read online

Contemporary French libel law explicitly proposes to adjudicate matters of “honour”. In so doing, it deploys terms and techniques crafted in the 19th century, at a time when law’s jurisdiction over matters of honour was strongly disputed by an alternative quasi-legal institution: the duelling code. This article returns to that historical moment from a legal materiality perspective to examine the ways in which duelling and libel law borrowed from each other’s materials in order to make honour matter. It argues that the history of libel law cannot be cast as a straightforward instance of the legal ‘formalisation’ of a mere social code, as traditional modernization narratives might lead us to expect. Rather, it shows the ways in which libel law came to be haunted by the material traces of duelling, and explains why honour remains, to this day, a recalcitrant matter for French law.

note: after publishing this article I became aware of a similar argument about the connection between duelling and libel law in France made by legal scholar James Q. Whitman in his 2000 article Enforcing Civility and Respect: Three Societies - albeit from a different theoretical perspective and to different argumentative effect. The fact that Whitman and I both draw on Robert Nye’s classic monograph Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in 19th Century France for our accounts of duelling, goes some way towards explaining the close parallels between our arguments on that topic. In retrospect, however, I wonder whether there is more than a historical coincidence here. As I write in the piece, the analogy between libel law and duelling was first suggested to me by the popular trope which I encountered amongst judges during my fieldwork in France in 2017-2019, according to which the Paris libel court was a modern duelling ground. In retrospect I wonder whether the currency of this trope in the small world of French libel lawyers and judges, might itself have been a distant echo of Whitman’s thesis (Whitman notes in his article that he presented a version of the paper in Paris). Who knows…?