms have been smothered in oil and grimed with soot something more savage emerges.
We are in the outer bailey of Fort Lagarde above the town. Soon the first bear is released, He storms through the crowds, pursued by the hunters. After this warm-up, once outside the fort, he attacks a young woman. There’s nothing subtle about it, no courtship, symbolic or otherwise. The bear growls and waves his long shepherd’s staff in the air defiantly. The girl is tackled to the ground and left with black smudges, a visible record of the attack. Not just a rite of fertility, the encounter also marks entry into adulthood.
Meanwhile, the bear continues his spree. Soot and oil mark the designated females. Sometimes the bear and hunters fight, hurling the staff between them. But mostly the hunters work to keep the bear supplied with oil, soot and drink. Much beer is spilt.
The bear radiates violence. After all, carnivals are necessarily transgressive, and wildness is tolerated, even encouraged. But since I was last here the crowds have grown and the bears, hemmed in by onlookers, are unable to dart about so freely.
Now, the bear is approaching me and, this time, I am determined to accept my fate, but I am frustrated by a young woman who tells me to budge. She is one of a high-spirited gaggle linking hands to form a line separating the crowd from the action. With their baby blue berets, they could be a UN peace-keeping operation. The pastorettes [little shepherdess] are a new addition, introduced after women demanded a more active role.
In the town later, the onlookers are crushed against each other. The laughter becomes nervous. The bear climbs onto a balcony and growls. Edgy but playful, he is worryingly unpredictable.
Soon, the bear is completely black. Along with his brothers-in-arms, he is corralled out beyond the village walls into the market square. There, he is shaved by white-clad and white-faced barbers with the help of an axe and a sausage. Good triumphs over evil. The soiled sheepskin is tossed into the crowd revealing the man underneath. The bear is a man, the man a bear, his savagery and rampant sexuality brought under control.
Traditionally, the bears, hunters and barbers have been young lads and the victims girls they have grown up with.
Little has changed since my first visit, apart from the emergence of the pastorettes. But this year I am here to witness another innovation, this one controversial: the glitter bears.
With the end of the traditional event, the glitter bears are about to perform so I run to the Place d’Armes in the centre of the village. The two bears, Céline and Lucie, are getting dressed and practicing their steps.
I first met Céline yesterday.
***
Not knowing what Céline looks like, I ask the president of the organising association where to find her. She doesn’t know where Céline is, nor what she intends to do.
However, wandering through the streets, I soon find a group of young women selling bandanas who lead me to her. Glass in hand, she is chatting with a group of friends outside a bar. Céline, Christelle and Jessica break off to talk to me. Céline was the first female bear and continues in that role. Christelle is one of the hunters, and Jessica helps with the sewing.
“Everything started one evening in the Bar Catalan after the election of the bears,” Céline tells me. “We said to ourselves, why can’t women be bears? Jokingly. And somehow the idea grew, and we said let’s prepare everything so we can do it. That night we created the team. People of all ages joined in, from the youngest to the oldest. We brought everyone together. We found skins, soot, staffs and seamstresses. The festival was on Sunday, 20 February 2022.”
“At first the subject was taboo.” adds Christelle, who was also there. “But the moment had come, and I think that wasn’t by chance. There had been the lockdown in Covid. The festival continued [in 2022 after a year’s pause] but differently. We were back, and I think that we were also post-MeToo. There had been all that thinking about how society was changing. I’m certain that I – that we – would never have imagined that two or three years before.”
The bears, hunters and barbers were all women. Guns were not welcome. Glitter was added to the mix. Apart from that, the scenario was the same as the traditional event and has remained so.
“Céline was extraordinary,” enthuses Christelle. “Because she is very fit. It was spectacular, which is important. She danced everywhere… She reminded us of how it was in the past.”
Céline is from the village. Her partner Guillem, a livestock farmer, has been the bear nine times. Their son has played the bear twice in the children’s event.
“We are breaking down the barriers between male and female. We are challenging the rules, and when it comes to age or physical limits, there are none. We’re just as capable at sixty, at forty, as at seventeen. That’s no small thing.”
I ask about the reactions.
“The first year was a surprise but the second was hard. We got threats that we’d be beaten up, that the police would stop us. But nothing happened — they let us carry on.”
The festival is now listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage along with the events in nearby Arles-sur-Tech and Saint-Laurent-de-Cerdans. But, if women are playing men’s roles, isn’t that a concern?
“Not at all,” says Christelle, who specialises in historic monuments. “I contributed to the application… If we add changes and roles for women, we are absolutely within UNESCO values. There are many who say that the traditions are fixed by UNESCO. Not at all, it’s the opposite.”
The UNESCO website confirms that intangible cultural heritage belongs to the community – and can evolve as that community changes.
In any case, the festival has changed previously. Playing the bear was not always the honour it is today. The role was usually reserved for someone who was already rather wild. The barbers were added in the 1920s.
Over the hill in Saint-Laurent-de-Cerdans, the figueretes (fig women) invented themselves some fifteen years ago. These young women daub men with figs, a response to the traditional botifarrons (sausage men) who daub women’s faces with black pudding. When they first appeared the slogan on their t-shirts read: ‘Sem pas vingut aquí per nos fer menjar la – we haven’t come to be made to eat it.’
Back in Prats-de-Mollo, Céline complains: “We’re waiting to be included in the programme, because at present we’re not part of the events schedule. We want to be valued.”
But how can a woman play this bear?
I ask: “How do you cope with the idea that the bear and the women, it’s a kidnapping, an attempted rape?”
Christelle: “That’s why I talked just now about post-MeToo. This whole story of rape and abduction wasn’t necessarily always spoken about openly. When people take part in the festival, they don’t necessarily think about the original story behind it. There’s a kind of consent. When you’re from the village you consent to being marked by the bear and perhaps tackled. You are expecting it.”
Now I know why the bear didn’t tackle me the first time I came here. Back then, I ran away. This time I stand still. By the end of the festival, I will have been marked twice by a male bear with oil and soot, and twice by the female hunters, with glitter. Each time I smile. It feels like a privilege.
Christelle: “I think it’s also a question of the times… Ten or fifteen years ago, the [male] bears mostly daubed women. Now it’s men and women alike. The glitter bears do the same – they daub men and women indiscriminately. So, something has evolved. We’ve completely moved away from the original fable, because the festival has evolved along with society.”
“It’s not a revolution, it’s an evolution,” all three of them chorus.
The resistance to the glitter bears shows how much the traditional ritual still depends on masculinity. If a woman plays the bear, it cannot be part-man, part beast, with both elements needing to be tamed. As Céline says: “When you put on the bearskin, you are neither woman nor man, simply an animal.”
Long live the carnival, both the new and the old. Long live transgression.
And rewilding in all this? Rewilding means coexistence, not control. Not tame bears. What would it be like in Prats-de-Mollo if there were real bears in the woods?
See also: The Implausible Rewilding of the Pyrenees for the inside story of playing the bear in Saint-Laurent-de-Cerdans.