Andrew Steinmetz grants that notions of honor may sometimes have been false and that it was unlikely that opponents would be of equal skill, so there would have been many a concealed murder. But duels still served a purpose “in the absence of better laws, better police, better taste, and better manners.” His advice for participants is almost comically exact:
All practiced duelists take good care, if in an affair they puncture their adversary, to carefully wipe their sword with their handkerchief, before returning it to the scabbard. A beautiful Toledo has been known to be considerably damaged by carelessness in this respect. During the confusion that necessarily arises when a principal receives the coup de coeur or home thrust, such an accident to the trusty weapon is very likely to occur.12
By the late nineteenth century, the basic rules were clear: Seconds were expected to mark the standing spot of each combatant, leaving a distance of two feet between the points of their weapons, arms extended. Where each man should stand was drawn for by lot. Bouts were confined roughly to a 20-by-6-meter area, so that a running battle with combatants rushing about helter-skelter was impossible. The swords, rinsed with an antiseptic (carbolic acid) to avoid infection, were measured to establish that they were of equal length, and in no case was a sword with a sharp edge or a notch allowed. If, on comparing weapons, the swords were found to differ, the choice would be decided on by chance, unless the disproportion were of a material nature. The sword-bearing hand could be wrapped in a handkerchief, but no end of the handkerchief was allowed to hang down, lest the point of the opponent’s sword catch in it. The combatants were requested to throw off their coats and bare their chests, to show that they were not wearing anything that could ward off a thrust. A refusal to submit was considered a refusal to fight.
At the dropping of a handkerchief, the cry “Allez!,” or their equivalent, the contestants would set to, the seconds standing close to each combatant, holding a sword or a cane, point downward, ready to stop the fight the moment the rules were transgressed. Unless it had been stipulated, neither combatant was allowed to ward off his opponent’s blade with his unarmed hand; should either persist in doing so, the seconds of his adversary could insist that the offending hand be tied behind his back. Opponents were allowed to stoop, rise, vault to the right or left, and turn around each other, “as practiced in the fencing lessons and depicted in the various treatises on the art.”13
When one of the parties conceded he was hurt or a wound was noticed by his second, the fight was stopped; but with the consent of the wounded man it could continue. The signal to stop was given by that man’s second raising his sword or cane while the opposing second cried out “Strike up the blades!” at which the combatants took a step back, still remaining en garde. All duels were to take place during the forty-eight hours succeeding the offense unless otherwise agreed; twelve hours was the earliest that a duel could be fought after a challenge. When two officers were involved, a disabling injury, if the duel had been fought with the permission of the recipient’s colonel, was considered a battle wound and entitled the bearer to a pension. There were even special regulations for bishops, despite the fact that the Church had long forbidden them to fight.
A late-nineteenth-century saber duel, where one of the participants lost his head. Names and location are unknown. (illustration credit 8.1)
The code duello could triumph in the most adverse circumstances. Robert Louis Stevenson may well have been drawing on fact when he depicted a challenge made in 1813 by the French hero of his novel St. Ives against a gnarled army veteran, an “old whiskerando … a brute of the first water”—with both men prisoners of war at the time. They unscrew a pair of scissors, tying each blade to a branch gathered from the prison courtyard. They fight at night, in the dark, out of view of the guards—but all strictly according to the rules of formal dueling.14‡
One of the most articulate apologists of the practice was the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen. “The love of honor,” he wrote, “may be regarded as a peculiar modification of the impulse of self-preservation; it aims at the preservation of the self in consciousness.… By honor in the objective sense we mean the opinion which our surroundings have of us.”15 Paulsen believed the duel should be retained as an alternative whenever a man could not bring himself to drag an outrage to his honor before a pedantic court of law. If a man in such circumstances were not allowed to vent his anger by dueling, he would resort to some other form of revenge, thus setting off a cycle of retribution. Paulsen also defended duels as proofs of courage and assertions of worth against wealth.
