FILM: The Duellists, Revisited

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Sleepwalking over the Grave of Joseph Conrad

by Joseph P. Timperio

The Duellists (1977), Directed by Ridley Scott, U.K.
With Harvey Keitel, as Feraud; Keith Carradine, as D’Hubert; Albert Finney, as Fouché; Tom Conti, as Dr. Jacquin; Cristina Raines, as Adele; Edward Fox, as The Colonel (Napoleonic supporter); Diana Quick, as Laura; Alan Webb, as the Chevalier

Cinema, when done seriously, can certainly produce enduring works of art, and such artifacts merit the same kind of attention as other accomplishments in the more classical fields.

THE HISTORICAL BASIS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duellists)

This Conrad short story evidently has its genesis in the real duels that two French Hussar officers fought in the Napoleonic era. Their names were Dupont and Fournier, whom Conrad disguised slightly, changing Dupont into D’Hubert and Fournier into Féraud.
In The Encyclopedia of the Sword, Nick Evangelista wrote:
     As a young officer in Napoleon’s Army, Dupont was ordered to deliver a disagreeable message to a fellow officer, Fournier, a rabid duellist. Fournier, taking out his subsequent rage on the messenger, challenged Dupont to a duel. This sparked a succession of encounters, waged with sword and pistol, that spanned decades. The contest was eventually resolved when Dupont was able to overcome Fournier in a pistol duel, forcing him to promise never to bother him again.[2]
     They fought their first duel in 1794 from which Fournier demanded a rematch. This rematch resulted in at least another 30 duels over the next 19 years in which the two officers fought mounted, on foot, with swords, rapiers and sabres.

“No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It hurries us into situations from which we must come out damaged. Whereas pride is our safeguard; by the reserve it imposes on the choice of our endeavor as much as by the virtue of its sustaining power.”-Joseph Conrad, The Duel

 

THUS IS THE SEMINAL QUOTE in Joseph Conrad’s third-person omniscient novella, from which Ridley Scott’s lush, dramatic period film, The Duellists, is derived; it is the only instance in the story, taken from actual persons in the history of the Napoleonic age, in which Conrad makes a clear, statement of opinion, and, upon reading it, I have taken this quote to heart. Indeed, it has carried me through instances of personal conflict and comforted me in times of seemingly endless setbacks.

In the film, Scott offers no such omniscience, and relegates the narrator of the story (placed in the eloquent hands of the redoubtable Stacy Keach) to merely dressing the scene, filling the temporal void in the passage of time during the decade and a half over which this series of duels are fought between two cavalry officers in Napoleon’s Army.

In this, the film’s director has carved the story down to a palatable, chronologically accessible action film; and much to Scott’s credit, he has also kept strict attention to the style, mode, and cinematographic template of the age, an achievement only surpassed, in my opinion, by Inagake, or Kurosawa, masters of the visual and fidelity to the mise en scene. The visual aspect of the film is nothing short of stunning; Scott creates moving portraits, the landscapes and costumes framing the plot and its subjects in organic colors, graphic displays of violence in the guise of seemingly altruistic honor. The effect is so Many scenes look like paintings.
I came to Conrad’s story from watching the film; and I must confess: it was not from some lust to pursue the historical importance of the subject, as interesting as it is to me now. At the time I was a student at the Ohio University School of Theater’s Professional Actor’s Training Program, a period when ”liberal arts” still meant something in today’s universities, today consumed with “vocationalism” of the crassest sort.

Among the acting, directing, and playwriting studies that filled my days, (as well as psychology and philosophy) I latched onto the idea of fight choreography, and stage combat; so I came to the film for the swordfighting, it’s that simple. I was not disappointed. In this film, the Fight Director, William Hobbs, has done for swordfights what Scorcese has done for the modern film noir and the gansgster genre, Italian style; indeed Hobbs brought the grim reality of the duel to the screen in all the ”splendor” Paramount had to offer at the time, elevating the past performances of swashbucklers (a derogatory term originally used to disparage ”ignorants” in the use of edged or pointed weapons), such as Errol Flynn, or Tyrone Power, or even Sir Laurence Olivier, from the ”bish-bosh-bish” film swordplay, to the art and science of fencing and edged-weapon combat scenarios it has been since Ridolfo Cappo Ferro laid his treatise to print in 1606.

