§ 2. Philidor’s Followers: Deschapelles, Labourdonnais, and the Dethroned Dynasts

While many Europeans who lived before the Age of Revolution had looked upon chess as merely a game, others had regarded it as a symbolic representation of battle. “Everyone knows that this noble and ancient game is a model of war,” asserted Philippe Stamma’s Essai sur le jeu des échecs (1737), echoing Gioachino Greco’s Jeu des eschets (1669) and Joseph Bertin’s Noble Game of Chess (1735), these three being the most important chess books of the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century.^[51] The three books also agreed in referring to chess as a “noble game.” If playing chess was like conducting a war, and the people who conducted wars were noblemen, then chess was logically a noble game. And indeed, we have seen that English aristocrats serving as army officers in the Netherlands in the 1740s took chess lessons from Philidor. But the decline in the conception of chess as merely a game, exemplified by the biography of Philidor, was paralleled by a decline in the conception of chess as symbolic battle, similarly exemplified by the biography of Deschapelles. Both declines took place gradually from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, as increasing numbers of intellectuals encroached on the aristocrats’ pastime.

Alexandre-Louis-Honoré Lebreton Deschapelles (1780–1847), Philidor’s successor in the Café de la Régence dynasty, was both an aristocrat and an army officer.^[52] Given his interest in chess and his place in French society, he might appear at first glance a social atavism. But even as late as the Napoleonic era, the aristocracy and the officer corps had not given up the game.

	Imperious,
	Napoleon,
	Pushed hard the wood,
	From childhood on.

	As young cadet,
	On bivouacs,
	Up mountain tracks,
	On camels’ backs;

	Behind the fray,
	On palace tiles,
	‘Cross countless miles,
	On far-flung isles;

	He pushed his Would,
	He pushed attack,
	Until at last,
	The wood pushed back.

Napoleon’s secretary Bourrienne, his stepson Prince Eugène, his chief of staff Berthier—all, like the emperor himself, of noble birth—his cavalry commander Marshal Murat, and various of his generals likewise took to the microcosmic battlefield. Napoleon played badly, however, and no one else in his entourage particularly distinguished himself.^[53]

Nor were all aristocrats and army officers reactionary; many, including both Napoleon and Deschapelles, had republican views and supported the Revolution. For Deschapelles, this represented a rebellion not only against society at large but also against his own community, and not only against his social class but also against his own family. Like Légal, Deschapelles was an aristocrat whose family had its roots in Brittany, one of the most counterrevolutionary of the former provinces of France. Deschapelles’s family emigrated from France rather than accept the new republic.

The chess master’s youth resembled Napoleon’s. Born near Versailles in 1780, he was sent as a boy to Brienne, in Champagne, to attend the collège there. In France a collège is a secondary school, generally a prestigious one; Brienne’s was reserved exclusively for sons of the nobility. Napoleon had attended the same school, graduating in 1784. Ten years later, with revolutionary France at war against most of Europe, the school closed and its students dispersed. Deschapelles joined the army and fought in the northern campaign, notably in the important battle at Fleurus. During that battle he suffered a saber wound in the head and lost his right hand. A regiment of Prussian cavalry subsequently galloped over him, he said, for good measure. In recognition of his bravery, he received the cross of the Légion d’Honneur at its first distribution, under the Consulate. Later, not only soldiers but also cooks, musicians, and mechanicians would be admitted into the Légion d’Honneur. Deschapelles’s injuries prevented him from pursuing what promised to be a successful career as a field officer. As soon as he recovered, he was transferred into military administration.

Deschapelles discovered chess while on leave in Paris in 1798. He happened upon the Café Morillon, where a lawyer named Bernard was holding court, surrounded by other refugees from the Café de la Régence. The revolutionaries had taken over the latter venue, as previously mentioned, sending into exile the advocates of ludic trials. Bernard had been one of the few players who had only had to accept odds of a pawn and the first move from either Légal or Philidor. He had also coauthored a chess treatise in 1775 and participated in the founding of the Paris chess club in 1783.^[54] Deschapelles learned the game from Bernard and created a legend out of the process: “I acquired chess in four days. I learned the moves and played with Bernard, who had succeeded Philidor as the sovereign of the board. I lost the first day, the second, the third, and beat him even-handed on the fourth, since which time I have never either advanced or receded. Chess to me has been, and is, a single idea, which once acquired cannot be displaced from its throne while the intellect remains unimpaired by sickness or age.” Sometimes he said it took only three days. Otherwise he stuck to this account to the end of his life. One critic, drawing on contemporary apologetics for the biblical account of creation, suggested that it should be taken as a parable in which the four days stand for four years or four ages.

