Were any French Revolution figures involved in duels and what was the general attitude towards dueling by the revolutionaries? (I know plenty of French historical figures who participated in duels before and after the French Revolution but it seemed less popular during the republic?)
According to the article Duelling in eighteenth-century France: Archaeology, Rationale, Implications(1980) by George Armstrong Kelly, ”the great majority of ”patriots” abominated this feudal survival, but they found it less than simple to legislate manners.” On February 3 1791, the deputy Chevalier introduced a new law against duels, which carried, despite opposition from the right. One year later, September 17 1792, the Legisaltive Assembly did however pass an act of indulgence agaisnt all cases of duelling that had transpired since July 1789, giving as its reason that ”political and patriotic considerations might have legitimately provoked such combats.” But two years after that, July 17 1794, the National Convention, after determining that no existint legislation had dealt with duelling, instead decreed that a committee ”examine and propose means of preventing duels and the penalties to assign those guilty of duelling of provoking it.” According to Armstrong Kelly, under the ”Jacobin regime,” renewed attemps were also made to eradicate duelling in the armies.
When it comes to individual revolutionaries attitudes towards dueling, Armstrong Kelly notes two known duels between actual deputies of the National Assembly:
In the first case, it was Cazalès, the spokesman for the ultramonarchists, who delivered the injure to Barnave, then the spellbinding young speaker of the Left, having called him a "tramp" and a "brigand." The duel was fought, à l'anglaise, with pistols in the Bois de Boulogne on the morning of 11 August 1790. Despite the courteous disposition of the two men toward each other personally, they fought lethally. Eventually Barnave managed to wound Cazalès on the forehead. Surprisingly, the duel cemented a friendship across political barriers, and the two antagonists were mutually hailed with applause when they greeted each other next in the Assembly. Barnave's victory won him much popularity, especially in his native Grenoble. In the second case, the well-known friend of Barnave and future Feuillant Charles de Lameth, though avoiding the consequences of one injure by a young officer named Chauvigny de Plot, could not ignore the ensuing insults of a deputy of the Right, the due de Castries, son of the marshal. Their combat took place with swords on the Champ de Mars on the afternoon of 12 November 1790; Lameth was painfully wounded on the left hand. Though a literary descendant of the due describes the encounter as "a simple explanation between gentlemen,” more serious political implications were attached to the act, for Lameth, though a noble, was at the time a popular spokesman for the Left. Word was passed that Castries's sword had been poisoned, and on the following afternoon a large, angry mob sacked the Hôtel de Castries on the rue de Varenne. The following evening Castries left Paris for exile. Important political repercussions attended this episode, gravely damaging Mirabeau’s rapprochement with the Court.
He furthermore notes that both Brissot and Louis Sébastien Mercier wrote about duels in the 1780s, both celebrating the fact that the amount of the them had been waning during the reign of Louis XVI and contributing this to ”philosophy” or ”the spirit of the century.” Nicolas Guénot, future agent of the Committee of General Security, "was in and out of prison throughout his [military] service [1775-1783]; and in one of the brawls in which he was involved and in which sabres were drawn, he was severely wounded in the left arm, the use of which he never fully recovered." Finally, in July 1790, Barère inserted some remarks about dueling in the journal Le Moniteur, complaining that ”the egislators are witnessing how a feudal practice is surviving the destruction of feudalism,” and calling the duelist ”a wild animal who should be handed over to the discretion of the constituted authorities of protection” and ought to even be declared an outlaw. Armstrong Kelly uses Barère’s demand as ”unquestionable evidence” that during the revolution, ”the French were continuing to draw their swords against one another”