The storyline is deceivingly simple. The film’s (and novella’s) main characters, D’Hubert and Feraud, played by Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel respectively, start as lieutenants in Napoleon’s Cavalry; D’Hubert, we learn, is a staff officer attached to the commanding general as officier d’ordinance, and sent to confine Feraud, a regimental officer, to his quarters for impaling a relative of the Mayor of Strasbourg in a duel that morning, a rather impolitic act considering the French army is garrisoned in that city.
He finds him in the upscale salon of a Strasbourg socialite. The film clearly identifies D’Hubert in this instance as the protagonist, an unwitting (though intelligent) everyman, and Feraud, in his fiery impetuousness as a duelist, as the antagonist.

Characteristically, Feraud takes offense at D’Hubert’s calm insistence on carrying out a simple order, an insistence that seems to embarrass the gauche Feraud as it must be issued in the salon of a woman whose approval Feraud is clearly seeking. This otherwise mundane, forgettable incident leads, as a result of Feraud’s combustible temperament, to the first of their armed encounters, and indeed, in defiance of conventional forms of Affairs of Honor, gives us ample basis for sympathy for D’Hubert, who, though a staff officer, is no stranger to the sword. In the ensuing duel, D’Hubert manages to wound Feraud in the forearm.
In these first few scenes Scott deftly sketches out the implications from the class difference separating the main characters. For D’Hubert, a military career is the means to an end, a way of furthering his already elevated social station, and eventual status as person of rank and privilege.
For Feraud, a ”lunch-box” soldier, a blue-collar volunteer in the Army of the Revolution, war, and the military, is a means to its own end, and much like their master, Napoleon, he rises in rank from obscurity into the privileged inner folds of privilege of the imperial age.

I SPEAK OF CRAFT because that kind of talent assures us that even at his lowest point an artist like Scott will still have enough cinematic tricks in his quiver to move the plot forward in elegant ways, and so he does in Duellists. One of the more successful devices used in this film is the surgeon that tends to both Feraud and D’Hubert, a whimsical, sardonic type admirably fleshed out by Tom Conti. It is he who gives D’Hubert his logical (and obvious) course of action, if he’s to avoid risking being skewered by Feraud. Speaking as a friend and a voice of the Enlightenment, he recommends that poor D’Hubert, ”stay away from him (Feraud), stay ahead of him (officers of different rank cannot duel)…and put your trust in Bonaparte.” (Officers cannot engage in personal quarrels while under articles of war.) In this flourish the movie also takes a gratuitous swipe at Bonaparte and what he represented in that age, the hated carrier of the revolutionary plague, since Napoleon’s armies on balance imposed progress on the conquered nations (he liberated the Jews, for example, from existing prejudicial laws). In so doing, Scott falls unwittingly (?) for the favored slanderous Anglo-American narrative about Napoleon.

In such manner, the whims of history give the film the roadmap for the cat-and mouse chase of rank and geography that develops; in the intervals of the advancement in rank, and the separation of deployment of the different regiments to which they are attached, we see not only the four successive duels the film portrays, but the ever-increasing distance in class consciousness. Feraud, in an excuse for the blind aggression which permeates his very existence, fuels his drive to confront D’Hubert by his vision of him as little more than a ”pomaded staff lackey,” or ”proper general’s poodle,” who will use any opportunity or artifice to forward his career. (Brutish as that view may be, it is not entirely devoid of substance.) D’Hubert, the more cerebral, reflective character Scott gives us, offers existential commentary on the nature of the position he is placed in. ”I am not fanatical enough to persevere in this absurdity”, he proclaims at one point, and we’re inclined to agree. To D’Hubert, Feraud’s obsession is a diabolical nuisance, a complication that although unavoidable, is hardly in keeping with his station—or desire to live in peace.

The second duel we see, a proper affair with civilian dueling swords, places the fencing theory in the picture of Domenico Angelo, and Danet. In this duel D’Hubert is bested with a thrust to the upper chest, and although willing to let the matter end there Feraud will not be assuaged. We understand that, crazy as it may seem to D’Hubert, Feraud, in command of the duel as the alleged ”injured party,” will not relent, so the conflict continues.
At this juncture, we are introduced to a character not in Conrad’s book, Laura, the ”woman of the garrison,” a former acquaintance of D’Hubert’s, who finds him, before this duel, and later nurses him back to health. Played by Diana Quick with remarkable ingenuity, Laura only loses him again when he must plan for his next encounter. The introduction of this player is not gratuitous: She serves as a vehicle for the fleshing-out of Feraud’s character, as she attempts to expose the nature of the affair now marred by the fog of years and innuendo. To her own surprise, as well as ours, she finds the character of both men deformed by the imperatives of the prevailing military etiquette, the cultural rules dictating the rules of honor of the age. Confronted with these immutables, and in part reflecting the painful limits of her own social position, she abandons D’Hubert in dispair.

The third duel, fought on foot, in a stable, and with heavy cavalry sabres, is the most graphic and savage of the duels in the film; the contrast in setting, and wild implacability that the combatants display, solidifies the nature of the affair as an engagement of pride in regimental honor, and both Feraud, and D’Hubert, now captains, lose the personal control the duel previouly held for them.
D’Hubert, contemplating his life apart from the exigencies of war, writes his sister, a royalist now married in Southern France, of his wish to find a wife; Feraud, with no family, and no life other than that of a warrior, pursues each advancement in rank only as markers in a personal conflict that is now all-consuming.

Their next encounter is fought on horseback, in full dress uniform, witnessed by an audience of peers, as a ”compliment to the cavalry.” Feraud is wounded by a cut across the forehead. Both Conrad, and Hobbs, from different perspectives, understand the nature of this wound; the veins in the forehead hold a copious amount of blood. Vincent Saviolo, some eighty years before, recommended this tactic for disabling an adversary; the blood cascades down into the eyes, and the duel must be terminated, if not concluded.
As previously stated, these two adversaries are constrained in their affair by the duels of nations, which take absolute precedence over the affairs of men. This part of the narrative is particularly rich in visuals. Thus we are transported to the horrible retreat from the Russian Campaign, with the visceral nature of the Russian scenes palpable in every frame; you can almost hear the soldiers of the ”Sacred Battalion” freeze to death as they fall prey one by one to the ferocity of the Russian winter.

The desperate situation would appear to offer the contending officers an honorable way out of their predicament. As it is, in short notice, D’Hubert and Feraud find themselves fighting Cossack marauders, detached to harass the French army every inch of the way on its painful march back to gentler latitudes. In a gesture of comradeship, D’Hubert offers Feraud a drink of schnapps, which Feraud, of course refuses. Later, in accompanying Feraud as a volunteer and brother officer to fight off Kossack irregulars, we wonder: Is D’Hubert once again trying to conciliate Feraud? Perhaps he regards the chance of being killed by the implacable Feraud a much more ominous probability than being felled by a Russian barbarian.

The beginning of the campaign of France finds Feraud a step below D’Hubert; D’Hubert has been made a General; their affair, now famous and infamous, has been fueled by the boasts and slanders of Feraud, who now asserts its inception resulted from D’Hubert’s ambition, and lack of fealty to the Emperor (“He never loved the Emperor!”). His obsessions now take on the semblance of reality.
Events accelerate. At Waterloo D’Hubert is injured in a leg by a Prussian shell; he convalesces through the destruction and defeat of the Empire, marries, and is still convalescing at Napoleon’s return from Elba. D’Hubert is offered the command of a brigade, which he refuses. Feraud, now too a general, survives the Hundred Days of the second reign, only to be put on the ”Butcher’s Block;” a death sentence to assuage the returning royalists and the Allied Sovereigns.

