War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER IV

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SINCE HISTORY has abandoned the views of the ancients as to the divine

subjection of the will of a people to one chosen vessel, and the subjection of

the will of that chosen vessel to the Deity, it cannot take a single step

without encountering contradictions. It must choose one of two alternatives:

either to return to its old faith in the direct intervention of the Deity in the

affairs of humanity; or to find a definite explanation of that force producing

historical events that is called power.

To return to the old way is out of the question: the old faith is shattered,

and so an explanation must be found of the meaning of power.

Napoleon commanded an army to be raised, and to march out to war. This

conception is so familiar to us, we are so accustomed to this idea that the

question why six hundred thousand men go out to fight when Napoleon utters

certain words seems meaningless to us. He had the power, and so the commands he

gave were carried out.

This answer is completely satisfactory if we believe that power has been

given him from God. But as soon as we do not accept that, it is essential to

define what this power is of one man over others.

This power cannot be that direct power of the physical ascendency of a strong

creature over a weak one, that ascendency based on the application or the threat

of the application of physical force—like the power of Hercules. Nor can it be

based on the ascendency of moral force, as in the simplicity of their hearts

several historians suppose, maintaining that the leading historical figures are

heroes—that is, men endowed with a special force of soul and mind called genius.

This power cannot be based on the ascendency of moral force; for, to say nothing

of historical heroes, like Napoleon, concerning whose moral qualities opinions

greatly differ, history proves to us that neither Louis XI. nor Metternich, who

governed millions of men, had any marked characteristics of moral force, but

that they were, on the contrary, in most respects morally weaker than any one of

the millions of men they governed.

If the source of power lies not in the physical and not in the moral

characteristics of the person possessing it, it is evident that the source of

this power must be found outside the person—in those relations in which the

person possessing the power stands to the masses.

That is precisely how power is interpreted by the science of law, that cash

bank of history, that undertakes to change the historical token money of power

for sterling gold.

Power is the combined wills of the masses, transferred by their expressed or

tacit consent to the rulers chosen by the masses.

In the domain of the science of law, made up of arguments on how a state and

power ought to be constructed, if it were possible to construct it, all this is

very clear; but in its application to history this definition of power calls for

elucidation.

The science of law regards the state and power, as the ancients regarded

fire, as something positively existing. But for history the state and power are

merely phenomena, just as for the physical science of today fire is not an

element, but a phenomenon.

From this fundamental difference in the point of view of history and of the

science of law, it comes to pass that the science of law can discuss in detail

how in the scientific writer's opinion power should be organised, and what is

power, existing immovable outside the conditions of time; but to historical

questions as to the significance of power, undergoing visible transformation in

time, it can give no answer.

If power is the combined will of the masses transferred to their rulers, is

Pugatchov a representative of the will of the masses? If he is not, how then is

Napoleon I. such a representative? Why is it that Napoleon III., when he was

seized at Boulogne, was a criminal, and afterwards those who had been seized by

him were criminals?

In palace revolutions—in which sometimes two or three persons only take

part—is the will of the masses transferred to a new person? In international

relations, is the will of the masses of the people transferred to their

conqueror? In 1808 was the will of the Rhine Alliance league transferred to

Napoleon? Was the will of the mass of the Russian people transferred to Napoleon

in 1809, when our army in alliance with the French made war upon Austria?

These questions may be answered in three ways: (1) By maintaining that the

will of the masses is always unconditionally delegated over to that ruler or

those rulers whom they have chosen, and that consequently every rising up of new

power, every struggle against the power once delegated, must be regarded as a

contravention of the real power.

Or (2) by maintaining that the will of the masses is delegated to the rulers,

under certain definite conditions, and by showing that all restrictions on,

conflicts with, and even abolition of power are due to non-observance of the

rulers of those conditions upon which power was delegated to them.

