'The Last Duel' both a fun and instructive read

Eric Jager is a Professor of English at UCLA. His latest book, "The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial By Combat In Medieval France," might sound like a yawner to anybody not familiar with his writings.

It is not. From the first page, he takes both the general reader and historian on a fast-paced ride in this thriller that will have the book lover wanting to jump ahead and find out who wins the battle between two men locked in mortal combat. Resist the temptation; the spinning of the tale is as interesting as the conclusion.

Students in his medieval literature classes can look forward to learning about martial arts, social inequities, wars of plunder, the legal system, court politics and religion in 14th century France. Jager is a masterful storyteller and his students will have fun learning this material. They will also come to understand that "The Last Duel" provides an interesting case study on the sociopolitical dynamics that triggered the French Revolution 400 years later.

In December 1386, a huge crowd gathered at a Paris monastery to watch Jean de Carrouges, a Norman knight, engage in combat with Jacques Le Gris. Carrouges’ wife, Lady Marguerite, had accused Le Gris of rape while her husband was away fighting in Scotland. Le Gris strongly denied the charges. Because she was considered the property of her husband, Marguerite could not directly charge Le Gris with the crime. Her husband had to champion her cause.

He did just that and started a process that eventually led to “trial by combat” between him and Le Gris. Both men, in full armor, met in a fight to the death that would prove which man’s cause was right in God’s sight. In the complicated religious logic of the time, it was believed that God would only allow the truthful combatant to win.

A battlefield loss by Carrouges would also put Lady Marguerite in double jeopardy. If her husband was killed, her accusation of rape would be considered false. The punishment for this crime would be death.

This was the very type of religious “fanaticism” that Voltaire and others decried four centuries later in pamphlets that became the catalyst for the French Revolution. In response to both the despotism of the French monarchy and inflexible church doctrine, writers like Voltaire and Montesquieu called for the use of reason and liberty -- not religious dogmatism or traditional beliefs -- to become the basis for problem solving in an Enlightened Society.

It is often noted that the French Revolution was the beginning of the modern feminist movement. Lady Marguerite was considered mere property, not a human being, in medieval France. She could not bring sexual assault charges without risking her own life. Obviously, there could be no true liberty, equality and fraternity as long as aristocratic privilege and religious tyranny so stacked the social equality deck against women.

Many scholars remain interested in the causes of the French Revolution. They need to look no further than Jager for a primer.

Those who study societal and organizational change know that there is always a gap between cause and effect. That is, certain events occur in one time period but their ramifications are only recognized in a distant time period. As University of Michigan Business Professor Karl Weick likes to say, these events are “interruptions” in the normal flow of activities and we can only “make sense” of them retrospectively.

By the time of combat between Carrouges and Le Gris, the practice of judicial duels was coming to an end because of increasing collective suspicion of its logic. This particular episode was the death knell of the practice. In its place, French ideologues sought to substitute reason for tradition and equal rights for privilege. To a great extent, they succeeded.

"The Last Duel" teaches us that despite the victory of secularism, little has changed in human behavior since the late 1300s. Jealously, passion, loyalty and betrayal are all on display in the book. So are needs for power and dominance. Many believe these behaviors are inherent in human nature.

Maybe so. However, I like the explanation of the late psychologist Abraham Maslow on the causes of social pathologies. He argued that when humans separate religion and reason, pathologies are bound to occur. Neither part is complete or functional without the other. Moreover, to utilize one without the other inevitably results in societal sickness and social maladies.

"The Last Duel" will always remain “current” until we learn this crucial lesson.