lit a candle 3h agoMy dad went at 81 too, different country, different everything, but there's a window in your seventies where you think you dodged it and then you don't. Never been to a corrida in my life, found Montcouquiol through a translated excerpt of Recouvre-le de lumière years back, that line about courage and fear being a couple stuck with me more than it should have. Strange thing to grieve a stranger over, but here I am.
Their story
Alain Montcouquiol, known in the bullfighting world as Nimeño I, was a pioneering French torero who later became one of the most distinctive literary voices of the tauromachie. He died in Nîmes on 5 November 2026 at the age of 81. News of his death brought tributes from Simon Casas,…
Alain Montcouquiol, known in the bullfighting world as Nimeño I, was a pioneering French torero who later became one of the most distinctive literary voices of the tauromachie. He died in Nîmes on 5 November 2026 at the age of 81. News of his death brought tributes from Simon Casas, fellow aficionados, and the municipal leadership of Nîmes, who remembered both the ring pioneer and the writer who kept his brother's memory alive.
Born on 4 September 1945 in Ambert in the Puy-de-Dôme, he moved to Nîmes at about nine when his father, a soldier, was posted there. His father died in a motorcycle accident a few months after the family's arrival. At school in a city steeped in bull culture, Montcouquiol heard classmates talk about the corrida and about death in a way adults had never spoken to him about his own father's death. That encounter drew him toward the arena. With childhood friend Simon Casas (Bernard Dhombs), he trained on the hills above Nîmes against imaginary bulls and then left for Spain with almost no money, choosing the apodo El Nimeño. French and Spanish afición alike still said a man needed Spanish blood to become a torero. Montcouquiol and Casas set out to prove otherwise.
Through the late 1960s he fought as a novillero on both sides of the Pyrenees, with hard seasons of triumphs and setbacks. In May 1967 he debuted with picadors in Zaragoza. His home presentation in Nîmes on 9 July 1967 was brutal: mistral wind, difficult cattle, and a blow to the throat that sent him to the infirmary. Better afternoons followed, including a noted performance at Lunel in October 1968. That same year he and Casas received the Prix de la vocation from the Fondation Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, a public recognition of a fragile French bullfighting revival.
By the mid-1970s Montcouquiol judged that he would not become the great matador he had dreamed of being. Rather than settle for a middling career, he stepped aside. His younger brother Christian had caught the same fever and showed greater raw courage in the breeding pens. Alain became Christian's counsellor and then apoderado. Under the name Nimeño II, Christian rose to become the first French matador of truly international stature, filling major plazas from France to Latin America. Alain later said his own unfinished ambition was healed by that shared ascent.
The shared story broke in Arles on 10 September 1989. Facing a Miura bull named Panolero during the Feria des prémices du riz, Nimeño II was thrown and landed on his cervical vertebrae. He fought for years to recover movement after an initially catastrophic injury, but he could not return to the ring. On 25 November 1991 he took his own life at his house in Caveirac. Alain had argued for him to stay for his wife and children and to reinvent himself as an arena director. After the suicide he said he understood his brother's reasons, even as grief nearly destroyed him.
Writing became the way forward. Recouvre-le de lumière (Verdier, 1997) is both elegy and testimony, written so that Christian's children and grandchildren would know the "folie des toros" the brothers had lived. Philippe Caubère later adapted it for the stage. Further books followed: Le Sens de la marche (Jean-Carrière Prize, 2009), Le Fumeur de souvenirs, and La Bonne Distance. Montcouquiol described his method as walking and thinking, then reading prose aloud until it crossed "the width of a café table" into a reader's ear. He insisted he was not "the brother of a statue," even after Serena Carone's monument to Nimeño II rose before the Nîmes arenas almost under his windows. With time he made peace with the sculpture as a living memorial that children climb on and triumphant matadors dress with flowers.
He remained rooted in Nîmes, speaking and writing about courage, fear, and death as questions the corrida forces into the open. In later interviews he recalled that before a fight every fear arrived at once, until the bull itself cleared the mind. Companions and friends, including Françoise, surrounded him in his final years. Cause of death was not made public. A private mourning circle and a wider afición now hold the memory of a man who opened Spanish sand to French ambition and then turned that ambition into literature.
Biography adapted from French Wikipedia; Midi Libre (2021, 2026); Éditions Verdier; Causeur (2021); Tertulias (2026); Le Monde archive (1968). Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“After the death of Christian, Nimeño II, writing helped me move forward.”
Paraphrased from his 2021 Midi Libre interview on grief and authorship
“Between my texts and readers, there should be the width of a café table.”
On his plainspoken aesthetic, Midi Libre, 2021
“I am not the brother of a statue, and I never will be.”
On resisting the monumental myth of Nimeño II, Midi Libre, 2021
“Courage and fear are a couple. Sometimes you lean toward fear, sometimes toward courage.”
Causeur interview, November 2021
“If one does not have Spanish blood in one's veins, one cannot become a torero.”
Prejudice he recalled hearing as an adolescent in Nîmes, which he set out to disprove
Photos
1Alain Montcouquiol
by People Forever
That line gets me too, didn't expect it from a bullfighting book