In his capacity as supply officer, Deschapelles accompanied the Grande Armée on its campaigns through Europe. Out of the 1806 campaign against Prussia came another story he used to tell about himself, subsequently published in the chess journal Le Palamède under the title “Supplément au bulletin de la bataille d’Iéna” (Supplement to the Bulletin of the Battle of Jena). Napoleon, a pioneer in the use of propaganda, regularly sent “bulletins” back to France from foreign battlefields. The bulletin from Jena described the French victory that marked the culmination of the Prussian campaign. After the battle, the French army marched directly to Berlin, and Deschapelles marched directly to the headquarters of its chess club. There he suffered two disappointments: The Germans were not in the habit of playing for stakes, and they refused to accept odds of a pawn and two moves. Their three strongest players did, however, agree to contend against him as a team. Deschapelles defeated them in both games played. Back in Berlin after the February 1807 Battle of Eylau, near the Baltic coast city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), he returned to the chess club. “I declared to them that I no longer wanted to play even with them, that it was time to give up the joke, and that I would not play another game without imposing odds on them.” He gave odds of a rook and won two out of three games, drawing the third. It was also around this time that he later claimed to have offered his “permanent challenge” to the world at odds of a pawn and two moves.^[55]

A year and a half later Deschapelles found himself in the opposite corner of Europe in opposite circumstances. Spanish guerrillas forced a French army to which he was attached to surrender at Baylen. Taken from there to Cadiz, on the Atlantic side of the Straits of Gibraltar, he escaped and returned to France. Whether resentful of the failure of Napoleon’s regime to reward him according to what he felt were his merits, or of the humiliating treatment by Napoleon of the army that had surrendered, or of the behavior in general of that “liberticide,” he retired from public service and thenceforth refused to wear his Légion d’Honneur cross. In 1812, however, Marshal Ney arranged for him to be offered the post of commissioner of the government tobacco monopoly at Strasbourg, and he accepted it. There, during Napoleon’s brief return to power in 1815, known as the Hundred Days, Deschapelles helped to organize the resistance in the eastern part of France to the second invasion of the allies, a year after their first invasion and first expulsion of Napoleon. This does not necessarily mean that Deschapelles had converted to Bonapartism in the interim, even though he received a general’s rank: Many republicans, and opponents of the Bourbons of all kinds, joined in opposing this second, longer-lived restoration of France’s old dynasty by the allies.

After Napoleon’s second abdication, Deschapelles entrenched himself in the Café de la Régence and successfully defended his right to impose on all players the odds proclaimed in his “permanent challenge.” Meanwhile the young Louis-Charles de Labourdonnais was rising rapidly through the ranks. Deschapelles decided to commission him as his lieutenant but soon lost his ability to command him. When he could no longer compel him to accept odds, he withdrew in Labourdonnais’s favor, announcing, “in his hands the reputation of France is safe.” Deschapelles doubtless preferred to step down in a dignified manner rather than suffer overthrow by force. Moreover, his conquest of chess had brought him only modest fame and wealth. Thus, he retired from the game, sometime around 1824, when he could still claim to be its best player.^[56]

The two leading British players came to Paris on separate occasions to test their strength against Deschapelles. John Cochrane made an extended stay in 1820–21 and engaged both Deschapelles and Labourdonnais in a round robin, receiving from the former his standard odds of pawn and two moves and going even against the latter. Cochrane lost to Deschapelles by an unknown score and to Labourdonnais six games to one. Labourdonnais, also receiving odds of pawn and two moves from Deschapelles, defeated his mentor seven games to none.^[57] Then Cochrane managed to persuade Deschapelles to play without odds on the board, by accepting odds of two to one on the stakes for each game. The Scotsman won more than a third of these games, thus proving himself the better gambler if not the better chess player. Cochrane’s strength was in the openings, which Deschapelles readily conceded: “During the first twenty moves, I always had a bad game, and all the games I won were considered hopeless.” William Lewis arrived in 1821, and again difficulties arose in negotiating the terms of play. Eventually a temporary agreement was reached, Lewis accepting a pawn and one move from Deschapelles and winning at those odds one out of three games, with two draws. After this short series, however, they could not settle on terms to continue.^[58]

