The Purpose of Dueling
and the Bureaucratic Hell that Replaced it
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Dueling was primarily "used" to settle matters of Sexual Impropriety and regulate gossip (professional and personal). It certainly worked better than HR.
Part of the norm was that it was just expected men who did not duel (peasants, ect.) could be beaten, socially exiled, or worse for a direct insult.
But amongst gentry-aspirants and above,(which might include actors, lawyers, and shopkeepers sons on the very low end) things like an insult to a female relative's reputation, or worse: direct molestation offered, would be settled by a duel.
There'd be a meeting of seconds to see if some apology or arrangement could be made... perhaps the most common being that upper-class men who defiled (consensually or not) women of slightly lower station might consent to marry them and restore their honor, lest they die at the hands of a male relative.
Likewise matters of personal and financial ruin often came to duels. Russian Playwright/Poet Alexander Pushkin fought 29 duels across his life to much celebration (lesser duels over minor insults only rarely resulted in death or injury)…. however towards the end, in a personal death spiral of debts, and scandal, not the least of which was a persistent life destroying rumor his wife had/was cheating on him with their brother in law Georges-Charles d'Anthès (a French Officer). Pushkin, attempting to salvage his honor and reputation sent d'Anthès an insulting letter (practically demanding a duel)…which went ahead despite their friends’ protestations.
Another big one was professional gossip. In an age before regulation, what made you trust professionals was their know personal reputations. Screwing clients might not just ruin them professionally, but socially... their daughter might be forced to marry a disgusting Tanner's or muckraker’s son. (as opposed to now where its a game to find regulatory loopholes that will let you screw your clients)
Naturally this reputation had to be guarded... so they'd duel to defend it... Ergo people were reticent to insult them, but their increasingly terse demands that a poor job be set to right had a ringing sound of steel to it.
Of course one needed not be upperclass to have upperclass pretensions, or to live in a community where reputations and honor mattered a great deal. Thus to the amusement of the elite, and deadly earnestness of the participants, less formal but no less serious feuds and duels of honor were to be found in the lowest of social strata… amongst farmers, herdsmen, and even amongst the more organized or pretentious of criminals.
And if a professional like a lawyer or architect or even an actor or court lady (Actors’ and women’s duels are a bizarre little world’s all their own… the melodrama!) well if they destroyed professional venture, or estate, or the prospects of a fellow actor/lady... they might be left to flee the region and abandon the vocation or face the risk of death.
The profession that was most regulated by the duel was of course the military. Instead of the modern expectation that incompetence would be covered up and abuses which threatened the service tolerated... 18th and 19th century militaries would often see officers and cavalry men who'd seen enough of a colleagues dangerous failures and refusal to resign, issue an insult for which to not respond would be social and professional death.
The bravery of officers and cavalry was so important, and the mere insinuation of cowardice so corrosive to their prospects (let alone refusing or failing to appear for a duel... which might be more socially and professionally devastating than a felony conviction in the modern era)... that of course they'd have to show up and see their professional differences finished in one party apologizing or coming to terms (far more likely in lesser civilian professions) or more likely in the case of military men, death.
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Our entire world of Human Resources, Business regulation, Disaster Inquiries, Review Boards, Civil Right Administrators, Product testers, minor lawsuits, family court, dispute resolution, Anti-Discrimination meetings....
All of it exists to regulate personal and professional interactions in such a way as to keep institutions barely tolerable to the elite and the people inside them.... And the Victorians, Georgians, and Caroleans before them maintained BETTER functioning institutions, families, and militaries, with none of it.
Because they were personally and Socially committed to quality: The Quality of their women, The Quality of their Professions, The Quality of their militaries, The Quality of their societies, The Quality of themselves, and their reputations for that quality...
And if you were compromising that quality or if you insulted it, they'd fucking kill you, or die trying.
Such a threat made regulation by bureaucracy not only unnecessary, but insulting.
