When Dawn at Père-Lachaise Smelled of Gunpowder

Five o'clock in the morning, a spring day under the July Monarchy. Two men in frock coats climb over a boundary wall of Père-Lachaise, followed by four seconds and a doctor carrying his leather bag. The light is still grey. They make their way down among the graves, look for a clearing flat enough, pace out twenty-five steps. One draws an oblong case from a velvet sheath: a pair of flintlock horse pistols, smooth-bore, the powder measured to the grain. Duelling in the nineteenth century was not a piece of news — it was an institution. And Père-Lachaise, with its wooded hills, its forty-four hectares enclosed by walls and its silence before dawn, was one of the grounds Parisian duellists turned to when the Bois de Boulogne or the Bois de Vincennes seemed too exposed.

The ritual followed strict rules, codified in 1836 by the Comte de Chatauvillard in his Essai sur le duel, approved by the representatives of twelve great families of France and by the military elite. The seconds — two for each combatant — chose the place, the weapon and the conditions. The ground had to be isolated, away from police patrols, and the fight took place at dawn, for reasons as practical as symbolic: the low, slanting light blurred the outlines of the combatants, and the streets were empty. Paris offered several such “fields”: the Bois de Boulogne above all, the Bois de Vincennes, the Île de la Grande Jatte at Neuilly, the racecourses of Saint-Ouen or Levallois. Cemeteries, locked at night, ringed by high walls and planted with trees, offered a further advantage: discretion guaranteed by the stone itself. Père-Lachaise, standing outside Paris when it opened in 1804 and still bordered by open country under the Restoration, met every condition. Its hollows, laid out by the architect Brongniart to create a romantic landscape, offered natural, sheltered ledges hidden from view.

The code of honour called for an isolated spot, hidden from prying eyes and the police. Père-Lachaise, walled, planted with trees and deserted before opening, offered all of that — and witnesses could always claim they had come to pay their respects.

The Penal Code of 1810 made no mention of duelling — a silence that amounted to tolerance. The Cour de cassation ruled in December 1836, the same year the Chatauvillard code was published, that the act was punishable, but in practice the courts only intervened when the basic rules of combat had been broken. Duelling therefore flourished in a legal grey zone throughout the century. Aristocrats preferred the sword; journalists and politicians, the pistol. The technology was deliberately kept crude: old smooth-bore flintlock pistols, inaccurate by nature, kept the death toll down, while the revolver was banned. Georges Clemenceau, who fought twelve duels, was, in the words of Paul Déroulède, “three times formidable, with his sword, his pistol and his tongue.” The Dreyfus Affair brought the duelling fever to its height: some three hundred encounters pitted Dreyfusards against anti-Dreyfusards, often sparked by that morning's newspaper editorial. Édouard Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole, crossed swords with Arthur Meyer, editor of Le Gaulois, and ran him through the thigh — a bloodier outcome than most.

Père-Lachaise bears the best-known trace of this duelling culture: the grave of Victor Noir. On 10 January 1870, the young journalist, aged twenty-one, called on Prince Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte at Auteuil, sent as a second to settle the terms of a duel between the prince and Paschal Grousset, an editor at La Marseillaise. The meeting turned violent. The prince drew and shot Victor Noir through the chest. A hundred thousand people followed his funeral two days later, in a procession so hostile to Napoleon III that it nearly brought down the regime. The strikingly lifelike bronze recumbent effigy, the work of Jules Dalou, became one of the most visited monuments in the cemetery — and, in a twist the code of honour never anticipated, a symbol of fertility. Victor Noir never went to Père-Lachaise to fight. He rests there instead. The irony is that this journalist, who died carrying a challenge to a duel, has come to embody at Père-Lachaise not death but life.

The visitor who walks the paths of Père-Lachaise as the gates open in winter, when fog clings to the branches of the horse chestnuts, can still guess what the duellists came looking for: absolute silence, an enclosed ground, a landscape of hollows and clearings that cuts each plot off from the rest of the world. The practice of duelling died out after 1918 — the industrial slaughter of the trenches made settling a quarrel at twenty paces seem absurd. The last French political duel took place in 1967, between Gaston Defferre and René Ribière, with swords, in a private garden at Neuilly. Père-Lachaise, for its part, has kept its landscape intact: the same hills, the same century-old trees, the same corners where dawn light is slow to reach. The swords have been put away, but the setting is still there.