Nineteenth Century Sabre
LongEdge Fencing training materials for gymnasium sabre are constantly under development.
Sources
Each “author” page has a table listing the techniques in the text in a standard format. Soon, I'll be pulling all of these into a concordance and doing some analysis on which techniques are the most common, obviously, core, etc.
LongEdge Fencing is just starting to look at nineteenth century gymnasium sabre as described by the following texts.
- Ministry of War “Fencing Manual” (1877)
- Romuald Brunet (1884) – No translation as yet
- Louis Rondelle (1892) – Written in English
Other authors to be examined as secondary authors to be consulted are listed below. These texts are used to validate our interpretation of the core texts and to provide differing perspectives on the topic. The latter two both trained at the Joinville Academy under the 1877 army fencing manual.
- Citoyen Bertrand “Fencing, Applied to the Military Art” (1801)
- Alexandre Valville (1817)
- Joesph Tinguely “Manual of Contre-Pointe” (1856)
Valville produced his text for the Russian court and included much of the Slavic sabre fencing.
In Practice
The three core texts give a range of tactical advice for how to conduct oneself when sparring with sabre. Understanding the advice and the implications of it is the current focus of research.
Focus Questions
- Emphasis on compound actions and, in particular, compound ripostes. Tactical advice is to always begin with simple attacks to divine the opponent's play style. Only then, after figuring this out, should one use compound attacks and compound ripostes to decieve the opponent and score. How does this square with Rondelle's advice below.
- There is a discrepancy between the very strict and defined parry positions and the advice for parrying when sparring. Parries are described as being formed with the hand no more than 10cm from the body (parry of the flank strike at 33cm), resulting in a very withdrawn arm. However, the sparring advice is that parries are made with the arm almost fully extended. Why the difference? What triggers the change from one style of parry to the other? Something here has been left unstated. We assume this is to do with pedagogy.
Key Principles
In the section on The Assault in the sabre part of Rondelle's manual, we get these principles. How do we best bring these into play?
In every attack he should take the greatest pains to preserver Opposition, and thus, guarantee himself against a Point Strike upon the body, which the adversary might make. The precept is absolute. […]
The Riposte by the Point Thrust is the most terible for the adversary and the most advantageous for the one who employs it, for it is the most rapid attack and it maintains the adverse blade in Opposition. Fencers too often quit the the line of the defence to make ripostes and thus expose themselves to Replacings [lit: remise, a renewed attack]. […]
The assailant after every attack, whether successful or not, should retreat slightly out of distance and at the same time hold the adverse blade outside the line of his body.