On January 29, 1834, Armand Carrel was involved in a duel between MP François-Charles Dulong and General Bugeaud. Dulong had offended Bugeaud during a debate on military authority. The two men clashed and Dulong died. Bugeaud accused Carrel, a friend of Dulong, of having caused his death by dissuading him from publishing his apology. Carrel, for his part, was convinced that Louis-Philippe had ordered a political murder. Bugeaud's witness was none other than General de Rumigny, Louis-Philippe's aide-de-camp, whom Carrel accused of preventing the reconciliation. Rumigny was in charge of the Cabinet Noir, Louis-Philippe's parallel police force, and it was he who recruited the rioters at Republican demonstrations, in order to justify a tougher crushing of dissent.
After this story, Dupin aîné tried for the first time to ban dueling; Carrel was against him as an apologist. He wanted to maintain dueling as the only protection against slander, because it guaranteed freedom of expression. In 1837, just after Carrel's death by duel, Dupin aîné obtained a ruling from the Cour de cassation (French Supreme Court) to the effect that this practice, if not outlawed, should be restored to common law, as duelists could be prosecuted for homicide.
Was it the military habit, which Carrel retained in his work as a journalist, that condemned him to take up the sword so often? He fought three duels as editor of Le National: the first, at the very beginning of the paper's existence, against the editor of Le Drapeau blanc, and the second on February 2, 1833. Rumors of the Duchess de Berry's pregnancy had just reached Paris, sparking an epidemic of duels between Republicans and Carlists. Many republican newspapers were taken to task by the Carlist camp: Carrel saw this as an attempt at censorship, and responded by proposing a duel. But Prefect Gisquet undertook to arrest all potential troublemakers: Carrel saw here again, and above all, a risk of censorship of the press, over and above differences of opinion.
Carrel seemed ready to make amends and leave the gun for the pen. However, on July 22, 1836, he faced Émile de Girardin in the duel that condemned him. This was the conflict between the old political press and the new press, just after the laws of September 1835 re-established high bonding and prior censorship for caricatures. Girardin, just after launching his newspaper, published an article hostile to the political press; the latter responded with an article in Le Bon Sens, which Girardin in turn decided to sue for libel before the criminal court. Carrel was irritated by the procedure: Girardin had appealed to the corrupt justice system, incompetent according to Carrel, rather than choose the path of honor. Girardin retaliates one last time, threatening to reveal in his columns the intimate life of the director of Le National, who lives with the wife of his former captain.
Carrel died of a pistol shot on the morning of July 24. Chateaubriand paid him a moving tribute in his Mémoires, referring to him as "the shadow of the grandson of the great Condé". In a similar vein, Chateaubriand compared Courier's death to that of Rancé. Finally, we find Carrel in the Congrès de Vérone, in 1838, where Chateaubriand gave the first draft of what was to become the famous appeal to the dead in Mémoires d'outre-tombe.
