The challenge is, with a POD anywhere after 1600, sustain dueling as a way to settle problems to the modern day. Make it socially acceptable to kill someone, so long as it's done for an acceptable reason, under a dueling code, on a field of honor, etc., if they offend you. Make it so that politicians settle their problems outside as often as they do in debates.
AHC: Dueling continues to this day
- Thread starter Polish Eagle
- Start date
Preventing the rise of the middle class, or create their co-option into the system of honor present among the nobility?
According to Tridentine Catholic penitential manuals, any man who participates in a duel, even to a draw, is excommunicated latae sententiae (automatically). A simple priest could lift the excommunication. Still, Catholicism did not at all approve of dueling.
Perhaps a more expansive definition of self-defense, so that loss of reputation/"face" can be considered an act of aggression?
Squaring this with democratic ideals like freedom of speech could be tricky--perhaps dueling is legal in response to libel/slander but not political disagreement.
Also, since one doesn't have to accept a challenge to a duel, any injuries or deaths resulting from a duel can be considered by mutual consent.
Also, in the U.S. the major decline in dueling came with the Civil War--it was the South where it was the most popular and with the South devastated, nobody wanted to fight each other anymore.
No Civil War and dueling might go on for awhile.
Squaring this with democratic ideals like freedom of speech could be tricky--perhaps dueling is legal in response to libel/slander but not political disagreement.
Also, since one doesn't have to accept a challenge to a duel, any injuries or deaths resulting from a duel can be considered by mutual consent.
Also, in the U.S. the major decline in dueling came with the Civil War--it was the South where it was the most popular and with the South devastated, nobody wanted to fight each other anymore.
No Civil War and dueling might go on for awhile.
Hilariously, Musolini managed to fight someone in a sword duel in the early 20s, says wikipedia (see here): http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...AAAAIBAJ&pg=3684,1474948&dq=duel+swords&hl=en
And there was one in Chilie in the 50s also.
And there was one in Chilie in the 50s also.
The rise of the middle class in the 19th century did not end the practice of duels. In the victorian period, the middle class mimicked the aristocracy (building lavish urban mansions, having servants, sending their sons to public schools) and thus they would also challenge each other whenever honour was fealt at stake. In previous eras only nobles were considered capable of giving satisfaction, but this was extended to the bourgeoisie when said middle class grew wealthy and politically influential in the course of the industrial revolution. By the second half of the 19th century even Labour MPs or progressive artists did participate in duels. It was a time, when Gentlemen would resolve differences during a meeting at dawn with seconds and a pair of dueling pistols in misty Hyde or Regents Park. It was this rise in dueling and the shift from (aristocratic) fencing to shooting and the subsequent rise in the death toll that led - next to the rise of the working classes, where formal duelling had no tradition and disputes were rather resolved by a spontaneous fist-fight or snickersnee than a formalized duell with seconds - to the demise of duells at the turn of the century. The final mortal blow was the Great War and the lost generation it brought forth, for which honour was but a sham after the mass killings in Flanders Fields.
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Absent a specific law it strikes me that a duelist is likely not to commit a crime, they would always have a self defence defence to a charge of murder, assault or whatever