DISAPPEAR – The clown and squire, who founded the Old-Fashioned Circus with Silvia Monfort in 1974, revolutionized this discipline by giving horses back their dominance. He died of a heart attack on Saturday, April 6, aged 79.
In The dictionary of my lifepublished last year by Kero, on the question of Proust’s questionnaire, “How would you like to die”He answered ” in good health “. In fact, in March he was still on the track under the large white tent of the Folies-Gruss, installed as always in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris to celebrate the anniversary of his company. Alexis Grüss would celebrate his 80th birthday on April 23rd. He died of cardiac arrest at the Saint-Joseph Hospital in Paris on Saturday April 6th. His family announced his death: “Alexis Gruss was much more than a talented man; He was a pillar, a master of equestrianism and spectacle, whose imprint will forever remain in our hearts. He dedicated his life to continuing the equestrian arts through his teaching and sharing, inspiring entire generations.”.
We can appreciate the pain and sadness of a family united around the patriarch who brilliantly embodied this circus dynasty, which has had six generations of equestrian expertise.
Alexis Grüss was born on April 23, 1944 in his grandmother’s caravan in Bart im Doubs. Of Italian origin, she was an acrobat whose circus one day ended up in Saint-Marie-aux-Mines, where she met her future husband, André-Charles Gruss. THE “Lightning” tells the legend. “I am the product of an Alsatian stonemason and an Italian horsewoman. Sauerkraut and order on the one hand, spaghetti and fantasy on the other.”he said with humor Figaroin 2018.
also readAlexis Gruss, the king of the horse circus, is dead
Reality imposes itself in the form of five children, including André, Alexis’ father. The many years that followed still speak today of happy marriages, numerous children, seeds of acrobats and aerial riders, of competitors who joined forces (Alexis married Gipsy, a Bouglione), of a certain idea of the circus.
Alexis Gruss represented this idea with conviction. Especially since 1974, the date of his meeting with Silvia Monfort, who opened the doors of the Carré Thorigny in the Marais to his marquee and the Hôtel Salé, which with the horses, the elephant and the pig was not yet the Picasso Museum! Together they founded a circus school that already had a penchant for broadcasting.
“For me, power transmission is the most important thing in a discipline like track racing. The transmission of the gesture. We cannot learn otherwise than by repeating the gesture conveyed to us by an elder. It is the hand that preserves memory, the hand controlled by the brain, and if the master knows how to transmit, the student surpasses him., he said again to Le Figaro. He was indeed inexhaustible in this need ” transmitted “, associated with the work cult in this family. It is thanks to them that he, the respected landowner, and his wife Gispsy, an excellent wireworker, managed to start their business at a time when so many others had disappeared.
Every year, the audience under the circus tent measures what it means to be at Alexis Gruss’ school and admires his children Maud, Stefan and Firmin, as well as his grandchildren, including Charles and Alexandre, as they perform numbers in equestrian acrobatics or on the high school. The granddaughters, a little younger, “Succession” already on the track, are already damn talented. “What we must first instill in our children is the desire to learn.” Do you give them the desire? The example is fundamental for this. Then the family is built on a few values: Respect first with this formula: everyone at home and everyone together. »
The other family of a man who grew up in a troop. He said he lived with his parents until their deaths in 2003. A family, a cavalry, a circus, a term that he rejected, however, after raising the name for it “Old-Fashioned Circus”which he chose in 1974 with his accomplice Silvia Monfort. Then the ones from “Cirque National”when in 1982 he managed to convince Minister Jack Lang to link circuses with culture rather than agriculture. “Circus: that’s the word that I can’t avoid and that I still don’t want to use today. Some people have done everything. » he wrote in his dictionary. But it is on the mark that this man will have lived his entire life with great character and a keen sense of humor.
His father saw him as a clown, he became a squire and developed a boundless passion for horses. His cavalry now numbers fifty horses, the imposing Boulonnais, the nervous thoroughbreds, the proud Akhal Téké Turkmen, the sturdy Scottish Shire horses and the little Argentine Falabellas who work hard on the race track. For numbers where this family is one of the last to know how to pull off such performances “Later later”. “A horse that arrives at my home changes after six months of training. He becomes more beautiful. You also like to learn », he said. While he emphasizes that his children trained their horses themselves: “They watched, observed and took advice… We live with them, we love them.”.
He, the music-loving saxophonist who had removed the character of Mr. Loyal from his shows very early on, saw himself more as a conductor. The image of him as the old landowner disappearing backstage after a little Charlie Chaplin-style jump in the show that just ended on March 31 will continue to stay with us. Also an artist of a certain elegance. His funeral will be celebrated next Thursday at the Saint-Roch church.