Or (3) by maintaining that the will of the masses is delegated to the rulers

conditionally, but that the conditions are uncertain and undefined, and that the

rising up of several authorities, and their conflict and fall, are due only to

the more or less complete fulfilment of the rulers of the uncertain conditions

upon which the will of the masses is transferred from one set of persons to

another.

In these three ways do historians explain the relation of the masses to their

rulers.

Some historians—those most distinctively biographers and writers of memoirs,

of whom we have spoken above—failing in the simplicity of their hearts to

understand the question as to the meaning of power, seem to believe that the

combined will of the masses is delegated to historical leaders unconditionally,

and therefore, describing any such authority, these historians assume that that

authority is the one absolute and real one, and that every other force, opposing

that real authority, is not authority, but a violation of authority, and

unlawful violence.

Their theory fits in well with primitive and peaceful periods of history; but

in its application to complicated and stormy periods in the life of nations,

when several different authorities rise up simultaneously and struggle together,

the inconvenience arises that the legitimist historian will assert that the

National Assembly, the Directorate, and Bonaparte were only violations of real

authority; while the Republican and the Bonapartist will maintain, one that the

Republic, and the other that the Empire were the real authority, and that all

the rest was a violation of authority. It is evident that the explanations given

by these historians being mutually contradictory, can satisfy none but children

of the tenderest age.

Recognising the deceptiveness of this view of history, another class of

historians assert that authority rests on the conditional delegation of the

combined will of the masses to their rulers, and that historical leaders possess

power only on condition of carrying out the programme which the will of the

people has by tacit consent dictated to them. But what this programme consists

of, those historians do not tell us, or if they do, they continually contradict

one another.

In accordance with his view of what constitutes the goal of the movements of

a people, each historian conceives of this programme, as, for instance, the

greatness, the wealth, the freedom, or the enlightenment of the citizens of

France or some other kingdom. But putting aside the contradictions between

historians as to the nature of such a programme, and even supposing that one

general programme to exist for all, the facts of history almost always

contradict this theory.

If the conditions on which power is vested in rulers are to be found in the

wealth, freedom, and enlightenment of the people, how is it that kings like

Louis XIV. and John IV. lived out their reigns in peace, while kings like Louis

XVI. and Charles I. were put to death by their peoples? To this question these

historians reply, that the effect of the actions of Louis XIV. contrary to the

programme were reacted upon Louis XVI. But why not reflected on Louis XIV. and

Louis XV.? Why precisely on Louis XVI.? And what limit is there to such

reflection? To these questions there is and can be no reply. Nor does this view

explain the reason that the combined will of a people remains for several

centuries vested in its rulers and their heirs, and then all at once during a

period of fifty years is transferred to a Convention, a Directory, to Napoleon,

to Alexander, to Louis XVIII., again to Napoleon, to Charles X., to Louis

Philippe, to a republican government, and to Napoleon III. To explain these

rapid transferences of the people's will from one person to another, especially

when complicated by international relations, wars, and alliances, these

historians are unwillingly obliged to allow that a proportion of these phenomena

are not normal transferences of the will of the people, but casual incidents,

depending on the cunning, or the blundering, or the craft, or the weakness of a

diplomatist or a monarch, or the leader of a party. So that the greater number

of the phenomena of history—civil wars, revolutions, wars—are regarded by these

historians as not being produced by the delegation of the free-will of the

people, but as being produced by the wrongly directed will of one or several

persons, that is, again by a violation of authority. And so by this class of

historians, too, historical events are conceived of as exceptions to their

theory.

These historians are like a botanist who, observing that several plants grow

by their seed parting into two cotyledons, or seed-leaves, should insist that

everything that grows only grows by parting into two leaves; and that the

palm-tree and the mushroom, and even the oak, when it spreads its branches in

all directions in its mature growth, and has lost all semblance to its two

seed-leaves, are departures from their theory of the true law of growth. A third

class of historians admit that the will of the masses is vested in historical

leaders conditionally, but say that those conditions are not known to us. They

maintain that historical leaders have power only because they are carrying out

the will of the masses delegated to them.

