Civility and its Discontents, 1500-1650

The sixteenth century saw an intense effort to control social intercourse through civility. The origins of this transformation are commonly ascribed to the publication of two contrasting books: Castiglione's Courtier (1528) and Erasmus's De Civilitate (1530).

It is axiomatic to notions of the civilising process that the new civility tamed and controlled violence. But this is not what happened. There was a significant increase in violence from the mid sixteenth century. The reason was threefold. Firstly, the new model of gentlemanly conduct fostered an honour code that encouraged masculine aggression.

Whereas chivalry had emphasised the hierarchical relationship of service to God and to one's prince, the new cultural codes of Renaissance civility are indicative of the intense individual rivalry that was transforming the social elite. The most significant sign of this change was the invention of the duel. Duelling quickly developed its own rituals, with the employment of seconds whose quasi-juridical role ensured fair play, and the rules governing the challenge and the combat were largely codified in Italy by 1550. From there it spread first to France and then to England and the Holy Roman Empire by the end of the century. Spain, which had strict laws against duelling, and where honour remained closely tied to service to the monarchy, remained largely immune. Duels were fought over points of honour, which to our eyes are a trivial amalgam of slights, insights and petty transgressions, for which satisfaction was required. But honour is more than just a moral code. Like magic or Christianity, it is a world view: ‘Honour permeated every level of consciousness: how you thought about yourself and others, how you held your body, the expectations you could reasonably have and the demands you could make on others... It was your very being. For in an honour-based culture there is no self-respect independent of the respect of others'. Honour was thus public property and ‘the shortest route to honour was thus to take someone else's, and this meant that honourable people had to be ever­vigilant against affronts or challenges to their honour, because challenged they would be'.^[967]

The duel marked a break with medieval forms of dispute settlement, such as trial by combat.

Since duelling was officially condemned, supporters of the duel turned to the ancients for justification: the concept of satisfaction was derived from Roman law. Cicero's De officiis, a standard grammar school text, made opposition to tyranny the duty of every citizen. These ideas became perva­sive: ‘For righteous vengeance there's no punishment' says Corneille's Le Cid (1637). The cult of honour was sanctified by the quest for eternal recognition. A beautiful death conferred reputation; it was a terrestrial and worldly rather than a spiritual view of death, and the gentleman's insouciance towards death marked him out from the commoner.

Erasmus made clear the distinction between etiquette and civility: ‘be lenient towards the offenses of others. This is the chief virtue of civilitas’. But in practice, breaches of civility were taken as a sign of contempt. Insults by omission included the failure ‘to respect the rights of others, especially when the refusal is followed by an noticeable affectation; a vassal who passes in front of his lord without giving him an honest greeting; an individual who when meeting a magistrate effects an air of scorn... an inferior who lacks the same civility to he whom he owes subordination and respect'.^[970] Churches provide striking evidence of the consequence. In England, pew disputes led to parishioners ‘sticking pins into each other, disturbing the graves of dead neighbours and encouraging horses to defecate in the seats of opponents'.^{[971] [972]} Matters were worse in France in 1608, ‘where the principle cause which moves the French nobility to quarrels, disputes and division [is]... pre­eminence in churches and the honours in them... who will be the loftiest in life and death... who shall lead processions... and who shall have the blessed bread first'.

Violence, Civil Society and European Civilisation turning point in the 1550s and the ‘introduction of the duel into France during the reign of Henri II which made here such great progress in the last 120 years... it did as much wickedness as that most furious civil war'. In the seventeenth century the Dutch were famous for their intolerance of formal etiquette, but this did not make them violent. In fact, the Dutch Republic has good claim to be the most pacified state in early modern Europe.