In a gesture of camaraderie so typical of the era, D’Hubert, entreats Fouché, Minister of Police, to remove Feraud from the list of the walking dead. In a memorable five-minute cameo performance, Albert Finney, brilliantly incarnating Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s Minister of Police, the master opportunist intriguer and improbable “survivor” of French politics, turns Carradine into a piece of scenery.
The novella and film now approach their denouement. Feraud is relegated to a provincial town, under the supervision of the police, and there he remains, disconsolate and isolated without employment, lacking any vision of the future, until he reads in a paper the royal appointment of General D’Hubert to the command of the 5th Cavalry brigade (Reims); this breathes new life into Feraud, who with the help of fellow ”anciens militaires,” maneuvers to secure the final duel to complete his lifelong self-assigned mission.

Fought with pistols, among the stunning ruins of an ancient castle, it is the surprise outcome of the film, in which D’Hubert, after fifteen years of being at Feraud’s disposal for this affair of hatred, finally gains the upper hand. With Feraud at last at his mercy, and despite remonstrations from Feraud to be killed, in an action of supreme possession of his faculties, D’Hubert simply rules Feraud out of his life, literally, declaring him dead, and ordering him to behave accordingly. The dueling code forces Feraud to obey this last command. D’Hubert is thus finally liberated from the fetters of perverted honor.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

The features already described make this film a masterpiece of the genre of period filmmaking, comparable to Barry Lyndon (and with a puny budget of $900,000, something of a miracle); but it is William Hobbs’ fight choreography that lifts The Duellists to a class of its own. It’s no accident that the film won ”Best Debut Film” at Cannes 34 years ago, a very auspicious beginning indeed. Too bad that at the peak of his fame, Scott never managed to make another film worthy of equal mention.

Unintended lessons? 

The Duellists packs something of a warning to would-be revolutionists in our time, and one of the reasons we revisit this film after almost four decades of relative obscurity. The performances are uniformly memorable, and, as previously stated, the choreography of the duels is superior to just about anything seen in other period pieces, a banquet for those who prize the art of fencing and swordmanship (not the same thing, as you can fence with anything, including chairs or plain sticks.)
But it is the class conflict woven into the story and its implications that deserve examination by those seriously interested in social change.

At its most basic, the story of Feraud and D’Hubert can also be read (perhaps in a way that neither Conrad nor Scott intended) as the failure of the French Revolution —one of the greatest revolutions in history—and the stubbornness of the status quo.

The ups and downs of the protagonists during the Napoleonic period underscore the fact that the overthrow of the old ruling class is just the first stage of a revolution. The consolidation process is probably just as difficult if not more so, for it is in this stage that the enemies of real change, those deposed from their towers of privilege and their retainers, seek revenge and restoration. With enemies within and without, revolutionaries need to make hard choices. This is when errors and deformations set in, later reinforced by the rising paranoia of the people in power, only to haunt the revolutionary cause and create further enemies as the process heats up.

The meticulous reconstruction of the period allows a good window into the historical and social context of the story, and it is perhaps as an unwitting reflection of both Conrad and Scott’s class bias, that, as the film progresses, we are led toward a definite sympathy for the character of D’Hubert.

This seems consistent with the director’s intentions; for the distraction of the personal conflict masks the failure of the revolution, and a subsequent endorsement of institutionalized privilege. Thus the trajectory of D’Hubert/Feraud’s fortunes serves as a mirror for the trajectory of the revolution itself…what started so promising as a political upheaval against the institutions of aristocracy, and was fueled by insistence on the individual liberty and dignity of the propertyless citizen, is eventually thwarted by those same strata that, after each great social convulsion, turn the revolution into a game of gradual betrayals.

Lessons for Americans

The American revolution left the bourgeoisie (in those days, as in England, called “the Middle Class”, chiefly comprised of merchants and enterprising landowners) intact and fortified it. And soon enough, in France as well as in America, the bureaucrats and politicians became the willing and obliging instruments and shills of the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie.