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Of course as with all good and beautiful things in the world, the Enlightenment and Utilitarianism (which never saw anything useful it could not destroy) killed the institution. By the 1850s the Last dueling in the British Empire was considered a curiosity, with the article “Dead (and Gone) Shots” appearing in Charles Dickens Publication All the year Round in 1862.
In America, and on the European continent it continued in its fashions… In the US and especially after the civil war, formal dueling collapsed or was outlawed and the term was used to describe the Quickdraw Duels of which western fans will be familiar, and other hot headed impromptu eruptions in violence. On the European continent formal dueling continued and was a major part of military Culture in the French, German, and Russian Empires right up until WW1, when political destabilization broke the social cultures which produced duels in Germany and Russia, and the French finally losing all dueling culture after WW2. A few curiosity duels occurred into the 70s in France and south America… the participants themselves engaged as much in personal mythmaking and publicity as they were a truly honor based dispute demanding satisfaction.
But on the fringes and in the cracks of society you still see little echoes.
Much as Conservative political commentators are loath to ever speak of the matter… Justin Trudeau won his government in a boxing match. The 2012 stunt, put together by right wing Canadian-Jewish political personality Ezra Levant was supposed to be a fun humiliation of the rookie MP by conservative-Indigenous blackbelt senator Patrick Brazeau… However it turns out Karate and youth are not a replacement for actual bare minimum boxing training… so Trudeau wonthe match, and with it much of the publicity and mysterious aristocratic majesty that would quickly propel him to head the dying Liberal Party… and then to win his first majority.
And of course just a year before in 2011 Donald Trump had his Appearance at WWE’s Wrestlemania, appearing as the victorious face defeating eternal heel (and real life friend) Vince McMahon.
Of course any wealthy Rapper can tell you the unparalleled power of the perception of violence, the unquantifiable reputational super-power that is being known as an OG (Original Gangster) who “Keeps it Real” (as opposed to all the fake rappers who only pretend tought)… And of course, like the Russian Poet Alexander Pushkin before them, many have died trying to maintain that reputation.
Then there is the last place one can experience the old world of blood and sabre. Whilst the French have at last abandoned the duel, and Americans might still train for a quickdraw out of concern for drugged out psychotics… The Bloody world of German academic fencing still survives, though Fascists, communists, and Liberal-Democrats have all tried to kill it off. Where the Mensur is still fought, and like Bismark before them, young German lads might receive nasty dueling scars on their face as their instructors tell to smile widely so the scars opens and set properly.
Of course none die… but then most survived earlier duels.
But the mystique of violence and the strange binding power of the threat, it still survive in cute little cities, and mountain forests… in boxing clubs, shooting ranges, ghetto alleys, and presidential offices…
That, the gentlemanly aristocratic spirit of sword and shot might return, even as the bureaucrats fail and fall.
Wonderful piece of humor, if you get the joke you get it, but if you’re unfamiliar with the conventions: The seconds’ job is to load the pistols and oversee the duel in the interests of their respective duelists. A scandalous and insulting, but not unheard of, practice, was to NOT load balls in the pistols after the black powder if the seconds knew eachother, and felt the whole thing was hot-headed misguided matter. Both men would fire, both would be thought to be misses… and both would be encouraged to make ammends, and walk away with their honor intact, having proven their bravery and seriousness.
Again a scandalous farce if ever suspected.
The joke in this comic is the second’s went to this trouble and put their reputations on the line to protect their friends, only for one of their friends to suspect them, and so want his opponent dead he brought a back-up ball and covertly loaded it. Thus the invocation of the almighty for the miracle.
(Also note the pun on the French “Erreur” which unlike the english “error” has its first connotation as a mistake in perception, but is also simply the word for “Miss”, as opposed to “hit”… thus the pun that the shot was a miss, but also that the seconds’ estimation of their friend was somewhat amiss.
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TL;DR: Dueling was a thing in Pre- and Early-Modern European societies (i.e., before AD 1800) because there were tangible, concrete, financial incentives to protect one's reputation as a gentleman. Because those incentives no longer exist, dueling is unlikely to reemerge.
