Anybody been, or know someone who was, on the field of honour? Academic duel? Or is that strictly for the history books and storybooks, not taken seriously for a couple of centuries?
Things that don’t qualify: typical street crime and gang warfare, honor killings, Olympic fencing… I’m interested in the concept of an arranged duel. Even an arranged fight like in the lame movie Three O’Clock High
Centuries? You know all those WWI & II war movies where the German officer has a facial scar? That’s from dueling.
CMC
Hasn’t pretty much every male child had an appointment to fight somebody after school at least once? Technically, I think that might qualify for loose definitions of dueling…
Wikipedia has a list of duels that you might find interesting.
Google seems to be fairly certain that the last duel was fought in France in 1967 but wikipedia’s list has an entry from 1994 in England.
I find it interesting that Alexander Hamilton’s son was killed in a duel several years before the famous Hamilton/Burr duel.
That 1967 French duel was filmed, apparently; you would think they would keep that sort of thing private, but they were not able to shake off all the journalists, it seems.
I do not have the impression that duelling is the latest 21st-century fashion, not least because of the increasing irrelevance of the class of formal nobility who were into it, but your list also includes a couple of farmers settling their differences via a prearranged bolo fight, not a crime of passion, so you never know-- I would not be astounded to hear that it still occasionally happens.
I did that once, in 6th grade, circa 1963. (But no, I never got the impression that it was widely common, let alone universal.)
(ETA: We became friends, kinda-sorta, after that.)
Yes, I have. And I arranged for others to fight or die as well.
I was the lead range officer for a sportsman’s club and ran the practical pistol competition for years. I was always looking for new challenges when I thought of the classic duel. So, how to set one up without killing someone? After several ideas that required sophisticated timing devices I made a target like a pair of dumbbells - a shaft with a round disc on each end. It pivoted on the top of a vertical pole set in the ground. Each disc was plywood and covered with paper for each new duel. Two shooters set up side by side. On command they spun around (in opposite directions) and fired at their disc. The holes in the paper told the story of who lived, died or got grazed.
I tried it a couple of times without the spin and it worked well but I was not comfortable with each shooter spinning in the correct direction so I never used it for competition. We did use it without spinning, each shooter drawing from a holster.
I have seen similar setups used to demonstrate the 21 Foot Rule.
Dennis
There was plenty of violence to g around where I grew up but pre arranging a fight was rare. Most of the time one found out about a fight by surprise AKA the sucker punch. There were also arguments that evolved into a fight.
Telling someone at school to “Meet me behind the gym after school and we will settle this.” could often result in the opponent bringing all of his friends along.
Clearly, the class of mean caitiffs and villains who would resort to waylaying, sucker-punching, and brawling are not in the universe where they could be challenged to an honourable duel among gentlemen 
Or avoid violence by a timely apology.
True enough. I worked very hard to overcome my roots and learn to present myself as a gentleman. Sometimes the Leavenworth Street slips through…
I remember a Dave Allen sketch that was set around 1810, and had one nobleman insulting another and getting slapped. He says, “My second will attend upon yours.” But the second insults and gets slapped by the other second, who presents HIS second, and then that second insults and gets slapped, and on and on.
So they all line up facing each other at dawn, and begin shooting and falling like a line of dominos.
Pretty sure those were provided by the makeup department.
True, but the makeup department wasn’t just putting scars on people for no reason.
The point was these scars from academic dueling were taken very seriously well into the last century.
CMC