By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  WITHIN A YEAR OF THE INCIDENT OUTSIDE THE DUC DE SULLY’S house a new verb had been added to the language: “voltairiser,” meaning “to voltaire, to thrash.” Voltaire’s humiliation epitomizes the absurdity, arrogance, and hypersensitivity of the upper classes in eighteenth-century France. Yet from the accession of Louis XIII in 1610 to the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815 it was the nobility that shaped swordsmanship into something recognizable as a modern sport.

  It came about as a by-product of violence. While Louis XIII recognized that he should outlaw destructive feuding, he had a romantic fondness for the days of chivalry and when in 1635 L’Academie française was established, members received a ceremonial sword (although clergymen did not). During his thirty-three-year reign the country went dueling-mad—no nation, not even the German aristocracy or the Protestant rulers of Ireland, was as obsessed. Men fought at any time of the day or night, by moonlight or torchlight, openly in the streets or in secluded parks (the Bois de Boulogne was a favorite venue), on the slightest provocation. Those who wished to avoid a formal duel would resort to a collision in the street—the “rencontre”—which would lead to “words” and a fight on the spot without the duel’s formalities: but the result was the same. Seconds were considered cowards if they did not join in, and often two or more participated. One duel, in 1652, involved four seconds a side, and there could be as many as ten, or even twenty—not melees as before, but planned encounters regulated by at least some semblance of procedure.† More than six thousand Frenchman lost their lives to duelling within a period of a hundred years.

  It was famously said that when court acquaintances met in the morning their first inquiry was “Who fought yesterday?” and, after dinner, “Who fought this morning?” Lord Herbert, English ambassador to the court, tells in his memoirs of a young man who asked for a girl’s hand only to be informed by her father that to be eligible he should fight a couple of duels first. Herbert adds, “There is scarce a Frenchman worth looking on who has not killed his man in a duel.”

  Nor were duelists likely to show remorse for their actions in public. When the Marquis de la Donze was awaiting execution for killing his brother-in-law, he was asked to repent. “What!” he replied. “Do you call one of the cleverest thrusts in Gascony a crime?” Rarely were matters of honor resolved amicably: when the one-legged Marquis de Rivard was challenged, he sent a surgeon in reply and suggested that in the interests of fighting “on an equal footing” his opponent should submit to a similar amputation. The duel was called off.

  This frenzy quickly spread beyond Paris, and Louis XIII, seeing how the provinces were being denuded of their most talented men, reluctantly encouraged Cardinal Richelieu to set about stemming the tide with whatever measures he saw fit. Richelieu, the austere prelate who from 1624 on was de facto ruler of France, had personal motives for taking action: years before, when he had been Bishop of Luçon, he had displeased the Marquis de Thémines. The Marquis—since he could not gain satisfaction directly from a man of the cloth—determined to challenge Richelieu’s older brother. It did not take him long to fabricate an opportunity and, when the two men met, the head of the house of Richelieu, struck through the heart, died instantly.

  No sooner had the younger brother become minister than he issued an edict against dueling; but he took a pragmatic view. Legislation forbidding duels had long been in place but rarely enforced. Richelieu believed that the law’s severity was the reason for its nonenforcement, so in 1626 he pushed an edict through a reluctant Parlement de Paris limiting the death penalty to those whose duels actually resulted in death or whose seconds dueled with each other and ensured that these penalties were applicable even for duels fought elsewhere on the Continent and overseas. The measures failed to eradicate dueling (one duel is on record as having taken place by the light of a lantern positioned to illuminate a copy of the cardinal’s edict), but they were enough to anger the noblesse d’épée and would soon be the mainspring of the nobility’s confrontation with Richelieu.

  The critical case involved the most infamous duelist of the time, François, Comte de Bouteville-Montmorency—the possessor, he claimed, “of the finest mustache in France”—who had survived twenty-one duels. At 2 P.M. on Wednesday, May 12, 1627, in broad daylight on the Place Royale, the most fashionable square in Paris, Bouteville fought his twenty-second, against the Marquis de Beuvron, for no better reason than that Beuvron wanted to avenge Bouteville’s last victim. Rosmadec des Chapelles, one of Bouteville’s two seconds, killed one of Beuvron’s seconds. The King was livid, but it was widely assumed that he would not have a leading nobleman executed.

