Fritz the elephant

As you enter the premises of the Museum of Fine Arts, you are immediately intrigued by the stuffed elephant in its showcase. Allow me to introduce Fritz, a star from the early 19th century, from the North American circus Barnum and Bailey. Fritz was born in Asia around 1820. He stood 2.90 meters tall at the withers, weighed over 7 tons, and had spectacular tusks, about 1.5 meters long. Captured, he found himself in a district of Hamburg, where he was bought by Phineas Taylor Barnum, the circus’s founder. Trained in the United States, he became one of the show’s performing elephants. In 1902, while the circus was on tour in Europe, it visited the city of Tours. On June 11, at the end of the performances, the animals formed a procession to the train station, where they would be loaded onto wagons. The city’s inhabitants and those from surrounding areas crowded to see this strange parade. Upon reaching Nicolas-Frumeaud square, Fritz reportedly became uncontrollable, without any apparent reason. A rumor suggests that the animal was burned on the trunk by a cigar, or that he swallowed a cigarette, triggering his nervousness. However, no sources from that time confirm this. It is more likely that the animal was in musth, a periodic hormonal state in male elephants, during which they secrete a tar-like substance and become particularly aggressive. Regardless, the circus employees were unable to control him, and the decision was made to put down the poor Fritz . He was strangled in the square, dying in agony. The circus director then decided to donate the animal’s body to the city. To prevent the carcass from decomposing, it was prepared and sent to Nantes, where a naturalist stuffed it and reconstructed its skeleton. Fritz returned to Tours by sea, aboard a steamship, to be exhibited at the Museum of Natural History. The skeleton was displayed in a room upstairs, while his body was placed in the vestibule. Today, he resides in the former stables of the Museum of Fine Arts because he was relocated there in 1910 due to space constraints at the Museum of Natural History. Unfortunately, his skeleton was destroyed during the bombings of World War II. Restored in the 1970s, Fritz became a true mascot for the city and served as an emblem in the fight against animal cruelty. In 2020, the garden near the square where he was killed was renamed in his honor to support the cause of animal protection. In 2022, his statue was added to the garden of the same name.