War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

We do not know whether the real d‘Artagnan fought as many duels as the fictional one, but he probably fought his share, because France of his time was at the crest of the wave of a dueling epidemic. Dueling had almost disappeared in France during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Under François I and Henri II, a handful of judicial duels took place with royal sanction. As the numbers of surplus elites increased, however, so did their propensity to resolve their quarrels by murdering each other. After 1560, dueling for personal honor and without royal sanction became so common that contemporary commentators believed more noblemen died from it than in combat. One estimate was that 7,000 to 8,000 were killed in the two decades after 1588. It was said that Henri IV granted more than 6,000 pardons for the killing of gentlemen in duels during the first 10 years of the seventeenth century. Dueling was effectively eliminated only during the reign of Louis XIV, at the very end of d’Artagnan’s life. (He was killed in battle in 1673.)