For Deschapelles, chess represented just one stop on a tour of games. He actually took up Polish checkers first, but his interest in it lasted only three months. At the end of that period he addressed the following discourse to the Paris checkers champion: “I have looked through your game, and I find but little in it. At one time, played by gentlemen, it might have been worth practicing; but it is now kicked out of the drawing room into the antechamber; and my soul is above the place of lackeys. In three months I have become your equal, in three months more I could give you a man; but I renounce the pursuit, and bid you farewell. I shall never play checkers again!”

From checkers Deschapelles jumped to chess, and from chess to whist. Whist is a card game that is still played today but whose popularity has been eclipsed by its descendant, bridge. At some point Deschapelles also became a very good billiards player; at another, a master at backgammon. In whist, however, he seems to have found his game. He began to win substantial sums, allowing him at last to assume something like his rightful place in society, and eventually elevating him to the rank of rentier, someone who lives on the income from his investments, which in Deschapelles’s case amounted to thirty or forty thousand livres annually. He bought a “country house” on the outskirts of the Faubourg du Temple, a suburb of Paris, where he gave large luncheons. Afternoons and evenings he devoted to playing cards in town. Pierre-Charles de Saint-Amant, a younger Café de la Régence chess master who wrote a biographical sketch of Deschapelles, speculated that “chance” gave Deschapelles his financial success. “What was required for that was a less mathematical arena than chess, a game where…chance might permit weakness to sustain its hopes, and mediocrity its illusions.” Saint-Amant’s implication is that Deschapelles found more victims at whist than at chess, and victims willing to risk more money. The card players of that era do not appear to have rated themselves systematically the way the chess players did, so a claim of supremacy for Deschapelles at whist would be difficult to substantiate. He certainly made himself well known in clubs, cafés, and spas throughout Europe in the 1820s and 1830s. His career in cards culminated in the publication of his fragmentary Traité du whiste (Treatise on Whist) in 1839, and in the general adoption of a tactic of his invention, known to bridge players even today as “the Deschapelles coup.”

In the 1830s, Deschapelles’s thoughts returned to politics. He told a British chess enthusiast: “I am of no country. Show me a good man, and I will try to be his brother. But were I to choose, though I have never seen England, and understand not your language, I am more a Briton than anything else. I love your country, in the firm belief that your admirable political constitution gives to man all of the liberty which he is as yet sufficiently civilized to enjoy without running into licentiousness.” A democrat in principle, he envisioned himself a dictator. Or at least so the prosecutor claimed when Deschapelles was brought to trial following the Paris insurrection of June 1832. He had entangled himself in a small republican party known as the Gauls, one of many groups discontented with the outcome of the Revolution of 1830. Saint-Amant believed that Deschapelles, in his “disordered ambition,” had expected to be summoned to lead the government after a new revolution: “He believed himself called to the post of commander, of lawgiver; because of his superiority of intelligence, he judged himself destined for the top, one day or another.” ^[59] Deschapelles’s conceits were not as strange as they might appear, arising as they did out of the same heady milieu that produced the dreams of the comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Auguste Comte, and the other “prophets of Paris.” ^[60] He emerged from the episode unchastened by the memory of a month or two spent in jail and assorted bruises to his ego. Clinging to his pretensions, he wrote constitutions for refugees from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and various American republics to take back home from Paris with them. He distilled his political ideas into La Loi du peuple (The People’s Law), published in 1848, a few months after his death, when revolution again broke out in France, and in many other European countries as well.

