At the “sensational trial that excited all England,” he claimed to have acted in self-defense. He was convicted, and this time he would not escape. Some months later, Liebknecht visited Newgate Prison, where Barthélemy had been put to death. “Among the plaster casts of the faces of men who had been hanged was that of Barthélemy, with the impression of the hangman’s noose still visible. His expression was changed very little—his face still showed an iron determination.”
Marx fought only one more duel—this time with pistols; he had apparently lost interest in the sword, and there is no mention of fencing in his letters to Engels. However, ten years before he ever met Barthélemy he did commit this view to paper, that the “principal thesis [of political economy] is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theater or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence etc the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital.”3
BY THE TIME OF BARTHÉLEMY’S DEATH, A NEW KIND OF MASTER WAS coming into being. Instruction in the noble art had come a long way from the days when it was a school of quick tricks for anxious duelists and public entertainers. Beginning in the early 1870s, evening galas featuring international fencers could bring in thousands of spectators, but this did not mean that there were many active fencers generally. While fencing was popular in Italy and France, as dueling declined, so the sport too fell off throughout the rest of Europe. Masters might become cultivated and socially adept, but they were catering to a diminishing clientele. Fencing stood at a crossroads.
In Britain, the first club (as distinct from a salle belonging to a master) was the London Fencing Club, founded on July 13, 1848, by an ex-student of Angelo fils, one George Chapman. The membership came to embrace the Earl of Cardigan, Lord Desborough (possibly the finest athlete Britain has produced),* and Prince Louis-Napoleon, who was briefly a member while in exile. (He was described at the time as “a wild, harum-scarum youth riding at full gallop down the streets to the peril of the public, fencing and pistol-shooting, and apparently without serious thoughts of any kind.”)4 The Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, had taken up fencing while at the University of Bonn (winning prizes for his skill with the broadsword), and he passed on his interest to his children, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. Both princes were members of L.F.C. from 1865 till the end of the century. The stage was represented by Edmund Kean and Henry Irving, music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and literature (ancestrally) by Byron, who was known to pass out from excitement while watching theatrical performances and who had a sword made for Kean, in homage to his performance as Othello.†
Byron is always reported as having a clubfoot, but this did not stop him from becoming a keen fencer. He learned the sport from Henry Angelo at Harrow and tried to get Angelo to teach him at Cambridge too, but the city’s mayor refused the master permission to rent premises.5 Through Angelo, Byron met the ex–champion boxer “Gentleman” Jackson, who shared rooms with Angelo in London. He took lessons in both fencing and boxing (wearing especially heavy clothing for the former, to make him sweat more freely) and became friends with his two teachers and “their strange assortment of high-class demi-monde associates in theatrical and sporting circles,” as his biographer Leslie Marquand put it.
Whatever the character of Angelo’s friends, at the London Fencing Club a strict decorum prevailed. To make a remise (in which one fencer pushes on with his attack rather than waiting to parry the riposte) was frowned upon and required an apology. Counterattacking was likewise considered bad form; a consistent offender might not have his membership renewed. As one early-twentieth-century historian put it, “Pedantry was, as it had been before, the bane of fencing.”6 Some masters had their pupils take lessons standing in tea trays, to teach them to limit their foot movement. One master described a typical bout in which two fellow maîtres d’armes would place themselves en garde and the first would then make an appel—a stamp with the front foot—with a violent “Voilà, monsieur!” followed by another beat of the foot and an elaborate lunge, perfect stylistically but “not erring on the side of quickness.” His opponent would form, with exquisite precision, perhaps half a dozen parries while the original attacker would attempt to deceive them, but almost in slow motion: “no unseemly scrambling.”
La Leçon d’Escrime—a French postcard from the turn of the century: “Lunge well, be both bold and graceful.” (illustration credit 9.1)
The L.F.C. set its face against publicity and shunned contact with other clubs: “Any member who took part in competitions outside the Club was regarded with considerable disfavor,” records the official history. “Members fenced for exercise and for the love of belles armes … and regarded their Club as an exclusive establishment where they could enjoy physical development and the pleasure of (strictly male) company.”7 Good manners required that outside of competitions both fencers should leave the strip with the illusion of being equally matched: even to count touches was unheard-of.
Similar attitudes prevailed on the continent. In Paris there were the Salle du Cercle de l’Union Artistique, the Salle du Cercle des Eclaireurs, and a handful named after their founding masters: Boyer, Jacob, Manniez, Mérignac Fils, Mimiague, Pellenq, Pons, Neven, Robert, Ruze, Staat. The tone of relations between the clubs can be gleaned from Les Salles d’Armes de Paris (1875), which describes the doyen of the Paris professionals, the seventy-seven-year-old Alphonse Pons: “He speaks pompously, he fences pompously and he has pompously called his salle ‘Academy of Arms.’ ”8 Nevertheless, the club had more than a hundred members.
