The judicial trial by ordeal was abandoned in the reign of Elizabeth, but the practice of private duelling has survived in spite of adverse legislation, and is exceedingly popular in France down to the present day. The law of civilised nations has, however, always been dead against it. In 1599 the parliament of Paris went so far as to declare every duellist a rebel to his majesty; nevertheless, in the first eighteen years of Henri Quatre’s reign no fewer than 4,000 gentlemen are said to have perished in duels, and Henri himself remarked, when Creyin challenged Don Philip of Savoy, “If I had not been the king I would have been your second.” Our ambassador, Lord Herbert, at the court of Louis XIII., wrote home that he hardly ever met a French gentleman of repute who had not either killed his man or meant to do so! and this in spite of laws so severe that the two greatest duellists of the age, the Count de Boutteville and the Marquis de Beuron, were both beheaded, being taken in flagrante delicto.
Louis XIV. published another severe edict in 1679, and had the courage to enforce it. The practice was checked for a time, but it received a new impulse after the close of the Napoleonic wars. The dulness of Louis Philippe’s reign and the dissoluteness of Louis Napoleon’s both fostered duelling. The present “opportunist” Republic bids fair to outbid both. You can hardly take up a French newspaper without reading an account of various duels. Like the suicides in Paris, and the railway assaults in England, duels form a regular and much appreciated item of French daily news.
It is difficult to think of M. de Girardin’s shooting dead poor Armand Carell—the most brilliant young journalist in France—without impatience and disgust, or to read of M. Rochefort’s exploit the other day without a smile.
The shaking hands in the most cordial way with M. Rochefort, the compliments on his swordsmanship, what time the blood flowed from an ugly wound, inflicted by him as he was mopping his own neck, are all so many little French points (of honor?) which we are sure his challenger, Captain Fournier, was delighted to see noticed in the papers. No doubt every billiard-room and café in Paris gloated over the details, and the heroes, Rochefort and Fournier, were duly fêted and dined together as soon as their respective wounds were sufficiently healed.
Meanwhile John Bull reads the tale and grunts out loud, “The whole thing is a brutal farce and the ‘principals’ are no better than a couple of asses.”
Now, admitting that there are some affronts which the law cannot and does not take cognisance of, in these days such affronts are very few. That terrible avenger, public opinion, is in this nineteenth century a hundred-handed and a hundredfold more free, powerful, and active than it used to be, before the printing-press, and, I may add, railways, telegraphs, and daily newspapers. But of all cases to which duelling, by the utmost stretch of honorable license, could be applied—a mere press attack is perhaps the least excusable.
Here are the French extolling the freedom of the English press by imitating—or trying to imitate—English independence and the right to speak and act and scribble sans gêne—and it turns out that an honorable member in the Senate cannot lose his temper, or a journalist write a smart article, without being immediately requested to fight. “Risum teneatis, amici!” and this is the people who think themselves fit for liberty, let alone equality and fraternity! (save the mark!)
The old town clerk at Ephesus in attempting to compose a dispute of a rather more serious character some eighteen hundred years ago, between a certain Jew and a Greek tradesman, spoke some very good sense when he appealed to both disputants thus: “If Demetrius have a matter against any man the law is open, and there are deputies: let them implead one another.”
Next time M. Rochefort pokes fun at Captain Fournier in the “Intransigeant,” we advise the captain, instead of pinking that witty but scurrilous person, to try the law of libel. If he wins he will get money in his purse, which is better than an ugly gash in his side; if he loses he will go home to consider his ways and perchance amend them, under the stimulus of a just public rebuke—a sadder and perhaps a wiser man: that, indeed, both he and Rochefort might easily be.—Belgravia.