As romantic as the descriptions in this post are, they miss something quite significant, if somewhat less. . . idealistic. Pre- and early-modern European societies were divided into two classes: the gentry and the commons. These were set at birth, and though it was possible to move from one to the other, this was very difficult. One only became a member of the gentry by an act of ennobling, and being cast out of the gentry was a Very Big Deal.
Remember that line in the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal?" This is the social distinction they were targeting. In no small part due to the fact that, was far as the social distinctions in Britain were concerned, all Americans were commoners. Didn't matter how rich, influential, wise, competent, etc., an American was: he was, and always would be, a commoner, and thus permanently subordinate to his "betters".
This distinction had many real, practical, legal implications, but I want to focus on just one here. A gentleman's word was to be taken at face value. If his credibility, or "credit," was called into question, he had to demand satisfaction in the form of either an apology or a duel, or his reputation would be in tatters.
Why? Because the Jeffersonian ideal of all men being created equal has been so completely successful in the Anglosphere (especially outside Britain itself) that we've largely forgotten that no one believed this until, historically speaking, about half an hour ago. Before the Modern period, reputation had a far more tangible aspect than mere "quality." Gentlemen did not work for a living. They lived off their "income," which, for the vast majority of the gentry, consisted mostly of land rents. These rents could be derived from inherited lands or from appointment to official positions to which land rents were assigned (e.g., parish priests, judges, MPs, etc.).
The thing to understand about these land rents is that they were collected no more than annually. Less than that, if the gentlemen (and or his "man of business") faced difficulties in collecting rents (e.g., inconvenient wars) or were just lax and/or inefficient about doing so. But while the gentry may only have gotten "paid" annually, they had ongoing expenses. As anyone whose income is "spikey" can readily attest, this can easily lead to liquidity problems. The way the gentry maintained personal/household liquidity was to establish lines of credit, whether with financial institutions or directly with merchants.
There's that word again: "credit". Perhaps now you start to see the connection between a gentleman's word of honor and his material condition. There was no such thing as a "credit report" (there it is again!)," and the state of record keeping practices was such that gaining a clear and accurate accounting of any given gentleman's financial condition was difficult, if not impossible. Sometimes even for the gentleman in question! So the only thing that potential creditors had to go on was the gentleman's word of honor. His "credit". A gentleman pays his debts, because it's the right thing to do. That's it. Now, perhaps, one also begins to understand why Pre- and Early-Modern societies generally allowed imprisonment for debt. But I digress.
I think that any benefits dueling had for what you describe as "quality" were probably secondary effects. Call a gentleman's word of honor into question, and you call into question his "creditworthiness" in every sense of that word. And because the gentry depended on ready access to credit to stay liquid between their annual land rents, they were very, very concerned about protecting their reputations.
One wouldn't really expect one's reputation to be denigrated falsely all that often, so seeking redress for slander through violence has a certain arguable plausibility. But if one has genuinely earned a bad reputation, one should expect statements to that effect on the regular, far beyond one's ability to tamp them down no matter how vigorously one sends out challenges.
Further, one could only challenge social equals to a duel. A gentlemen could not ignore a challenge from another gentlemen, but was free to ignore challenges from commoners. Likewise, a gentleman did not need to challenge a commoner to a duel; one simply beat them with a stick. Literally. Conversely, a commoner who tried to do the same to a gentlemen was not likely to survive the experience.
There are all kinds of problems with this system, and there's a reason it went away. Honor societies have largely been replaced with Dignity societies, which are now being replaced with Victim societies. Etc. But it's important to understand the material considerations that made dueling a viable, and indeed arguably necessary, feature of pre- and early-modern European cultures. Such considerations gave concrete, tangible force to notions of "credit" and "quality" such that they could not be easily ignored. Unless similar considerations were to somehow emerge, I don't see any realistic path for (or, indeed, need for) dueling to reemerge as a common practice.
I wish the Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg fight would have happened. Elon challenging Mark to a fight over releasing a similar product rather than trying to look for a way to sue.