This arrangement has not changed in substance much in either country for over 200 years, although the ebb and flow of popular power and consciousness has at certain junctures forced the political managers to make concessions to the masses (i.e., FDR’s response to the Depression, the postwar boom, an era of capitalist exceptionalism, etc.), a fact later reflected in the creation of a new type of middle class in America, and its equivalent in France, albeit one eventually more fortified in the latter with democratic gains, such as a real effective universal healthcare system and a far more democratic workplace.

Thus, what we commonly call “the government”—at least in a class-divided society— is not the dominant class but mere privileged servants in the house of the overlords. Pelosi, Boehner, the Clintons, and certainly Obama, all fall into this sordid category which, to be precise, really spans the entire contemporary American political, media and executive strata. Of special danger for the ordinary American, the same servile corporate values have penetrated deeply into the American military, currently riddled with careerism.

At this point a clarification is in order. Contrary to much propaganda, in Soviet Russia the revolution followed a different course. The Soviet bureaucrats and party oligarchs— whatever their real or imputed abuses—never constituted a real class, but a tier, a stratum, of momentarily privileged citizens with no rights of private ownership to the property of the state, which they enjoyed in modest fashion by comparison to the American billionaires, their dynasties and their political satraps.

The grotesque inequality we observe today in America is therefore not a drastic deviation from a democratic egalitarian past (that exists only in myth) but the natural product of an arrangement issuing directly from the indifference (and fear) felt by the 18th century American political elite toward the fate and potential of the common man. After all, most of the “Founding Fathers” were big landowners, early capitalists, lawyers, prosperous merchants, and other privileged tiers, deeply conscious of the menace represented to their advantages by an authentic democracy based on universal suffrage.

In that sense, at its very inception, the framers of the revolt against the distant king schemed to block the path of common citizens toward a radically more egalitarian system. Only the enormous riches and vastness of the American continent eventually (and only partially) nullified this trap, allowing enough Americans to become self-made millionaires and even tycoons in their own right, but all the while playing the game with the perspective and values of the privileged circles.

If the democratic project was sabotaged from the start in America, the Napoleonic Age, which, in its time was seen by the ancient monarchies as something akin to Bolshevism, offers some rough parallels and almost identical lessons. In his ascendancy Napoleon was a child of the French revolution, sworn to defend its ideals of equality, fraternity, and liberty. Most Napoleonic biographers (especially French), and historians, concur that Napoleon was in its early phase a de facto promoter of revolution and republicanism, and a true believer in the promise of the latter. Later, as a result of enormous resistance and hostility by the surrounding powers, France was compelled to become a militarized state (still nowhere near what some Anglo-Saxon historians, including critics like Burke, would claim invidiously, as Prussia was already far more of an autocratic-military regime), wage continual, mostly defensive war for almost two decades, and open the door to the eventual corruption of Napoleon’s rule, notably nepotism, later concretized in Napoleon’s crowning as France’s First Emperor.

In such fashion, it’s possible to state that while the democratic project was spoiled in America at inception by the very Founding Fathers, in the case of France (and later Russia) it was suffocated by the forces of reaction at home and abroad and, of course, human fallibility. It’s also useful to recall again that both revolutions were for the most part bourgeois revolutions, as the petit bourgeois occupied most of the leadership roles, and that, inevitably, their chief beneficiaries were indeed the budding mercantile classes.

Against this backdrop, the The Duellists emerges as an unwitting reflection on the fragility of revolutions against privilege, and the difficulty of building real democracy when the masses remain unorganized and marginalized from the organic processes, and at the mercy of the traditional vices of humanity: opportunism, selfishness, generalized ignorance, cowardice, and obscurantism.

It also tells us a great deal about the counter-revolutionary leanings of the artists who conceived it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Joseph Timperio identified with the performing arts at an early age, coupled with an instense dislike for authority; this led him to Ohio University, where he studied acting, directing, playwriting, as well as philosophy and psychology. Theatre led to fencing, which, he admits, will do, in one form or another, for the rest of his life. A born iconoclast, Timperio enjoys debate and discussion, and he’s constantly fascinated by human diversity, and culture. Timperio serves as a contributing editor with The Greanville Post, and blogs frequently at Roundtree7.
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Further reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duellists

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