  The 1627 duel of the Count de Bouteville with the Marquis de Beuvron—and their seconds—in broad daylight in the middle of Paris. It led to Cardinal Richelieu’s crackdown on the practice throughout France—and Bouteville’s beheading. (illustration credit 4.1)

  Richelieu had other ideas. Beuvron and his unwounded second fled to England, but Bouteville and Chapelles found themselves arrested and tried by the Parlement de Paris. The Mercure français, one of the main newsletters, reported that, since Bouteville had been called out by Beuvron, he had only been defending his honor, as any nobleman might. (The paper forbore from adding that Bouteville would happily have dueled whatever the situation and even ran a dueling school in his town house.) Five of the grandest ladies of the court came to the king in person to make a final appeal for clemency, but it was no use: on June 22, 1627 Bouteville and Chapelles were beheaded; effigies of Beuvron and his surviving second were hanged alongside them.

  By a strange irony, the Cardinal would share his title with one of France’s foremost duelists, Louis-François-Armand de Plessis, Duc de Richelieu and Maréchal de France. Born around 1690, long after the cardinal’s death, the duc grew up to be “a reckless duelist, and a systematic and heartless seducer,” in the words of one historian.4 The darling of the ladies of the court (Emilie du Châtelet was one of his lovers, even though Voltaire was a close friend), he once arranged assignations with separate mistresses, leaving the arrangements to his secretary, who ineptly fixed the same hour for both. There was a scene and a duel ensued between the two women, one of them losing part of an ear. Far from tarnishing his reputation, the affair made Richelieu “the Adonis of the day.”

  While committed to the Bastille for the third time, he was moved from his dungeon to comfortable apartments at the intercession of female admirers and allowed to take a daily walk along the walls. As he paced the ramparts, a procession of elegant carriages filled with highborn admirers—all of whom either were or had been his mistresses—passed to and fro before him amid a flurry of gestures. In 1725, after having spent six years incarcerated, he was restored to favor and sent as ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor at Vienna, then the prime diplomatic posting.

  It seemed as if everyone was either writing about dueling or engaging in it—including the great philosophers. In the sixteenth century Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) had expounded at length on the iniquities of dueling, although he admitted that he was physically inept himself: “At dancing, tennis and wrestling,” he wrote, “I have not been able to acquire more than a slight, vulgar skill, and at swimming, fencing, vaulting and jumping, no skill at all.”5

  René Descartes (1596–1650) was a keen fencer as a young man. In 1621, while visiting Prague, he was aboard a boat bound for East Frisia when the crew tried to assault him, and he fought them off with his sword. Later, while in Paris, he was escorting a woman friend when a drunken lout abused her. Descartes “went after the rash fool quite in the stump-stirring fashion of d’Artagnan,” according to his biographer, and “having flicked the sot’s sword out of his hand spared his life, not because he was a rotten swordsman, but because he was too filthy to be butchered before a beautiful lady.” After completing his studies at the famous Jesuit college appropriately called “La Flèche,” Descartes spent twenty years in Holland, where he continued his fencing lessons. At one point he wrote to a friend apologizing
for doing so little mathematics—he had been too busy with his hobby. After his death a treatise he had written, The Art of Fencing, in which the “greater part of the lessons were drawn from his own experience,” was found among his papers. Sadly, it does not survive.6

  In one of his Essays Montesquieu (1689–1755) recorded, “When I was young the people of quality went out of their way not to be thought fine blades, and would avoid instruction therein as an activity which was too cunning by half, an enticement away from the simple path of righteousness.”7 No matter that dexterity with a sword made one more valuable to one’s king on the battlefield and would help frighten off idle challenges: skill at fencing implied a shady character and would continue to do so well into the eighteenth century. However, while it was thought bad form to be known as a “bon escrimeur,” gentlemen still regularly traveled to Italy to improve their skills.

