For nineteen years no one could beat Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais, and in the summer of 1834 he proved it in the most exhausting way the century could devise: eighty-five games against Alexander McDonnell, played across six matches in London with no clocks, no rest days and no title to win. He took the series decisively, and chess has treated the result as the unofficial championship of the world ever since. He died six years later, broke, and was buried in London a short walk from the man he had beaten.
The Régence
He came from a prominent family — his grandfather had been governor of the Île de France, and he later wrote that grandfather's biography. The obituary notice printed at the front of the 1842 Brussels edition of his Nouveau traité du jeu des échecs says he wandered into the Café de la Régence in Paris by chance after leaving school, without knowing how a pawn moved. Mathematics had been his weakest subject. Within three years he was beating the café's best players, including veterans who had played Philidor.
Alexandre Deschapelles, the strongest player in France and Philidor's recognized successor, then took him on. According to the notice, Deschapelles played him for two years at odds of pawn and two moves, never less, and then handed the sceptre to him. From about 1821 he was regarded, everywhere the game was followed, as the best player alive. In 1824, on a visit to London, he beat the leading English players, and his compatriots hailed him as "the greatest chess player in Europe," Garry Kasparov records in My Great Predecessors, Part I. He made his living from chess, which in the 1830s meant stakes, lessons and journalism rather than prizes.
Eighty-five games
In 1834 he crossed to London and met Alexander McDonnell at the Westminster Chess Club. What was meant as a match became six of them, eighty-five games in all, played through the summer at a pace that would be considered inhumane now. The organizer was George Walker, founder of the Westminster club. La Bourdonnais won forty-five, lost twenty-seven and drew thirteen; Kasparov notes that other sources give +44 −30 =14.
The games themselves were a revelation and stayed in the literature for a century — open, sharp, full of pawn storms and queen sacrifices, and far ahead of anything published before. They are the reason both men are remembered, and they are the backbone of this archive.
Kasparov calls the series essentially the first battle for the chess crown. He opens My Great Predecessors with its most famous game, the sixteenth of the fourth match, in which La Bourdonnais answered the Sicilian with 4…e5, the starting point, Kasparov notes, of a variation Evgeny Sveshnikov developed 150 years later. The game ended with three of his connected passed pawns on the second rank.
“However the adversary chose to march his troops, intrepidly La Bourdonnais followed him and fought for the centre of the board with courage and imagination.”
“La Bourdonnais did indeed play more deeply than his opponent, seeing strategic trumps which the latter was unaware of, and it was this that decided the matches.”
“The combinations of La Bourdonnais were based on a sounder positional foundation. These were the first steps of the strategy that was to be brilliantly demonstrated in the late 1850s by Paul Morphy.”
“…the famous De la Bourdonnais, who for genius, invention and force has never been excelled…”
The treatise and the magazine
In 1833 he published Nouveau traité du jeu des échecs, sold at the Café de la Régence and dedicated to Deschapelles. Its first chapter argues that having the move is no decisive advantage and that a game played correctly by both sides should be drawn. Kasparov credits it as the first manual to advise readers how to work on their own with a chess book and to calculate variations in their heads.
In 1836 he founded Le Palamède, the first magazine in the world devoted to chess, and edited it himself. It was the beginning of chess journalism as a trade.
Blindfold, and the end
He also played blindfold, reviving the exhibitions Philidor had made famous. The 1842 notice says he won two blindfold games at once against strong opponents, and drew one blindfold against Boncourt, a player to whom he could give only pawn and move with sight of the board. Deschapelles asked his friends to talk him out of the practice. They failed, and soon afterward he suffered three strokes. Dropsy followed and his doctors gave him up, but he outlived their verdict and was tapped four times, keeping his full strength at chess and still giving the same odds.
The money went. He lost his inheritance in a property speculation, and by the end of the decade he was living on what the game could pay him, in failing health. On the recommendation of Mignet of the Académie française, the French government placed him on its relief fund for men of letters; the notice says he lived to draw only the first quarter's payment. He returned to London to take a post with the Westminster Chess Club and died there on 13 December 1840. The notice observed that he had been born in 1795, the year Philidor died, and died like him in London, close to poverty. He was buried at Kensal Green, in the same ground as McDonnell.
Legacy
La Bourdonnais is the first player the world agreed to call the best, and the 1834 series is the first great match in the history of the game. The chess in it — direct, attacking, structurally far more sophisticated than its reputation suggests — was studied by Morphy, by Steinitz, and by everyone who came after. He also invented the chess magazine, and then died too poor to be buried at his own expense.
Books
Books Louis de La Bourdonnais wrote, co-wrote, edited, or contributed to. Translations and reprints are grouped under the same work.