Despite all attempts to outlaw dueling, masters were happy to give lessons to would-be duelists, but the days when instruction was based on life-or-death situations had long since gone. The artificial conventions of foil fencing, establishing rights-of-way, limited targets, and extended phrases now dictated how even duels should be fought. The influence of the military meant that the bayonet and the singlestick lingered on, but generally the weapons of choice had been whittled down to foil and saber. The épée was hardly used in the salle, while “even duels,” noted Burton, “are mostly fought with French foils, which I have called mere bent wires.”9
To prepare their pupils for more deadly encounters, masters would simply adapt their normal lessons at foil. While the foil and the épée were in reality very different, their guards being differently shaped and their blades differing markedly in both shape and weight, after the invention of the mask the style of foil became more mobile and vigorous, thus blurring any distinction even further, and foil technique came to be held by many as sufficient preparation for dueling.‡ But that was about to change.
By the 1850s a group of Parisian fencers were beginning to rebel against the stranglehold of foil technique. In 1862 the Baron de Bazancourt published Les Secrets de l’Epée, in which he argued that fencing in the salle should imitate real fighting. His message was reinforced when a well-known army captain, considered an expert salle foilist, nevertheless met his death in a formal duel against a far less experienced opponent. Bazancourt launched a revolution. During the last quarter of the century, Parisian masters increasingly prepared men for duels with standard dueling épées, differing from the real thing only in that their tips were capped. Purists immediately dubbed the new fashion a prostitution, and referees, still using the naked eye to award hits, would favor the épéeist whose style most paralleled foil wherever possible. Once introduced, however, the fighting épée was seen to have merits well beyond its uses in formal dueling; its practitioners had to develop the duelist’s mentality: hit without being hit.
It took time to develop an independent body of technique for the new weapon, but between 1884 and 1893 four leading masters, Claude La Marche, Jules Jacob, Ambroise Baudry, and Anthime Spinnewyn, all produced major studies in which they
discussed the differences between fencing in the salle and conditions of an actual duel and reached parallel conclusions: new techniques had to be taught. Pupils began to be instructed to use the guard of their épées to divert attacks, to parry and riposte in one movement, not two (as in foil), and to keep their feet closer together.11 Once épées were given blunted tips and épéeists taught to aim for the hand and wrist, the guard was enlarged the better to protect the hand.
This debate over dueling technique coincided with an extraordinary national scandal. From October 1894, when a French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was first accused of high treason for betraying military secrets to Germany, until 1906, when he was formally reinstated, the “Dreyfus Affair” aroused exceptional passions in the French. Journalists, editors, and politicians found themselves obliged to defend their views and their honor on dewy mornings in the Bois de Boulogne. The Affair was probably the last political issue to provoke duels.
Challenged novices frequently approached Baudry for a quick lesson before a duel. He is said to have stipulated that if his new pupil lost he need not pay anything, but if the pupil won he would be required to take fencing lessons for a year. His clients accumulated more than three hundred victories and Baudry had to take on five assistant masters. Fencers soon formed special clubs devoted exclusively to épée. “Foil play is dead,” declared Jean Joseph-Renaud, one of the most noted of the new enthusiasts. “Fencing is the art of fighting a duel, and it is nothing else.”§ Epée theorists repudiated the idea that they had evolved a new kind of swordplay, insisting instead that all they had done was return to first principles, stripping away accretions that were often dangerous “in the field.”
TWO SEEMINGLY DISPARATE FORCES—THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT (and, flowing from it, a newfound cult of chivalry) and the invention of cheap paper (allowing the rise of the popular adventure story) now combined to give swordplay a special place in popular culture across the face of Europe.
John Ruskin coined the word “medievalism” to describe an epoch in architecture, but it soon came to inspire a movement that would permeate almost every aspect of modern life. Private individuals began to collect armor (the first recorded sale being held at Christie’s in 1789), and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur was republished for the first time since 1634. There followed the Oxford Movement in religion, the Arthurian revival in art, the Gothic Revival in architecture, and the Young England movement in politics. The first of Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, “The Lady of Shalott,” based on a medieval Italian novella, came out in 1832. Tennyson had been inspired as a boy by Le Morte D’Arthur and spent forty years (from 1830 to 1870) completing his epic cycle Idylls of the King. Arthur and his Round Table were reinstated as national symbols. Equally celebrated was Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, with its “blade so bright that men were blinded with it.” Blinded indeed: as one historian records, “myth was restored and the quasi-historical Arthur now troubled only historians. Tennyson spoke for his age.”12
The second revolution, in publishing, took place in 1806, when two Huguenot brothers, Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, patented a design for a papermaking machine that would produce a continuous sheet of paper. Cheap printing was suddenly a reality, and Europe was awash in a literature that sought to satisfy the new longing for the adventures of chivalrous knights of old. No matter that European knights of the eleventh century, the “perfect gentlemen” of Tennyson’s poem, were actually an inglorious bunch, loutish, cruel, and rampaging. (The Germans still have a proverb, “Er will Ritter an mir werden,” “He wants to play the knight with me,” where “knight” means “bully.”) The enthusiasm embraced musketeers, crusaders, highwaymen, explorers, outlaws (from Robin Hood to New World frontiersmen), pirates, secret agents, court intriguers, and dashing army officers. And heroes and villains alike would resort, in a tight corner, to cold steel.