Periodically, at long intervals, Deschapelles’s interest in chess resurfaced. This happened in 1836, roughly a dozen years after his retirement from regular play. One day he walked into the Paris chess club, apparently with no preparation, to challenge Labourdonnais. They played four games of “pawns,” a variant of chess invented by Légal in which one of the contestants plays without his queen, in exchange for which he begins with sixteen pawns, double the number with which he would ordinarily begin. Giving no odds, Deschapelles won two games, lost one, and drew one. A few days later, he played ordinary chess with Saint-Amant, one of the strongest players after Labourdonnais, giving his customary odds. Each of them won a game and a third was drawn. Deschapelles seemed to be proving his theory that chess is a “single idea,” acquired all at once and forever.^[61]

That same year an article in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle dared to doubt the historical accuracy of his just-published “Supplément au bulletin de la bataille d’Iéna.” Offended, he responded by challenging England to a duel at chess, a challenge he made public in Bell’s Life, and by dispatching Saint-Amant as his second to London to arrange the terms. Specifically, he sought to battle England’s best player for the stake of £1,000. The negotiations began promisingly, but soon faltered for no apparent reason and were finally broken off by Deschapelles. Had he suddenly lost interest in chess again? Saint-Amant wrote later: “I accepted responsibility for taking his conditions to the English. The innumerable obstacles that he subsequently raised have always made me wonder whether he really wanted to undertake this rash attempt.” ^[62]

Deschapelles returned to chess just as suddenly in 1842, when he again played Saint-Amant. In five games at varying odds, all in Saint-Amant’s favor of course, Deschapelles won three and Saint-Amant two.^[63] Additional encounters of the sort probably took place unrecorded.

At the end of his life Deschapelles adopted Candide’s point of view and retired to tend his garden. Literally. Growing fruit became his new game. His melons won prizes and were served at the table of King Louis-Philippe. The secretary of the London Chess Club summed up his interview with the éminence grise of serious play:

M. Deschapelles is the greatest chess player in France;

M. Deschapelles is the greatest whist player in France;

M. Deschapelles is the greatest billiard player in France;

M. Deschapelles is the greatest pumpkin-grower in France; and

M. Deschapelles is the greatest liar in France.^[64]

New and old attitudes coexisted uneasily in Deschapelles. One could with equal justice describe him as an aristocratic dilettante or a professional gambler. He was a stickler on the matter of rank and a revolutionary republican. Perhaps his insistence on the strict observation of rank in chess—refusing to play without giving proper odds—was a compensation for his lost prestige as an aristocrat in increasingly republican times and for his own republican political views.

As a chess player he was a “natural,” having learned the game rapidly without ever formally studying it. He did not read chess books. His knowledge of the openings, the phase of the game most thoroughly analyzed in his day, was not at all up to contemporary standards. As a consequence he often got into trouble early, and from beginning to end he played very slowly. While others could open games mechanically, pursuing lines of development that had been established as sound, Deschapelles had to think out every move for himself, even the first ones. He was the last master to achieve the highest rank without the aid of accumulated knowledge. And of course he published nothing on chess himself. In these ways, he was a chess anachronism.

Nevertheless, Deschapelles did contribute to the future of the game. His condescension passed from champion to champion like a conqueror’s mantle, enlarging the popular image of great chess players. Like the young Rousseau, he felt that to be the best was the main thing; what to be the best at was not so important. Like the young Rousseau, but with more success, he cultivated one field after another. Again like Rousseau, this time the mature Rousseau of Du contrat social (On the Social Contract) and the Projet de constitution pour la Corse (Draft of a Constitution for Corsica), he felt that having become the best in a field made him a superior human being, qualified to dictate laws and social organization to an entire nation. This represented in a way a throwback to the ideas of the philosophes, who believed chess to be a useful or instructive game that taught skills applicable elsewhere. But Deschapelles did not make this argument. He played chess, as well as checkers, whist, billiards, and backgammon, because he liked games, because he could be the best at them, and because being the best at them made him, modestly, wealthy and well known. Through chess and the rest he acquired the social position to which his aristocratic birth no longer automatically entitled him.

The chessboard remained a battlefield, but from a symbolic one it had become a real one. To be sure, few died there. Many, however, in a country exhausted by more than two decades of almost continuous warfare, could see virtue in peaceful combat, and increasing numbers fought for laurels in that manner. And a “disabled” veteran officer, who refused to wear his military cross, proudly accepted for victories won on the chessboard real fame and real fortune.