Born into the golden age of the traveling circus, Emilien Bouglione seemed destined for the ring from the moment he arrived—his life entwined with sawdust, horses, and legend before he could even walk. This is the story of a man who not only inherited a dynasty, but transformed it, becoming one of the last great figures to embody the myth, artistry, and aristocratic spirit of the circus world.
Born to the Sawdust
His birth certificate reads Jules-Emilien-Buffalo Bill Bouglione — a name so extravagantly furnished that one half-expects it to arrive in a wagon. He was born on July 20th, 1934, in Coulommiers, in the Seine-et-Marne, while the circus was on his eternal tour. His father Joseph and his Belgian mother Rosalie Van Been were both of Romani descent — both with distant Italian roots — veterans of fairground menageries: that vast, aromatic republic of men, women, and beasts of every provenance that was, in the Thirties, reshaping itself into the modern travelling circus. The Bougliones were among its European pioneers. The father and uncles of “Julot” — the name by which Emilien was known in his own world — had already paraded beneath a succession of picturesque banners before settling on the proud before settling on “Les 4 Frères Bouglione,” and it is said that the very day after their newest member arrived, they signed the contract making them proprietors of the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris: the oldest ring in the world. One imagines that the infant Julot, in some prenatal way, already knew.
The family was vast; the ring was their schoolroom. Emilien entered it at the age of two, and was in the saddle by four. Like all such pistes, the Bouglione ring was a life school whose curriculum was written in the pungent smell of dung, leather, and sawdust. Their style of equestrian art owed nothing to the classical academic mode (already heading for the museum) nor to that brisk jockey aesthetic fashionable in the circus of the thirties. Their allure was fierier and more romantic: the mythical horse of adventure and legend that gallops through folklore and dime novels alike, ridden by a family whose Romani blood carried the mark of the virtuoso wonder.
Emilien, fourth of seven siblings, made his official debut in 1943 as “The Youngest Horseman in France,” under the tutelage of Achille Zavatta, one of the most protean figures the circus ever produced. In reality the child had already been putting himself to use in small roles in the pantomime “Blanche-Neige”: during the years of occupation, his father Joseph was lifting Parisian spirits as the author of innovative circus operettas, together with the director Géo Sandry, and for Julot the experience was a stern apprenticeship of theatricality and showmanship. He also served as assistant to the great clowns of the day, who rotated through the family’s rings with the reliability of a well-maintained mechanism. After the war, during school holidays, he began familiarising himself with the cavalry of his uncle Sampion II: seven Ukrainian stallions, which he formally took charge of in 1950.
All the Heroes
Assisted by the inseparable equestrian master André Vasserot, Emilien assembled rich stables and developed a style at once lively and precise: mixed breeds — Anglo-Arabs, Norwegians, ponies — freed from the rigid stylisations of the classical school, presented with his personal hallmark: himself in the saddle, astride a magnificent horse, every inch the western hero. In conducting his cavalry or in the evolutions of the courier, he moved — almost in the tradition of the great Ducrow, who had codified the genre on that very same ring a century and a half before — through a gallery of identities that the twentieth century had already agreed were thrilling: Robin Hood, Sioux chief, Zorro, Davy Crockett, Mexican charro, oriental prince, Argentine gaucho, gladiator, Andalusian vaquero. The costume details and orchestral choices were always of the highest order, and the charisma was, by now, pure cinema. He had managed to distil the spirit of popular literature and film into immediate scenic art. The ring, one might say, was his genre.
These were the nineteen-sixties — the apotheosis of the technicolor adventure film, and an intensely busy period for the family. In 1963, the Bougliones took over the management of the Cirque de Montmartre (formerly the Medrano), while from 1960 the celebrated television programme “La Piste aux Étoiles” had made its home at the Cirque d’Hiver. For fifteen years, the programme gave Emilien an extraordinary exposure to the techniques of television and to a remarkable range of artists. He was a quick study.