For many, the duel’s central purpose was not to kill but to confront death—and so to demonstrate that one was confronting one’s destiny. As Cecil Woodham Smith says in The Reason Why (putting a twist on Francis Bacon’s “Vengeance is a form of wild justice”), “though the thought of a duel provoked a shudder, dueling had a flavor of wild poetic justice.”16 To the triumphant protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s The Duellists, “sobered by the victorious issue of a duel, life appeared robbed of its charm, simply because it was no longer menaced.”17 In another, typical case, Casanova fought a duel against Count Xavier Branicki, a friend of the Polish king, over two actresses, and was wounded in the left hand: “It became one of his favorite anecdotes,” his biographer noted, “and he was proud to find that it increased his celebrity as a desperado.”18 It would be a mistake to underestimate the deep satisfaction afforded by coming through such encounters.
The formalities favored weapons that enforced physical distancing: rapiers and other forms of sword, and pistols, which did away with physical contact altogether. The pistol was the first hand weapon to rival the primacy of the sword. Which should a duelist choose? Here the argument could go both ways: for some the logic was that the greater the danger, the greater the honor; pistols were more dangerous than sabers; therefore pistols were more honorable. On the other hand, becoming an expert fencer took physical vigor, as well as much practice and technique, whereas any man could fire a pistol. A pistol fight was also considerably safer: as Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers’s sardonic detective, puts it, as he confesses to accepting three “challenges” in his life, “A bullet, you see, may go anywhere, but steel’s almost bound to go somewhere.”19
SO DUELING WENT ITS MERRY WAY. THE FRENCH CONSIDERED IT AN essential part of a young man’s education, and for the southern Irish nobility it was almost a religion. The great Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai (1802–60), cocreator of non-Euclidian geometry, was equally passionate about music and swordplay and would go to the dueling ground playing his violin. In Denmark, a Russian baron fought a Danish lieutenant over a horsewoman in the Copenhagen circus. Dueling in the Low Countries reached its high point between 1810 and 1830, and in India the British made it a regular pastime. Even ships started to duel: the Chesapeake and the Shannon squared off outside Boston Harbor in 1813 after a formal challenge had been issued.
In England, although the law against dueling was uncompromising, it was regularly flouted: the Duke of Wellington was not hanged for fighting Lord Winchilsea, nor was Lord Castlereagh transported to Australia for wounding Mr. Canning. The dukes of Norfolk and of York (George III’s brother), William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox, George Canning, and Sir Robert Peel fought without punishment. (George III took to providing would-be duelists with a “pardon,” which they would carry in their pockets to the dueling ground.) Before midcentury, however, things would change. “In England,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1850s, “all social classes dress the same way.” They were coming to settle their differences in the same way too. “The intelligent artisan, the powerful and rising middle class were learning to resent aristocratic privilege,” wrote Cecil Woodham Smith, “and nowhere was it more clearly manifested than in the practice of dueling. Members of the aristocracy had licence to commit a criminal offence and escape the penalty—and only, it seemed, members of the aristocracy.”20
In September 1840 Colonel Lord Cardigan
challenged Captain Harvey Tuckett (once under his command) after Tuckett had published a letter listing his faults. By this time, Tuckett had left the army, so Cardigan was not breaching the articles of war by fighting him. The duel, on Wimbledon Common, left Tuckett wounded in the ribs and bleeding profusely, and the Crown, bowing to public opinion, decided to prosecute. Cardigan became an object of public execration, with The Times roundly urging, “Let his head be cropped, let him be put on an oatmeal diet, let him labour on the treadmill.” Perhaps the paper already sensed the inevitable: all of a year later Cardigan was finally put on trial, in the House of Lords, and acquitted. That evening he attempted to attend a performance at the Drury Lane Theatre, and as soon as he was sighted a riot took place. “Yells, hisses, shrieks, groans made it impossible for the performance to begin; it being feared that the Earl would be attacked, he was taken out of the theater by a side door.”21 The next day The Times thundered out a leader attacking the integrity of such a privileged judicial process and demanding that Cardigan be relieved of his command. Something had to be done, and soon Queen Victoria herself was caught up in devising legislation that might rid her country of dueling once and for all.
