Duel

[13] By the late 18th century, Enlightenment era values began to influence society with new self-conscious ideas about politeness, civil behavior, and new attitudes toward violence.

By the 1770s, the practice of dueling was increasingly coming under attack from many sections of enlightened society, as a violent relic of Europe's medieval past unsuited for modern life.

The growing middle class maintained their reputation with recourse to either bringing charges of libel, or to the fast-growing print media of the early 19th century, where they could defend their honor and resolve conflicts through correspondence in newspapers.

Individuals in the Clapham Sect and similar societies, who had successfully campaigned for the abolition of slavery, condemned dueling as ungodly violence and as an egocentric culture of honor.

Between 1798 and the Civil War, the U.S. Navy lost two-thirds as many officers to dueling as it did in combat at sea, including naval hero Stephen Decatur.

[19] In England, to kill in the course of a duel was formally judged as murder, but generally the courts were very lax in applying the law, as they were sympathetic to the culture of honor.

However, the last-known fatal duel to occur in England was between two French political refugees, Frederic Cournet and Emmanuel Barthélemy near Englefield Green in 1852; the former was killed.

In the early nineteenth century, American writer and activist John Neal took up dueling as his earliest reform issue,[27] attacking the institution in his first novel, Keep Cool (1817) and referring to it in an essay that same year as "the unqualified evidence of manhood".

However, in this regional context, the term dueling had severely degenerated from its original 18th-century definition as a formal social custom among the wealthy classes, using fixed rules of conduct.

In 1827, during the Sandbar Fight, James Bowie was involved in an arranged pistol duel that quickly escalated into a knife-fighting melee, not atypical of American practices at the time.

[37] On 30 May 1832, French mathematician Évariste Galois was mortally wounded in a duel at the age of twenty, cutting short his promising mathematical career.

These turned out to be prophetic, as Pushkin himself was mortally wounded in a controversial duel with Georges d'Anthès, a French officer rumored to be his wife's lover.

Participation in a duel could be honorably refused on account of a major difference in age between the parties and, to a lesser extent, in cases of social inferiority on the part of the challenger.

In the event that the seconds failed to persuade their principals to avoid a fight, they then attempted to agree on terms for the duel that would limit the chance of a fatal outcome, consistent with the generally accepted guidelines for affairs of honor.

In most cases, the challenged party had the choice of weapons, with swords being favored in many parts of continental Europe and pistols in the United States and Great Britain.

Often sword duels were only fought until blood was drawn, thus severely limiting the likelihood of death or grave injury since a scratch could be considered as satisfying honor.

Other things often arranged by the seconds could go into minute details that might seem odd in the modern world, such as the dress code (duels were often formal affairs), the number and names of any other witnesses to be present and whether or not refreshments would be served.

[79] John Wilkes, "who did not stand upon ceremony in these little affairs", when asked by Lord Talbot how many times they were to fire, replied, "just as often as your Lordship pleases; I have brought a bag of bullets and a flask of gunpowder.

Research shows that much the largest group of later duelists were military officers, followed by the young sons of the metropolitan elite (see Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets).

Following the death of his opponent, John D'Esterre, O'Connell repented and from that time wore a white glove on his right hand when attending Mass as a public symbol of his regret.

During the late 16th and the 17th century, this tradition was gradually replaced with the modern fencing with the rapier following the Dardi school, while at the same time the practice of dueling spread to the bourgeois classes, especially among students.

Dueling quickly became so popular – and the number of casualties among the commanding ranks so high – that, in 1715, Emperor Peter I was forced to forbid the practice on pain of having both duelists hanged.

In Peru there were several high-profile duels by politicians in the early part of the 20th century including one in 1957 involving Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who went on to become president.

First, though confined to a segment of the upper classes, dueling served essentially the same purpose as the lowest eye-gouging battle among Tennessee hog drivers.

Third, the promise of esteem and status that beckoned men to the field of honor did not always match the expectation, but often enough dueling served as a form of scapegoating for unresolved personal problems.

Instead, the term was increasingly used to describe any violent fight or melee between two or more contestants using mixed weapons – clubs, bottles, Bowie knives, or firearms of any type or description.

[102] Crude so-called 'quick-draw' duels, though in reality very rare, were also fought to uphold personal honor in the western American frontier, partly influenced by the code duello brought by Southern emigrants.

[107] Settlements such as Tombstone and Dodge City attempted to prevent these so-called duels by prohibiting civilians from carrying firearms by local ordinance, with little success.

[112] The Portuguese traveler Duarte Barbosa tells that dueling was a common practice among the nobles of the Vijayanagara Empire, and it was the only legal manner in which "murder" could be committed.

[118] Unlike the more typical kris duel of Javanese and Malay culture, the Bugis-Makassar community instead wield badik, the local single-edge knife.