Defamation and duel are figures that run through the 19thcentury and deserve to be studied in greater depth in their relationship with literary events. Jules Janin is a leading exponent of libel suits: he sued Félix Pyat for his Chiffonnier de Paris and had him put in prison; he sued Le Corsaire-Satan and had him killed; he sued Banville and fined him. On the dueling side, the pistol duel between Armand Carrel, director of Le National, and Émile de Girardin, director of La Presse, in 1836, symbolically marks the struggle of two generations of the press. Carrel died at the age of 35. The famous duel between Alexandre-Honoré Dujarrier, manager of Girardin's La Presse and lover of Lola Montès, and Jean-Baptiste Rosemond de Beauvallon, editor of Le Globe, in which Dujarrier was killed, is another example of two opposing conceptions of the press: one industrial, the other independent.
The duel between Dujarrier and Rosemond de Beauvallon is an opportunity to give female counterparts to the various male figures encountered throughout the lecture. Who are these female warriors, answerers or companions of the literary spadassins? First and foremost, there are the actresses, led by Lola Montès, whose collusion with journalists was often noted, sometimes decried as a form of abuse of journalists' dominant position over actresses whose reputation they could make or break. Coralie and Florine around Lucien, in Illusions perdues, the Fanfarlo alongside Samuel Cramer in Baudelaire, Mademoiselle Mariette alongside Gérard in Champfleury: they are an important figure in novelistic fiction. The trial of Rosamond de Beauvallon, Dujarrier's murderer, revealed the sociological link between actresses and journalists: many of them appeared at the Rouen courthouse to give an account of the fatal evening that led to the duel. The surviving duellist was eventually acquitted, his lawyer having argued that there was no sufficiently explicit legislation on the dueling chapter to convict him.
