The First Duel Fought in Hot Air Balloons – Paris, 1808

Monsieurs Granpree and Le Pique fight for the hand of Mademoiselle Tirevit in the skies above Paris

We love stumbling across quirky stories in the Archive!

More often than not, we find these stories while looking for something else – our eyes always seem happy to read weird and wonderful tales in adjacent columns.

This strange story reports on the first duel to be fought in hot air gas [Ed: Thanks to all that provided feedback. Correction made!] balloons, in Paris, in 1808.

The Archive contains 100s of newspaper reports on all types of duels – but, so far, this is the strangest one we’ve seen.

However, we’re also thinking that maybe in France in 1808, this was not seen as strange behaviour at all?…

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