The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high
priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an
important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on
justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop
it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in
significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883
Maupassant called dueling "the last of our unreasonable customs."
As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel
retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the
literary imagination. Many of the greatest names in Western
literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them
Corneille, Moliere, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo,
Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains,
the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to
discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict
and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel
was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented;
yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some
conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble
bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was
everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary
history of the duel, as Touche makes clear, illuminates the
tensions that attended the birth of the modern world.
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