This new genre of stories redefined how swordplay was perceived. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), an early but crucial figure, effectively invented the historical novel, and his popularity soon swept the Continent; it was said that everyone in Berlin went to bed with Waverley under his pillow and read Rob Roy while sipping his morning chocolate. Scott himself may never have fenced (a leg withered before he was two years old prevented that), but his Waverley sequence alone includes some thirty scenes involving duels or challenges.13 He fomented a burgeoning school of British historical novelists—W. Harrison Ainsworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, R. D. Blackmore—as fiction evolved from the novel of manners to tales full of heroism and derring-do. By the 1830s imitations of Ivanhoe and Kenilworth proliferated. Scott and his immediate successors had little interest in exploring nuances of motivation; his writing—at least of action scenes—was like a modern adventure film, crammed with drama and special effects.
Not even Dickens was immune, regularly attending Salle Bertrand, the rival of Angelo’s as the leading London club, where he practiced for stage fights. His forays into amateur dramatics included his oft-played role as Captain Bobadill in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, where C. R. Leslie painted him in the part, lounging nonchalantly, a foil by his side, as if waiting for a fellow member to invite him onto the piste. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens disposes of one of his less admirable characters, Lord Frederick Verisopht, in a duel, and when Nicholas enters Mr. Crummles’s establishment looking for work there is a fight scene between two theatrical sailors of such range and detail that one feels Dickens must have encountered such a bout at first hand.‖ (The comic duel thus enters literature very late—only when the sword truly diminishes as a battle weapon can it be considered funny.)
Between 1880 and 1914 more than five hundred adventure novels were published, and nearly all featured swordfights. Captain Marryat, R. D. Blackmore, H. Rider Haggard (much admired by Freud), P. C. Wren (Beau Sabreur, and also onetime fencing champion of West India), and Anthony Hope (whose Prisoner of Zenda sold 500,000 copies over four decades in its British edition) were stalwarts in the first team. Robert Louis Stevenson (constantly complaining about his lack of invention) would patrol the midfield, with Joseph Conrad, a foreign signing, leading the line. Baroness Emmuska Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1902) and its successors, was (at the least) an energetic cheerleader.
Across the Channel, German pre-Romantics such as Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Friedrich von Schlegel were laying the groundwork. “Chivalry is itself the poetry of life,” wrote Schlegel in his Philosophy of History. Richard Wagner did his bit for Arthurian romance in Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Popular literature found its champion in Karl May, whose adventures of Kara Ben Nemsi, a sword-wielding traveler through northern Africa and the Middle East in the 1870s, are said to have been among the favorite light reading of Hitler, De Gaulle, and Albert Einstein. The Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler may have abominated the duel, but it appears in work after work, almost an obsession. The brothers Grimm included a memorable fairy tale in their great collection. “The Three Brothers” follows the well-worn theme of a man with three sons who tells them to go out into the world to learn a trade; on their return, “he who makes the best masterpiece shall have the house.” The eldest son becomes a blacksmith, the second a barber, the youngest a fencing master. During his apprenticeship the youngest son suffers many a blow, but he is never discouraged—“for,” he says to himself, “if you are afraid of a blow, you’ll never win the house.” The three return home, where the elder two duly display their skills. Just as the youngest son’s turn comes, the sky opens up into a torrential downpour. Drawing his sword, he flourishes it so fast that not a drop falls on him. His father is amazed. The story illustrates the new respect and revived sense of magic that now attended skilled swordsmen.
In France, nineteenth-century novelists sought inspiration in their own more recent history. The Adventures of François, Foundling, Thief, Juggler and Fencing Master During the French Revolution chronicles the progress of the eponymous François, who apprentices himself to Gamel the Fencing Mast
er and “is given a rapier for wear in the streets, which was not yet forbidden.” While his master teaches “middle-aged gents in the morning; the Jacobins about two,” François fights several duels and unsurprisingly takes all before him:
Twice he touched the man’s chest, and by degrees drove him back, panting, until he was against the door. Suddenly, seeming to recover strength, the Jacobin lunged in quarte, and would have caught the marquis fair in the breastbone had he not thrown himself backward as he felt the prick. Instantly he struck the blade aside with his open left hand, and, as it went by his left side, drew his rapier savagely through Amar’s right lung and into the panel of the door. It was over. Not ten minutes had passed.14
The father of all such writing is of course Alexandre Dumas (1802–70). Dumas’s own father was a general—a mulatto, the son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave—who served under Napoleon, as did the father of his friend Victor Hugo. Dumas also founded newspapers and a theater, indulged in political adventures with Garibaldi, fought in the streets during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, supplied arms (paid for out of his own pocket) to radical movements abroad, and stood for the National Assembly.
By the Sword Page 27