  LOUIS XIV CAME TO THE THRONE IN 1643, AT THE AGE OF FIVE. HE would reign for seventy-two years, in the opening nine of which nine hundred Frenchmen died in duels. His first edict against dueling appeared under his mother’s regency in the year of his accession, followed by another in 1651, a third in 1670.… In all, Louis XIV published ten such edicts, but rather spoiled their effect by granting more than seven thousand pardons in nineteen years, an average of one a day. Each new edict differed little from its predecessors but was intended to show that this time the king really meant business. His subjects simply didn’t believe him—until, in 1679, he published his “Edite [sic] des Duels,” threatening the death penalty not only for the principals but for their seconds, witnesses, and attendant surgeons. Their entire property would be confiscated and the coat of arms of a gentleman offender broken by the public executioner, a terrible fate for a man of honor. At the same time, he established a Court of Honor, composed of the maréchaux de France (the great officers of state directing the army) to resolve disputes brought before it, as well as to penalize offenders. The court declined to interfere when the party was of insufficiently high birth, but where their peers were concerned they were vigilant. It took Louis XIV twenty-five years to enforce his edict, but by 1704 fatal encounters had almost ceased. Fifty years on, Voltaire, skulking on the Swiss border, judged the King’s “abolition of duels” to be one of his greatest achievements.

  Having gathered a deliberately underemployed higher aristocracy under his watchful eye at Versailles, Louis XIV elaborated endless rules of behavior and extremes of formality. Every move was prescribed by a court convention, dress was determined by social standing, and l’étiquette was strictly maintained. Unlike the English aristocracy, who oversaw their lands or attended Parliament, the French nobility stewed in a pressure cooker of egos and intrigue—literally thousands of courtiers all fighting for favor. (Once, walking on the terrace at Versailles, the king caught sight of an unsworded officer, the unfortunately named Marquis de Silly, and peremptorily sent for him. “You appear before your sovereign without your sword?” he demanded. “Indeed, sire,” said the officer bravely. “We have been defeated at Blenheim, and I am on parole.” On this occasion he was forgiven.)

  ASIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT IN THE QUALITY OF ROADS IN THE mid–seventeenth century led to the widespread use of stagecoaches, and soon travelers learned that the long, wide-hilted rapier was not the most practical of weapons to wear in a confined space. In his diary for January 10, 1660, Pepys writes of walking to Westminster and overtaking Captain Oakeshott in his silk coat, “whose sword got hold of many people in walking.” In 1663 the “suit”—the first piece of menswear to fasten in the front—made its appearance. The rapier, easy enough to carry and draw in the days of doublet and hose, did not sit well with brocaded jackets, breeches, and silk stockings. So popular in the 1640s and 1650s, it had become antisocial, “an infernal nuisance to passers-by.”8

  In the Netherlands the rapier had already begun to be replaced as early as the 1630s by swords with smaller hilts and shorter, more manageable blades. When Charles II and his followers returned to England after their long exile there, they brought these “town swords” with them. The English, who called their military blades by the medieval term of “great-swords,” derided these new weapons, dubbing them “smallswords.” However, it quickly became clear that the smallsword was ideal for swordplay, effective in both attack and defense. Further, it obviated the need for a dagger. When the new weapon made its way to France, the court christened it “l’épeé courte,” a name that survived up to the end of the nineteenth century.‡

  IT DID NOT TAKE LONG FOR FRENCH MASTERS TO REALIZE THAT THEY needed to develop a new school of fencing to suit the new weapon. Until the first half of the seventeenth century they had depended on the Italians, to such a degree that Queen Catherine de’ Medici had installed several Italian masters in France to develop the sport. So successful were they that in 1567 her son Charles IX officially recognized the French Academy of Fence. Subsequent monarchs continued to patronize the academy. Louis XIV granted the association its coats of arms and conferred patents of nobility on six prominent masters. Only after studying under a recognized master for at least six years (one less than their confrères across the Channel) could one gain membership, and the teaching of swordplay throughout France became the monopoly of academy members.

  The academy was quick to establish an “escrime française,” a system that emphasized a more flexible way of holding one’s weapon, with the thumb and forefinger on either side of the lower part of the hilt. This grip afforded a new subtlety of movement that forced hilts to become smaller and more manageable. The word “rapier” became a term of contempt, applied to a sword of disproportionate length—the weapon of a swaggerer.

  It was a time for codification: the five basic steps of classical ballet were established in 1650, and treatises proliferated—on the art of war, anatomy, physiognomy, optics. The appearance of the great French Academy dictionary of the language (begun in 1638 and finally completed in 1694) ensured that French became the European tongue, the medium of diplomacy, the language of aristocracy, even of fine cooking. “For a century and more,” note the historians Will and Ariel Durant, “Europe aspired to be French.”9 When a competition was held in 1783 for the best essay on why French had become the universal language, it was sponsored not by the court of Versailles but by that of Berlin.

  In 1653 a book by Charles Besnard of Rennes, a leading master, showed conclusively that the French had finally improved on the Italians, whose masters had never allowed for purely defensive movements—every parry had also to be a thrust. Besnard (alleged to be the first to use the word “fleuret,” the French word for “foil”) saw that always trying to do two things at once was a mistake and separated attack from defense: Molière’s fictional fencing master evidently knew what he was doing. The leading foot for the most part was kept in front, so that the fencer stepped forward or backward in one line, allowing parries and ripostes alike to become more efficient. Besnard also introduced the formal salute, a symbol of courtesy and good form.§

  “The Italians had had their day,” wrote a nineteenth-century commentator. “They had practiced fencing with fervour, written about it with elegance, and illustrated it with great beauty. But now they were greatly distanced by their ultramontane brethren.”11 Besnard was followed by a succession of great master theorists: Philibert de La Touche in 1670, Le Perché (who popularized the counterriposte) in 1676, Wernersson André de Liancour in 1686, and Le Sieur Labat in 1690. As the smallsword evolved, the modern one-handed technique developed, and the back arm, which had sometimes been used to parry, sometimes to grasp an adversary’s sword, was now used primarily for balance.

  Of all these masters, Liancour was the most influential. His quarto Le Maistre d’armes, ou, l’exercise de l’éspée seulle remained the standard work on defense for more than three quarters of a century. Unlike most great teachers, he published his book shortly after qualifying as a master and continued giving lessons for another forty years. Le Maistre d’armes has fourteen copp
erplate engravings of fencers executing movements in elaborate court dress, set against some of the most dramatic backgrounds in fencing literature: island castles on clifftops here, towns and harbors there; in one a troop of cavalry spurs out of a burning village; in another a besieging army is blowing up a town’s defenses. In the most remarkable illustration of all, elegant gentlemen practice their sport while behind them a full-scale naval battle rages, with ships sinking and cannon smoke everywhere.

  Throughout his work, Liancour omits any reference to cutting strokes, indicating that by his time the rapier had been superseded by the smallsword. He also suggests that the master have a lighter and longer weapon than his pupil, as with so many lessons to give he should not tire himself unduly, and recommends removing the crossbar and shell from the pupil’s weapon to ensure that the pupil hold the handle firmly. Should he parry with the wrong part of the blade, the master’s blade would slip down his own and give him a painful rap on the fingers—an effective reminder of the importance of good technique.12

  Up till Liancour’s day, fencing had been in deadly earnest, as one’s life could depend on one’s skill. Now it became a courtly exercise in its own right, an accomplishment of a city gentleman much like music, dancing, or riding. Suppleness of wrist and careful use of one’s fingers replaced the aggressive style of the Elizabethans. The notion of an artificial “right of way” transformed the sport: the fencer who started an attack must be parried (or otherwise made to miss) before his opponent could riposte, after which the riposteur had the right to his stroke before the first attacker could reply. Fencers learned not to attack at the same time in order not to injure one another. For further safety, ripostes were not to be made until the attacker had returned en garde. A “delayed riposte” (where a fencer, having parried an attack, deliberately refrains from riposting at once, so as to upset his adversary’s timing) was known as “temps perdu”—a formulation that would have delighted Marcel Proust. Good fencers did not advance or retreat more than an inch or so but stood their ground and initiated their attacks with a light blow on their opponents’ blades, almost as a conductor marks a beat with his baton.