War And Peace

‘Louis XIV was a very proud and arrogant man; he had such and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he ruled France badly. Louis’ successors were weak men as well, and they ruled France badly. And they had such and such favourites, and such and such mistresses. But at that time a few men started scribbling in books. At the end of the eighteenth century a couple of dozen men in Paris began to hold forth about men being equal and free. This led to murder and mayhem all over France. These men killed the King and a lot of other people. But at that time there lived in France a genius by the name of Napoleon. He conquered everybody everywhere, or at least he killed a lot of people because he was a great genius. And for reasons best known to himself he went off to Africa to kill people there, and he killed them so effectively, and he was so bright and clever, that when he got back to France he ordered everyone to obey him, and everyone did. Setting himself up as Emperor, he marched off with the intention of killing a lot more people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And this he did. Meanwhile in Russia there was an Emperor called Alexander who declared war on Napoleon with a view to getting some order back into Europe. In ’07 he made friends with him quite suddenly, but they fell out again in 1811 and started killing lots of people. Whereupon Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men into Russia and conquered Moscow, but suddenly he ran away again and Emperor Alexander, advised by Heinrich Stein et al., united all of Europe against the disturber of her peace. Every one of Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemy, and the new force marched against fresh troops raised by Napoleon. The allies defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to abdicate and exiled him to the Isle of Elba, though without stripping him of the title of Emperor and continuing to show him the greatest respect, despite the fact that five years earlier and one year later he was universally regarded as a villain and outlaw. At which point Louis XVIII came to the throne, even though he had been until then a laughing stock to France and all her allies. Napoleon shed a few tears before the old guard, renounced the throne and went off into exile. Along came the clever statesmen and diplomats (especially Talleyrand, who was the first to grab the famous armchair, sit in it and thereby extend the frontiers of France), and they chatted for a while in Vienna, as a result of which nations emerged happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs all but fell out again and they were on the point of telling their armies to go off and kill each other again when Napoleon raised another battalion and invaded France, and the French, who had only just begun to hate him, gave in. But this infuriated the allied monarchs and they set off yet again to fight the French. And Napoleon, the genius, was defeated, proclaimed a villain at long last and shipped off to the island of St Helena. And in that rocky place the exile died a lingering death, cut off from those dear to his heart and his beloved France, and leaving all his fine deeds for the benefit of posterity. Meanwhile back on the European mainland reaction set in, and all the sovereigns turned again to playing havoc with their own people.’

You shouldn’t run away with the idea that this is just a joke, a caricature of historical description. Quite the reverse, it is the mildest possible depiction of the kind of contradictory and irrelevant answers provided by history as a whole, from collected memoirs and histories of nation states to generalized accounts of history, and also that modern genre known as contemporary cultural history.

What is so weird and ridiculous about these answers is that modern history is like a deaf man answering questions no one has asked.

If the aim of history is to describe the movement of humanity and nations, the first question that needs an answer for anything else to become intelligible is this: what kind of force is it that moves nations? Modern history will respond by patiently relating that Napoleon was a great genius, that Louis XIV was too arrogant, or maybe that certain writers wrote certain books.

All of this may well be true, and humanity stands ready to acknowledge it, except that humanity is actually asking a different question. It would all be very fascinating if we still recognized a divine power, self-sustaining and immutable, guiding nations through the agency of your Napoleons, Louis and writers, but we no longer acknowledge any such power, and so, before we can start talking about Napoleons, Louis and great writers, we have to demonstrate some kind of connection between those persons and the movements of nations. If some other power is substituted for divine will, we have to explain what it consists of, since this power is the very focus of all historical interest.