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| Saint-Amant |
Saint-Amant may or may not have been the first unofficial world champion. He refused a match against Jozsef Szen (1805- 1857) of Hungary who was one of world's top ten players for most of his playing career. He also never played the Russian Alexander Petrov (1794 – 1867), the first great Russian master.
He lost a match to John Cochrane (1798 – 1878), the leading Scottish master, in 1842 by a score of +4 -6 =1). Cochrane spent a long tour of duty in India and when he returned to the UK and beat everyone except Howard Staunton. Cochrane also helped Staunton prepare for his match against Saint-Amant, which established Staunton as the world's leading player.
Saint-Amant became a government clerk in Paris and eventually served as the secretary to the governor of French Guiana from 1819 to 1821 and was fired after he protested against the slave trade that existed in that colony.
Next he worked as a journalist and actor before becoming a successful wine merchant. He was a captain in the French National Guard during the 1848 revolution. The French militia which existed from 1789 until 1872 was separate from the French Army and existed both for policing and as a military reserve.
The Tuileries Palace was a royal and imperial palace in Paris which stood on the right bank of the River Seine. It was the usual Parisian residence of most French monarchs, from Henry IV to Napoleon III, until it was burned by the Paris Commune in 1871. Saint-Amant played a big role in saving it from being burned by a mob ans as a reward was made its Governor for a few months.
His Travels to California in 1850-1851, published in Paris in 1854, described his sailing on the Atlantic, crossing the Isthmus of Panama, sailing the Pacific and arrival in San Francisco. While serving as a diplomat in California he visited Oregon and his map of the Oregon Territory is scarce today, but at the time was considered the most comprehensive and important work son California published in French. He appears to have played no chess while in California, or if he did, no games survive.
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| Saint-Amant's map |
After his stay in California, he started his long journey home. Most likely he returned the same way he came, by ship and crossing the Isthmus of Panama, a journey that normally took 6 weeks or more. If he went around Cape Horn travel time was usually 6-7 months. That’s amazing today. It’s somewhat less than 2,600 from San Francisco to New York and you can fly it in less than 5 hours today. Even on Amtrak the train trip takes about 67 hours, including a 5 hour layover in Chicago. He arrived in New York in the fall of 1852.
Saint-Amant was back in Paris in 1858 when Paul Morphy made his first visit to France. He admitted that Morphy was the better player. They played some private games, only one game, which Morphy won, has been recorded and preserved. It was a consultation game in which Saint-Amant had a partner.
In 1861 Saint-Amant retired to Algeria and died there in 1872 after being thrown from his carriage. He died the day of the accident at his chateau near Algiers; he was 73 years old. A magazine of the day described him as a man of simple and modest nature combined with a great deal of varied learning and a wise and enlightened administrator. He was buried in the Cemetery of Birmandries in Algeria.
It’s difficult to to judge how good Saint-Amant really was by today’s standards, but Chessmetrics puts his rating between the years 1843 and 1846 in the mid-2500s placing him just behind Howard Staunton who was rated about 100 point higher.
His opponent in the following game was George Walker (1802 – 1879). Walker was an author and chess organizer who did a great deal to promote chess. He founded both the Westminster Chess Club in 1831 and the St. Georges Club in 1834 and as an author wrote about the game in his chess columns in The Lancet and Bell's Life.
The Lancet, founded in 1823, is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal that is among the world's oldest, most prestigious, and best known general medical journals.
Bell's Life was founded in London in 1822 and was a weekly 4-page sheet containing general news and sports, but gravitated mainly to sports in later years. It initially made its reputation covering prize-fighting but became known for reliable coverage of a range of sports such as cricket, angling, sailing and even chess. However, it was particularly known for its reports on horse-racing, publishing up to date information on schedules and results. Today it is best known as a racing paper.
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