Politics And The Technology Of Honor: Dueling In Turn-Of-The-Century Mexico

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Pablo Piccato

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, dueling acquired new meanings for Mexican elites. Military men, politicians and journalists fought and died in duels. The code of honor became a guide for the behavior and speech of public men during a key period in the construction of a modern political legitimacy. A national ruling elite was trying to establish its primacy after conflicts--such as the Reforma war (1857-1860), the French intervention and Second Empire (1861-1867)--which generated deep and often bloody political cleavages. In this context of recent factional strife, the practice of dueling coexisted with other elements of the Mexican state's and upper classes' embrace of European progress. As was the case in France and Germany of the time, a renewed interest in dueling in Mexico coincided with greater concern about personal reputation in public settings.

Dueling reveals, perhaps better than any other cultural product, the contradictions of Mexican ruling elites' embrace of modem politics. They construed the duel as a prestigious gesture of modernization, because it echoed the uses of other political elites in contemporary Europe. But dueling also exhibited their concern about status. Dueling expressed urban elite's claims to respectability in a context in which the markings of social hierarchy were becoming less obvious and ignored by the liberal 1857 Constitution. Dueling, in sum, was particularly useful in the process of consolidating a unified political elite because it articulated the equality of its members: educated, brave men, regardless of their profession or partisan persuasion. The decline of dueling coincided with the introduction of new political uses of violence by the 1910-1917 Revolution, but not with a decreased concern about politicians' honor.

The writers and journalists who explained to Mexican readers the benefits of dueling stressed the role of public opinion in sanctioning honor. This was the same public opinion that these educated men thought would eventually guarantee the political stability of the country despite a past of civil wars, a political system centered on an aging dictator (Porfirio Diaz's regime, or porfiriato, 1876--1911), or a massive popular mobilization after 1911. Public opinion, it was thought, could prevent unrest by making Congress and the press an effective representation of popular sovereignty. By establishing the honor of congressmen, dueling was a central piece of that process, which required the continuity, in a new form, of the social restrictions to political participation abolished by the liberal 1857 Constitution. [1] Therefore, and despite the provisions of the penal code, duelists were only lightly punished. The modern faith in dueling and honor was based on the implicit acceptance of a traditional feature of t he Mexican polity: a judicial and police system that protected upper-class suspects and turned all lower-class men into suspects, and a political system that excluded women and the poor. As a result, duels are conspicuously absent from the judicial archives in Mexico City. The following pages are an account of public men's belief in their own honor and equality, a paradoxical belief that was supported by their exclusion of others from the public sphere--at the same time as they proclaimed the importance of public opinion.

This article seeks to explore new paths for a cultural history of Mexican political elites. Mexico's political history is still the most interesting sub-genre for Mexican readers of history. Yet, many unchallenged assumptions and omissions plague the literature. Too often, political history becomes history of "great men." [2] Traditional narratives leave many unanswered questions: Why and how were women excluded from politics? How did elite groups claim the legitimate representation of popular interests after the massive mobilization of the Revolution? Dueling and honor are relevant topics because they embody the gender and class exclusions that constituted basic ingredients of Mexican politics.

Dueling and Modernity

Duels in Mexico, seldom employed in past centuries, became frequent after 1880, despite the penalties against duelists established in the 1871 Federal District's penal code. Official statistics of criminality count 32 convictions for dueling between 1871 and 1885 in the Federal District--19 of them between 1880 and 1885. [3] After the last year, published statistics do not list a single case-- probably due to the lack of prosecution against duelists (discussed below) and to the sketchy nature of Mexican quantification of crime. Other attempts to count duels, however, support the impression of an increasing frequency in the last decades of the nineteenth century and only a gradual decline after 1910. In 1894, for example, lawyer Manuel Lombardo cited newspaper reports of 43 duels resulting in wounds or deaths since 1871. [4] That same year, congressman and political writer Francisco Bulnes claimed that dueling was a recent fad, without strong roots in Mexico. [5] Angel Escudero's El duelo en Mexico, published in 1936, reviewed 78 cases, as shown in Table 1. The years with more duels in Escudero's account were 1892 (with 8 cases) and 1893 (with 7). [6] Given the secretive nature of dueling, it is not possible to establish how many cases are left out of these counts. Duels were certainly few in comparison with other violent crimes, and Mexican duels in particular may have been less frequent, at least in absolute terms, than in France, Germany and Italy. [7]