Duelling did not supersede traditional forms of dispute. One of the reasons for the sixteenth-century explosion of violence was the manner in which the duelling frenzy exacerbated the traditional feud, which had always been tempered by the Christian obligation to make peace. The swashbuckling romanticised myth of the duel obscures the reality. Participants rarely used the word around 1600; they were more likely to talk about ‘encounters'. Unlike the outlawed duel, the encounter was fortuitous and therefore justifi­able. Encounters permitted the use of firearms and a larger number of participants, which made the employment of specialist muscle essential. In Italy and France faction and civil war turned feuding into a toxic social and political problem. The Italian Wars (1494-1559) were as much a civil war as a struggle for French or Spanish hegemony. Their legacy was a number of new regimes that came to power through violence and lacked legitimacy. It was for these reasons that vendetta peaked in the first half of the seventeenth century: ‘Today [1608] there are so many encounters, and all of them bloody, that it would be too tedious to recount them all' explained a diary in Modena.^[974] In Bologna the cycle of vendettas that claimed a hundred noble victims peaked in the 1650s and 1660s.

Shining brilliantly also meant blotting out, obscuring and jolting one's rivals. Castiglione's successors therefore commended discretion. But Guazzo's Civile conversatione (1574) was to be the last of the influential Italian conduct books. By the 1640s it was recognised that ‘France is the Centre of Politeness in every respect... there they are cultivated and improv'd every day'.^[976] The reason for this shift lies in the different responses to the upswing in violence. From the 1570s the Italians developed a science of honour, the Scienza Cavalleresca, which was an amalgam of Jesuit teaching on grace, the Roman law concept of satisfaction and Aristotelian ethics. Rituals of contrition could satisfy or compensate for any injury: ‘there is no offence, however great it may be, to which one cannot apply the antidote of... satisfaction'.^[977]

But the Protestant Reformers would have no truck with satisfaction. The Augustinian theology of grace on which Protestantism was based taught that true peace was to be found in God. In Catholic France, too, this tradition came to dominate and the Jesuits were lampooned for excusing duelling in Pascal's Provincial Letters (1653). In northern Europe, sectarianism and civil war shook the Humanists' faith in man's capacity for cultivating virtue as the foundation of a peaceful society. Violence and division stimulated the fashion for stoicism with its emphasis on the inner search for peace. In the Dutch Republic this was associated with Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who rebutted the idea that vengeance could ever be reasonable. In England, France and Germany, their ideas were immediately seized upon as a balm for religious division and civil war. Montaigne (1533-92) in his Essais directly challenged received opinion about the honour code and the cult of the hero. Montaigne had little time for the outward trappings of etiquette - ‘philosophers shit and so do kings'. He called instead for a reformation of the self and his new man, or honnete homme, was behoved to be disinterested, circumspect, civil and agreeable. Montaigne appealed to snobbery: the honnete homme distinguishes himself from the hoi-polloi by his self-control and decency. His thinking had its most immediate effect in England. Montaigne's imitator, Francis Bacon (attorney general from 1613 and lord chancellor from 1618) wrote one of the clearest attacks on ‘the false and erroneous imagination of honour' and contributed to the successful 1613 act which criminalised insults provocative to a duel. Ben Jonson, once an accomplished duellist, renounced his past and in later plays like the The New Inn (1629) gave the honnete homme an English countenance.

It would take decades before these ideas formed the core of a new aristo­cratic habitus. The first significant conduct book of the new French civility, Faret's Honnete homme ou I'Art de plaire d la cour, did not appear until 1630 and the genre as a whole did not really take off until after 1660. The reasons for this are clear: it was the experience of civil war in both France and England that would stimulate the search for solutions. Meanwhile, the Italians remained cocooned from these developments: Montaigne's Essais were placed on the Papal Index of prohibited books. It was only during the Enlightenment that Italian thinkers began to ask why they were subject to much higher levels of violence than elsewhere. They attacked the Scienza Cavalleresca as sophistry, which deployed the ‘specious mask of peace' as a cover for propagating the cult of honour and surreptitiously promoting the duel. By the eighteenth century vengeance had become a stereotypically Italian trait.