A new bill was launched in the House of Commons on March 15, 1844. In the debate that followed, one member of parliament reckoned that during the reign of George III there had been 172 duels, 91 of which had led to fatalities. Three days later The Times reported that the true figure was over 200. The prime minister, Robert Peel, revealed that the new law would deny an army pension to the widow of an officer killed in a duel the year before. His point was that an “institution predicated on the affirmation of courage and the demonstration of manliness could … be subverted if it brought destitution to the dependent and the weak.” Thus hereafter dueling “could be rejected by individuals without the worry of taint attaching to their reputations.”22 The bill passed into law, and at last duels in England steadily declined.
ITALIANS—ESPECIALLY NEAPOLITANS—LOVED DUELING, AND ITALY clung to the duello more ferociously than any country besides France and Germany. In the ten years between 1879 and 1889, 2,759 duels were recorded there (this statistic is incomplete, as many were never reported); 93 percent of these were fought with swords, 6 percent with pistols, and only 1 percent with revolvers; 3,901 wounds were inflicted, 1,066 serious and 50 fatal. Thirty percent of these duels arose from political differences, 8 percent from some serious insult, 10 percent from religious disputes, and 19 percent from quarrels over cards or other games. In summer, the number of duels was five times greater than in winter, and hardly any duels occurred during Lent—an unusual argument for fasting. Out of any 100 duelists, 30 would be military men, 29 journalists, 12 barristers, 4 students, 3 professors, 3 engineers, and 3 parliamentary deputies.23 The lower classes, it was understood, resorted to the stiletto.
A study of dueling in the Italian army, published in 1886, went through several editions and provides an interesting overview. The minimum age was determined by whether the party had been accepted into the military; the maximum was fifty-five. There were three recognized degrees of insult: simple, grave, and very grave, the last implying an insulting act—a blow or actual wound.
The author, a Signor Gelli, recommended that shortly before the combat the contestants invite their seconds to dinner, so that they may be cheered by “an atmosphere of conviviality.” No one due to officiate at the duel should be invited, lest “his mere presence evoke dismal forebodings.” Come the day itself, the challengers must arrive no more than fifteen minutes from the time arranged, and it was not permissible for them then to attempt to compose their differences by way of an apology. Rapiers, sabers, or pistols were the general weapons of choice, but by agreement parties might use carbines, daggers, even poison or dynamite. If so desired, they could fight on horseback. In contrast with this freedom over weaponry, clothing was strictly regulated: “It is de rigueur that he shall wear an English frock coat and a high hat. As for the trousers, it shall have been determined by previous agreement whether they shall be supported by a belt or suspenders.” This was no laughing matter: as late as the first decade of the twentieth century, army officers fought 398 duels, probably more than any other European country.24
IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, DUELING EBBED AND FLOWED, but throughout the last half of the nineteenth century the story was almost entirely one of resurgence. As late as 1900, the minister of war defended the practice in the Reichstag on the ground that there was no other way of avoiding immediate bloodshed when insults had been exchanged. Unwillingness to fight was taken as cowardice. Count Ledorowski of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff was called on to resign his commission for advising a young lieutenant not to fight a duel.25
By 1887, the épée, known as the Pariser, had become the countries’ dueling weapon, though in army circles and throughout Austria the saber was still preferred, while naval officers stuck to cutlasses. When a rightist leader, Wolfgang Kapp, challenged Prussian chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg during the First World War, the chancellor declined, invoking higher duties to the Fatherland. He was supported in this by public opinion: indeed, during both the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War the German supreme command decreed a moratorium on dueling so as not to detract from the national effort.26
Skill in the salle could sometimes be a liability on the dueling ground. In 1893, in Vienna, a first lieutenant of the hussars demonstrated superb technique but no killer instinct as he delivered blows with the flat of his blade. His opponent noticed this tendency and stormed in, hacking off the hussar’s nose, which for the duration of the combat was stuck up on the wall by an attentive second; it was stitched back on afterward.
Some duels echo down the centuries. In 1834, a Baron Trautmansdorf was paying court to the widow of a Polish general, the young Countess Lodoiska R———; he was waiting only for a diplomatic appointment before marrying her. In the meantime, a Baron von Ropp began courting her and satirized his rival in a published sonnet. Trautmansdorf called him out. Ropp first accepted, then at the dueling ground introduced a champion to fight for him, who killed Trautmansdorf with a well-practiced thrust. At this, Trautmansdorf’s enraged second insisted upon satisfaction and in turn soon fell, mortally wounded in her turn: for she proved to be none other than Lodoiska herself, who had accompanied her beloved in male attire. Overcome by guilt, Ropp threw himself onto his sword and died beside the two lovers. Rather than bringing duels into further disrepute, the tragedy added to their unwholesome allure.27 In Germany an Anti-Dueling League was established only in 1902, and as late as 1934 a history professor in Göttingen called out a colleague for dishonoring him.
FOR MUCH OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY FRANCE WAS THE SCENE of passionate encounters, but far more duels were fought for form’s sake and quickly stopped at the slightest sign of blood. “The duel in France,” thunders Adolph Kohut in his history of dueling, published in 1888, “has deteriorated into a trivial game … [Its mainsprings are] in most cases enormous vanity.”28 As late as 1897 Marcel Proust, enraged by a review in Le Journal imputing that he was homosexual, fought a duel with its author, Jean Lorrain. One of Proust’s seconds was his friend Gustave de Borda, known as “Sword-Thrust Borda”; but the chosen weapon was pistols. The combatants stood at a distance of twenty-five yards and fired into the air. “Proust behaved very pluckily, though he wasn’t physically strong,” a contemporary remarked kindly. Three months later Lorrain was dueling once more, against another friend of Proust, Count Robert de Montesquieu, this time with swords. Proust’s biographer George Painter echoes Lord Peter Wimsey: “With pistols it was bad form not to miss your opponent, unless you had an exceptionally serious grievance; but with swords the combatants were in honor bound to go on fighting until one was hurt.” The difference was still marginal: Count Robert, whose idea of dueling was to twirl his sword around like the sails of a windmill, was hit on the thumb, bled profusely, and retired from the field.29
Mark Twain had great fun
at the expense of these heroes, many of whom, to his mind, seemed to treat dueling as a fashion accessory. “The French duel is the most health-giving of recreations because of the open-air exercise it affords,” he quipped. “I would rather be the hero of a French duel than a crowned and sceptred monarch.”30 Inveterate duelists had ceased to be much respected. It was true that most citified gentlemen would fight once, pour faire leurs preuves—to prove themselves—but more than three encounters suggested “an odor of disrepute.” During a duel at the Parc des Princes Vélodrome, on the outskirts of Paris, after a short opening clash of blades, one gallant told the directeur du combat that as he had now crossed swords with his opponent he would be happy to shake hands with him.
The formalities, so assiduously developed, were increasingly disregarded: salutes disappeared, seconds hardly bowed to each other, and the victorious duelist, rather than standing his ground until his wounded rival had been carried off, now left the field as quickly as he could. About the only rule that still lingered was the one that forbade duelists to speak to each other. A duel was nearly stopped in the 1850s because one of the parties shouted to the other in midlunge “Garde à vous!” The seconds threatened to retire until an apology was issued and silence promised—a promise scrupulously kept: at his next bout the offender was killed outright.
There is, however, one story of a duel in Napoleon’s time that was never less than serious. Two officers, Fournier and Dupont, maintained a duel over nearly two decades. In 1794, at Strasbourg, Captain Fournier, a fanatical duelist, challenged and killed a young man called Blum. His commanding officer, General Moreau, who was holding a party on the evening of the funeral, suggested to one of his aides-de-camp, Captain Dupont, that Fournier’s presence was surplus to requirement. When Fournier arrived and was denied admission by Dupont, he immediately challenged him. They fought with swords, and Fournier was wounded. “That’s the first touch,” he said as he sank to earth.
By the Sword Page 24