Trial by Combat

There's Something Sophomoric About Rudy

Trial by combat, Germany, 14th century.

On January 6, Rudy Giuliani stepped to the mike and told a few thousand friends that it was time for "trial by combat." This was at a gathering in the Ellipse, just south of the White House, and he was warming the crowd up for the headliner, Donald Trump. 

I have the impression that Rudy doesn't know very much about trial by combat. Maybe he should read some Shakespeare - Henry VI, Part 2, to be specific. 

The three parts of Henry VI are mainly about the Wars of the Roses, although Joan of Arc manages to put in an appearance in Part 1 (Will doesn't like her - she's French). My favorite character is Margaret of Anjou (another Frenchwoman). Her undisguised contempt for her husband, King Henry VI, is a marvel.

The lower classes also get some time on stage. Although the Wars of the Roses are basically about one large family slaughtering itself (all the principals were descended from John of Gaunt), there was also considerable social unrest from below during this time. In Part 2 we have Jack Cade's rebellion, best known for the line "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." 2H6 4.2.74.

Also in Part 2, overshadowed by Jack Cade, we have a trial by combat between a small-time employer and his apprentice. The employer is Thomas Horner, an armorer (his shop makes suits of armor). The apprentice is Peter Thump, who claims he has heard his boss say unkind things about the king.

The two show up in act 1, scene 3, in what I suppose we can call an arraignment. Peter says that his boss told him that Henry VI was not the rightful king, and that the man who should be king was another descendant of John of Gaunt: Richard, duke of York.

(Richard never becomes king. He is captured in battle in Part 3, 1.4. Queen Margaret taunts him by putting a paper crown on his head. He responds by saying, among other things, "beggars mounted run their horse to death." 1.4.127. Lord Clifford and Queen Margaret then stab him to death, and Margaret orders Richard's head cut off and mounted on the gates of the city of York "So York may overlook the town of York." 1.4.180. )

Anyway, back to Part 2 and Thomas and Peter. Thomas Horner, the armorer, is in a pickle, because, as the duke who is acting as prosecutor notes, such words, if actually spoken, would be high treason. So Horner says that Peter, his apprentice, is lying out of malice. And the king decides on a trial by combat, which occurs a little later, in act 2, scene 3. Both litigants show up with supporters. Both sides have been drinking, and continue to do so onstage. 

Apparently the older man has had quite a lot to drink. He's confident of winning. His young apprentice, on the other hand, thinks he's going to die, and he gives away his possessions - an apron, a hammer, and some money - to his friends.

The actual combat is brief and decisive. Peter the apprentice kills his employer, who gives us a parting gift - "I confess, I confess treason." 2.3.95.

I'm glad Shakespeare threw that bit in. Trial by combat was often seen as showing the will of God, possibly mediated by might makes right. Or maybe, by the time of the Wars of the Roses, simply might makes right. Shakespeare's audience was sufficiently modern that they might have seen death without confession as inconclusive on the subject of actual guilt or innocence.

There's a reason why trial by combat was, over the centuries, gradually being replaced with trial by jury. For all its flaws, trial by jury attempts to get to the actual facts.

Of course, trial by combat is simple and quick and reaches a definitive conclusion, with the added attraction that it's not much work for the authorities. It helps if you're willing to see both of the two combatants as expendable.

I can see why Rudy Giuliani would find it attractive.

But do we really want to live that way? If we settle our differences by violence, we live by violence.

People love to complain about jury duty and make jokes about lawyers. And our modern legal system is indeed cumbersome. But at least it seeks to divert conflict away from violence in the direction of peaceful resolution. And the ideal of justice based on fact and law appeals to me more than the picture of people settling their arguments with baseball bats.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a wise old professor who taught medieval history. One of his tasks was to explain the early development of western legal systems. How did brutish knights gradually get convinced to give up bopping their neighbors on the head when they were annoyed? It was a long, slow process that was only partially successful. But it established a principle: "The purpose of the law is to stop a fight."

There's a good, brief overview of the history of trial by combat in JSTOR Daily. To see it click here.

To be clear, what happened at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 was not a trial by combat. It is part of an argument over whether we keep the Constitution we have, or whether we get a new one, which will look much like the Republican platform in the 2020 election.

Picture credit: per Wikimedia Commons.

See also A Home Invasion.

After the Riot

What Was Trump Planning to Do?

Portuguese spinner, Fall River, Mass., 1916.

