Balloon Duels and Wax Bullets: The Strange Global History of Dueling

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1808, two men rose over Paris in hot air balloons and fired blunderbusses at each other's envelopes. A century later, at the 1908 London Olympics, competitors in heavy coats and metal helmets shot each other with wax bullets. This episode connects those scenes to a serious institution. Dueling began as medieval judicial combat, a trial in which God was expected to grant victory to the honest party and the loser was often executed as a perjurer. In 1215 the Fourth Council of the Lateran pushed back, objecting that it demanded a miracle on command.

The practice survived by changing its purpose. Renaissance courtesy books taught gentlemen to guard their reputations at any cost, and the duel became the price of membership in the elite. Kings outlawed it, yet an estimated 10,000 French nobles died in duels between 1580 and the 1620s. The episode explains the seconds who acted as diplomats, the dawn meetings in places with murky jurisdiction, the pistol formats that made the ritual deadlier, and the rougher forms it took in America, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines before ridicule and libel law finished it off.

• Swordsmen dueling at dawn carried lanterns as weapons, parrying with the metal frame or flashing the light into an opponent's eyes during a thrust.
• The Irish code of 1777 banned firing into the air as children's play, on the theory that honor could only be restored if the danger was real.
• In a barrier duel, a man who fired early and missed had to stand still while his opponent walked up to the line and took careful aim.
• The Sandbar Fight of 1827 ended peacefully for the two duelists, then turned into a brawl in which bystander James Bowie was shot, clubbed, and stabbed before killing an attacker with his knife.
• Challenged by Otto von Bismarck, scientist Rudolf Virchow reportedly chose two pork sausages as weapons, one infected with deadly roundworms. Bismarck declined.