The Social Animal
Endowed with a natural elegance that seemed entirely at ease outside the ring, “Julot” had gifts that surprised those who expected a circus man to be limited to the circus. He could converse with anyone on any subject — brilliant and modest in equal measure — and he developed, with some apparent ease, friendships well beyond the world of sawdust. He retained all the while the mysterious charm of the nomad: impossible to fully explain, impossible to dismiss.
In Parisian jet-set circles, he became friends with Salvador Dalí. In 1955, he sat for the legendary Richard Avedon, who made shoots of him now preserved in major museums worldwide – composing his true self between elegance and myth. In the nineteen-seventies, the Cirque d’Hiver became the stage for a new cycle of the “Galas de l’Union des Artistes,” among the most glittering social events of the century. Emilien collaborated on the direction, and year by year passed his chambrière and his horses to Gina Lollobrigida (whom he had first encountered as a seventeen-year-old on the set of Trapeze), Vittorio De Sica, or Josephine Baker. His circle of friends included Charles Aznavour, Alain Delon, and Jean-Paul Belmondo. For his stage costumes — always coordinated with extraordinary fairy-tale equestrian harnesses equestrian harnesses — he turned to Paco Rabanne: memorable above all was the majestic silver inlaid saddle-armour on which, wearing a gold-ribbed chaqueta over black, Emilien was portrayed by the great illustrator Renato Casaro for a magnificent two-sheet poster of 1976. It is the image of a man entirely at home in his own legend.
The Silver Clown
When, in 1974, the Bougliones placed themselves at the disposal of Prince Rainier of Monaco to organise the first International Circus Festival in Monte Carlo, Emilien entered his cavalry and took home the Silver Clown — the first ever awarded. In the equestrian acts as in life, he was accompanied by his wife, the beautiful artist and, later, gifted businesswoman Christiane Hernandez, who gave him four children.
The Sovereign Emeritus
The Bouglione circus stopped travelling in 1981, and a few years later the shows at the Cirque d’Hiver also fell quiet. Emilien turned to a lifelong passion: collecting. He amassed, with methodical fervour, an astonishing trove of art objects — canvases, bronzes, memorabilia, documents related to the circus and the equestrian world — filling every corner of the Parisian temple, and helping to reconstruct a history that might otherwise have dispersed. In 1999, together with his mother and his brother Sampion III, he gave his blessing to a decision to entrust children and grandchildren with the resumption of circus activities. His role in the project was unique and impossible to define precisely: that of the inspiring spirit. His presence alone lent quiet authority to an experiment that became, over the years, one of the most remarkable successes in the circus world.
In recent decades, anyone who happened to pass through the Cirque d’Hiver at any hour of the day could easily find themselves confronted with the noble silhouette of “Julot,” emerging unexpectedly from one of the ring’s vomitories, or from some mysterious corridor, or from any one of the thousand ancient little doors that the building seemed to multiply at will. His tall, lean figure moved silently and discreetly — and struck you, invariably, with his wardrobe. The magnificent waistcoats, coordinated with tie or foulard, emblazoned cufflinks glinting at the wrists. It was less the flamboyance of a retired circus veteran than the grace of an emeritus sovereign. Yet there was nothing formidable about him. A gentle familiarity established itself at once, and the conversation — one might find oneself drawn into circus lore, fine arts, current affairs, the passing grandchild, some neglected detail in a corner — burned with a quiet, fervent passion.
Emilien now joins the two previous generations of his ancestors in the dynasty’s mausoleum at Lizy-sur-Ourq. He leaves behind one of those figures — increasingly rare — thanks to whom the word “circus” continues to evoke fascination and legend rather than mere nostalgia. He was, alas, the last witness in the world to an entire aristocratic generation of the art. A new page is being written, fortunately, by his children, who have inherited his beauty and his grace: Joseph, who carries forward his father’s rigorous sense of spectacle and the fervour of his imagination; Odette and Regina, capable of shining in the ring and beyond it, in every role that circus life demands; and Louis-Sampion, with his ambitious work restoring the Cirque d’Hiver and preserving the fabulous “Musée Emilien Bouglione.” To them, to the splendid Madame Christiane, and to the many grandchildren, belongs both the perpetuation of the memory and our condolences.
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