Let's look back for a moment to January 6 and say that Trump actually won the big battle on Capitol Hill. What would that look like? The ballots are not counted, possibly they go into a bonfire. Pence and Pelosi and Grassley are killed or captured. Many other members of the House and Senate are dead or in captivity. 

What does Trump do then? Declare martial law and announce that he will rule by emergency powers?

If he does that, what do the remaining power structures do? I'm talking about the armed forces, the FBI. The states, which have their own armies. The corporations. The list goes on.

I'm just wondering if, at that point - it would have been late in the day on January 6 - there was any plan at all for what to do next.  Or was there no plan? That's what happened in the conquest of Iraq - no plan for the occupation.

I think we need to publicly speculate about Trump's endgame. I think a lot of people assume he was just going to keep on being president, and everything else would look a lot like it looked last year. That in itself is not pretty, but there is a dynamic to these situations, and nobody is talking about it.

Maybe we'll even get lucky and find some evidence. We won't know if we don't start looking.

Photo credit: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

See also A Home Invasion.

Paris: 6 February 1934

"Throw the Deputies in the Seine" 

Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly.

European fascism is a complicated subject, and I think many people make the mistake of focusing on Germany, and particularly Germany after the Nazis rose to power. As I've argued before, the Weimar experience seems to provide more useful lessons for those of us concerned about the direction of American politics. 

I also think that useful, and less inflammatory, parallels to the American experience can be found in other European countries, most notably Italy (see my article Jim Crow Was a Failed State, which goes through the Italian experience in some detail), and also France. 

One striking parallel from the French experience was an assault on the Palais Bourbon, seat of the French National Assembly, in Paris on 6 February 1934. It was in a number of ways different from what happened at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on 6 January 2021, but there are useful parallels that help us build a richer context for what happened to the People's House. One big lesson: Don't make martyrs.

Here's a description of what happened way back in 1934. At that time, the National Assembly was called the Chamber of Deputies. The Palais Bourbon is on the left bank of the Seine directly across from the Place de la Concorde. There's a bridge, called the Pont de la Concorde. 

"Nationalist and veterans groups took matters into their own hands with the street demonstrations of 6 February 1934, the wildest night Paris had seen since 1871. It no longer seems as certain as it did at the time that the organizers of this mass demonstration sought to overthrow the republic. But they coordinated their plans for a mass move on "la maison sans fenetres," the Chamber of Deputies, with slogans like 'throw the deputies in the Seine.' Action Francaise, the largest veterans' organization, the Union Nationale des Combattants, the Croix de Feu, and other middle-class nationalist direct-action groups massed some 40,000 demonstrators in a march on the Chamber. Although the Croix de Feu on the Left Bank didn't try very hard, the Action Francaise and UNC groups crossing the bridge from the Place de la Concorde pressed for hours against police barricades until finally the police fired into the crowd (it is still not clear what orders had been given by Eugene Frot, the minister of the interior), killing 16 and wounding 655. The Chamber was kept inviolate, but Edouard Daladier's government resigned the next day without being voted into a minority."

This is from pages 244-245 of Robert Paxton's 1972 book Vichy France. I've been a Paxton fan for a very long time. 

The dead and the wounded provided the right with an incandescent organizing principle, one they used to good effect for years.

Fascist rage and increasing power elicited a strong response from the left, resulting in a virtual civil war in France between 1934 and 1937.  The splintered parties of the left united in the Popular Front, which came to power in 1936. This period, which I think is instructive for Americans in our current situation, has been overshadowed by the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, and of course World War II, which began in 1939.

There wasn't a lot of shooting, but there were many strikes by workers, and a right-wing group called the Cagoule perpetrated quite a bit of violence, including the courtesy assassinations of two opponents of Mussolini, the brothers Carlo and Nello Roselli, in 1937. The divisions between left and right remained deep and bitter, and undoubtedly contributed to the ease with which Germany conquered France in 1940.

A few days after the sack of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Professor Paxton came back to the Palais Bourbon and, in the process, gave me a present. He had for years been declining to label Donald Trump a fascist, for valid reasons. In Newsweek on January 11, 2021, he wrote, "Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, [2021] removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary." 

I've been calling Trump a fascist for a while, but I must say I feel more comfortable doing so now that Professor Paxton has changed his position.

Photo Credit: Per Wikimedia Commons, 2011.

See also Fascism, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?