But in that case, if the force moving the peoples lies not in their

historical leaders, but in the peoples themselves, where is the significance of

those historical leaders?

Historical leaders are, so those historians tell us, the self-expression of

the will of the masses; the activity of the historical leaders serves as a type

of the activity of the masses.

But in that case the question arises, Does all the activity of historical

leaders serve as an expression of the will of the masses, or only a certain side

of it? If all the life-activity of historical leaders serves as an expression of

the will of the masses, as some indeed believe, then the biographies of

Napoleons and Catherines, with all the details of court scandal, serve as the

expression of the life of their peoples, which is an obvious absurdity. If only

one side of the activity of an historical leader serves as the expression of the

life of a people, as other supposed philosophical historians believe, then to

define what side of the activity of an historical leader does express the life

of a people, one must know first what the life of the people consists of.

Being confronted with this difficulty, historians of this class invent the

most obscure, intangible, and general abstraction, under which to class the

greatest possible number of events, and declare that in this abstraction is to

be found the aim of the movements of humanity. The most usual abstractions

accepted by almost all historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment,

progress, civilisation, culture. Postulating some such abstraction as the goal

of the movements of humanity, the historians study those persons who have left

the greatest number of memorials behind them—kings, ministers, generals,

writers, reformers, popes, and journalists—from the point of view of the effect

those persons in their opinion had in promoting or hindering that abstraction.

But as it is nowhere proven that the goal of humanity really is freedom,

equality, enlightenment, or civilisation, and as the connection of the masses

with their rulers and with the leaders of humanity only rests on the arbitrary

assumption that the combined will of the masses is always vested in these

figures which attract our attention—the fact remains that the activity of the

millions of men who move from place to place, burn houses, abandon tilling the

soil, and butcher one another, never does find expression in descriptions of the

activity of some dozen persons, who do not burn houses, never have tilled the

soil, and do not kill their fellow-creatures.

History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples of the west

towards the end of last century, and their rush to the east, explained by the

activity of Louis XIV., Louis XV., and Louis XVI., or their mistresses and

ministers, or by the life of Napoleon, of Rousseau, of Diderot, of Beaumarchais,

and others?

The movement of the Russian people to the east, to Kazan and Siberia, is that

expressed in the details of the morbid life of John IV. and his correspondence

with Kurbsky?

Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by the

life and activity of certain Godfreys and Louis' and their ladies?

It has remained beyond our comprehension, that movement of the peoples from

west to east, without an object, without leadership, with a crowd of tramps

following Peter the Hermit. And even more incomprehensible is the cessation of

that movement, when a rational and holy object for the expeditions had been

clearly set up by historical leaders—that is, the deliverance of

Jerusalem.

Popes, kings, and knights urged the people to set free the Holy Land. But the

people did not move, because that unknown cause, which had impelled them before

to movement, existed no longer. The history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers

evidently cannot be regarded as an epitome of the life of the peoples. And the

history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers has remained the history of those

knights and those Minnesingers, while the history of the life of the peoples and

their impulses has remained unknown.

Even less explanatory of the life of the peoples is the history of the lives

of writers and reformers.

The history of culture offers us as the impelling motives of the life of the

people the circumstances of the lives or the ideas of a writer or a reformer. We

learn that Luther had a hasty temper and uttered certain speeches; we learn that

Rousseau was distrustful and wrote certain books; but we do not learn what made

the nations cut each other to pieces after the Reformation, or why men

guillotined each other during the French Revolution.

If we unite both these kinds of history together, as do the most modern

historians, then we shall get histories of monarchs and of writers, but not a

history of the life of nations.

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1. Ebooks list page : 85
2. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER I
3. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER IV
4. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER V
5. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER VI
6. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER VII
7. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XIV
8. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER IX
9. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER X
10. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XI
11. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XII
12. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XVI
13. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER III
14. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER I
15. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER II
16. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER III