Tropes of literary war : Defamation/Duel

The defamation/duel figures must be read together, because they are both the product of the vicissitudes of freedom of expression in the 19th^century ; because they are complementary figures, one referring to verbal violence while the other refers to physical violence; because they are, finally, inverted figures, the development of one taking place at times when the other is weak. The entire political and literary history of the 19th^century can be read as that of this pairing of physical and verbal violence, of its inner balances, of the efforts made by the state - in a process that Norbert Elias would call civilization, the monopolization of violence - to control them. The^{nineteenth-century} adage, of uncertain origin, that "you can do anything with bayonets, except sit on them", sums up the difficulty of capturing public violence, and regulating duels, in regimes that were themselves born of violence, with no real legitimacy in the face of it. The end of the Ancien Régime, notably since the edicts of 1651 and 1679, had seen a drastic reduction in the number of duels, but they began to rise again with the Revolution. The Empire, with its authoritarian approach to freedom of expression, gave rise to neither defamation nor dueling; but under the Restoration, the number of duels rose again, partly under the pressure of a disaffected former military class (the demi-solde of the Grande Armée), but also thanks to a certain success of the military spirit in the mentalities of the time.

The word defamation dates from 1819. The very beginning of the Restoration instituted prior censorship for all publications, but the regime, in an effort to pacify its opposition and pacify public life, introduced three more liberal press laws in 1819, designed to reconcile freedom of expression with the protection of individuals. It was these laws which, along with the notion of defamation, introduced the notions of public or religious morality and decency that led to Baudelaire's conviction in 1857. Defamation judges and punishes the imputation of a fact prejudicial to a person's honor or reputation, as opposed toinsult, which is a direct characterization of the person, without reference to an action. Above all, it replaces the notion of calumny, instituted by the 1810 Penal Code, the application of which is problematic: calumny denotes the untruthful nature of the slanderer's remarks, and thus commits the trial to a verification of evidence which can never be entirely successful, and which inevitably ends up dragging the slanderers through the mud, whatever the reality of their actions. The notion of defamation, by freeing itself from the requirement to produce proof, protects individuals and reputations: regardless of the falsity or truth of the fact referred to, it is the act alone of imputation, the sole intention to harm that is judged. In 1872, Verlaine, anxious to put an end to the rumors surrounding his stay in London with Rimbaud, asked his friend Le Pelletier about the advisability of providing evidence in a possible libel suit: alas, neither the law in force in 1872, nor the forthcoming law of 1881, which still largely governs the press in 2017, provide any means of producing evidence.