War And Peace

The specialist historian describing the campaign of 1813, or the restoration of the Bourbons, states categorically that these events were produced by the will of Alexander. But the general historian Gervinus stands this view on its head when he seeks to prove that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons were not caused by Alexander on his own, they were caused also by Stein, Metternich, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Fichte, Chateaubriand and others. The historian has evidently broken down Alexander’s power into its component forces: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand and the others, but the sum of these component forces – the interaction between Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Staël and all the rest – is obviously not equal to the resultant effect, which was nothing less than the capitulation of millions of Frenchmen to the Bourbons. The only thing that emerges from all the words exchanged between Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël and the others is their own interrelationship, which cannot account for the capitulation of millions. So, in order to explain how the capitulation of millions came about as a direct result of their interrelationship, in other words how it was that component forces equal to a given quantity A somehow produced a resultant equal to a thousand times A, the historian has to fall back on the strength of individual power, which is something he has already denied by acknowledging it as a resultant force – he has to allow for an unexplained outside force acting on the resultant. This is precisely what the general historians do. Which is why they contradict not only the specialist historians, but also themselves.

Country folk, watching out for either rain or fair weather but lacking all knowledge of where the rain comes from, will say the wind has blown the rain up, or the wind has blown the rain away. General historians are just like that; when they are looking out for something, and it fits in with their theory, they’ll say that power is the result of events, but on other occasions, when they want to prove something different, they’ll say that power determines events.

There is a third group of historians, historians of culture, who follow the path laid down by the universalists in being prepared sometimes to acknowledge literary men and women as determining forces, though they interpret this power rather differently. For them power resides in ‘culture’, intellectual activity. Historians of culture are perfectly consistent in taking after their progenitors, the writers of universal history, for if historical events can be explained by certain persons dealing with one another in certain ways, why not explain them by certain persons writing certain books? From the vast array of connotations associated with every aspect of life, these historians select the single connotation of intellectual activity and call this connotation a cause. But despite their best efforts to demonstrate that the cause of events lies in intellectual activity, only by a great stretch of the imagination can one agree that there is anything in common between intellectual activity and the movements of peoples, and in no way can we allow intellectual activity to have determined the actions of men, for any idea that the savage butchery of the French Revolution stemmed from the doctrine of the equality of man, or that the bloodiest of wars and executions arose from the doctrine of love, falls short of confirming such a proposition.

But let us say for the purposes of argument that all the clever sophistries that fill these histories are right; let us accept that nations are directed by mysterious forces called ideas – even so, the essential question of history remains unanswered; either that, or we have to add another force to the power of monarchs and the influence of counsellors and other persons introduced by the universal historians, and this new force is the idea, and how the idea relates to the masses calls for some explanation. We can understand that Napoleon possessed power and because of that an event came to pass; with a little latitude we can even imagine that Napoleon, along with some other influences, might have been the actual cause of an event, but precisely how Rousseau’s book The Social Contract could have made the French people go out and slaughter each other must be beyond comprehension unless some causal connection can be established between this new force and the event.