FEBRUARY 2006 • VOLUME 6 • HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

Jean-Claude Racinet

irst and foremost, a warning: Michel Henriquet will perhaps feel offended with the vivacity of my answer. This would be an error on his part. I hold him in high esteem as a rider, and he knows it. I even happened to admire him at a time when his mastery outshone mine by so much. When I had a problem, I often resorted to him, and he always had the right answer. I, of course, never stated that he was a "simplistic" rider, as he states. The tragedy of our dialogue over the columns of D&CT is that it is perhaps blurred by a double translation process: from me to him , and from him to me. As the Italians say: "traduttore, tradittore"("translator, betrayer"). I offer my apologies to Mrs. Hilda Nelson, who, like a referee in a boxing match, is getting the blows.

It is with a little bit of lassitude, I must say, that I engage in this answer, for I'm not sure that the American reader, or to be more precise the English speaking reader, is very fond of these split hair polemics, whereby each "amp" tries ad infinitum – and ad nauseam – to justify its position on such or such historical or doctrinal detail. All the more so as, about the gist of the matter, to wit "was Oliveira a Baucherist?", Mr. Henriquet's opinion matches exactly mine, perhaps expressed in a clearer and more convincing way, for which he deserves all my gratitude.

In short: Nuno Oliveira realized a synthesis between the old system (La Gueriniere's) and a newer one (Baucher's ), and this synthesis expresses the true soul of the French way of riding. Bravo!

It is, therefore, all the more surprising to see Mr. Henriquet, upon acknowledging that through the teaching of Oliveira he is beholden to both La Gueriniere and Baucher, engage in a bitter condemnation of Baucherism as such. If this is not equivocation, what is?

Baucher, says Mr. Henriquet, was a proud man: so what? In the Southeast of France, there is a woman, Jeanne Calment, who is the oldest known woman on earth; she is 121 and happens to have known van Gogh. She says that van Gogh was obnoxious. This does not diminish in the least the genius of van Gogh.

Baucher, says Mr. Henriquet, did not practice shoulder-in; so what? Moses, that I know of, did not climb down the Sinai with a tablet under his arm reading: eleventh commandment: "thou shalt practice shoulder-in!" Besides, what shoulder-in is it about? In La Gueriniere's shoulder-in, four tracks are traced, but more important, the hind hooves set down aslant with respect to the movement, and cross over each other as well as the front hooves (La Gueriniere is very specific on this point), which is not the shoulder-in enforced by the FEI.

I must acknowledge that the shoulder-in of the FEI, whereby a slim angle (owing to the three track requirement) and a marked bending practically force the hind feet to set down in the direction of the movement, may also claim some historical legitimacy, since it can be traced at least as far back as the 1791 Portuguese Manoel Carlos de Andrade's Luz da Liberal e Nobre da Cavallaria… (Light of the Liberal and Nobel Art of Cavalry). Has Mr. Henriquet ever attempted to point out the contradiction? And if this is not equivocation, what is? And how can one make the base of a method (the so-called "classical") a movement which responds to two contradictory definitions? And how can one condemn a method (Baucherism) for ignoring an exercise defined in such an ambiguous way?

Mr. Henriquet "does not want to hear about the first and the second manner." Yet after having condemned the Baucherist teacher of his youth for his attempts at elevating the neck (the horse's), which can be found in the second manner, he praises Oliveira's acknowledgment of the "release of the aids" (descentes de mains et de jambes), the separation of the aids ("Mains sans jambe, jambe sans main"), which are in the second manner as well. In other words, Mr. Henriquet picks up what pleases him in the Baucherist method, and he is welcome to do so. But after having "borrowed" some ( as a matter of fact, most) of the procedures and sometimes the very philosophy of Baucher, how can he condemn Baucher's method so violently? And if this is not equivocation, what is?

Mr. Henriquet mentions that, according to Baucher, "a struggle will necessarily occur between the horse and the rider…" by the beginning of the training and the first manner was often "verging on violence." Well, violence has always been present in horsemanship and alas, still is. I must say that I myself was rather disappointed when I read in La Gueriniere's Ecole de Cavalerie that one of the advantages of the "school walk" was to: "Accustom the horse to abide the pain and fear of the violent lessons one is obliged to give him in order to supple him and confirm him as he progresses in the obedience of hands and legs" (translation is mine; a French saying goes "one is never better served than by oneself"). And I was appalled reading in another part of Ecole de Cavalerie which will never be translated into English or any other language since it is so obviously obsolete that the best way to deal with the problem of a horse's sticking out his tongue out of his mouth was to cut out all that was jutting out. But this, of course, is not about horsemanship, it is about veterinary art. Yet speaking of La Gueriniere, Mr. Henriquet has only praise for the "the rich and subtle progression" he introduced. So it always about the same hackneyed dialectic trick of anti-Baucherists, who, of course, are neither "dogmatic," nor "equivocal." Speaking of Baucher, emphasize the evil, But how could the marriage between the good (La Gueriniere) and the evil (Baucher) produce the perfect (Oliveira)? Please, tell me.

Mr. Henriquet will retort that I don't understand him, that he does not reject all of Baucher, but that practicing Baucherism as a whole led him to an impasse. Well, that's exactly how Baucher felt himself with respect to La Gueriniere's system, which led him to try other paths. And so it appears that horsemanship (like science) progresses from impasse to impasse. Perhaps, someday, someone will feel stranded in an impasse practicing Oliveira's system. Who knows?

Or course, I have more to say. But instead I would like to say – Let's call it quits.

Reprinted with permission from the publishers of Dressage&CT

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