Instead of men endowed with divine authority and directly led by the will of the Deity, modern history has set up either heroes, endowed with extraordinary, superhuman powers, or simply men of the most varied characteristics, from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses. Instead of the old aim, the will of the Deity, that to the old historians seemed the end of the movements of peoples, such as the Gauls, the Greeks, and the Romans, modern history has advanced aims of its own—the welfare of the French, the German, or the English people, or its highest pitch of generalisation, the civilisation of all humanity, by which is usually meant the peoples inhabiting a small, northwestern corner of the great mother-earth.
Modern history has rejected the faiths of the ancients, without putting any new conviction in their place; and the logic of the position has forced the historians, leaving behind them the rejected, divine right of kings and fate of the ancients, to come back by a different path to the same point again: to the recognition, that is (1) that peoples are led by individual persons; and (2) that there is a certain goal towards which humanity and the peoples constituting it are moving.
In all the works of the more modern historians, from Gibbon to Buckle, in spite of their apparent differences and the apparent novelty of their views, these two old inevitable positions lie at the basis of the argument.
In the first place the historian describes the conduct of separate persons who, in his opinion, lead humanity (one regards as such only monarchs, military generals, and ministers of state; another includes besides monarchs, orators, scientific men, reformers, philosophers, and poets). Secondly, the goal towards which humanity is being led is known to the historian. To one this goal is the greatness of the Roman, or the Spanish, or the French state; for another, it is freedom, equality, a certain sort of civilisation in a little corner of the world called Europe.
In 1789 there was a ferment in Paris: it grew and spread, and found expression in the movement of peoples from west to east. Several times that movement is made to the east, and comes into collision with a counter-movement from east westwards. In the year 1812 it reaches its furthest limit, Moscow, and then, with a remarkable symmetry, the counter-movement follows from east to west; drawing with it, like the first movement, the peoples of Central Europe. The counter-movement reaches the starting-point of the first movement—Paris—and subsides.
During this period of twenty years an immense number of fields are not tilled; houses are burned; trade changes its direction; millions of men grow poor and grow rich, and change their habitations; and millions of Christians, professing the law of love, murder one another.
What does all this mean? What did all this proceed from? What induced these people to burn houses and to murder their fellow-creatures? What were the causes of these events? What force compelled men to act in this fashion? These are the involuntary and most legitimate questions that, in all good faith, humanity puts to itself when it stumbles on memorials and traditions of that past age of restlessness.
To answer these questions the common-sense of humanity turns to the science of history, the object of which is the self-knowledge of nations and of humanity.
Had history retained the view of the ancients, it would have said: The Deity, to reward or to punish His People, gave Napoleon power, and guided his will for the attainment of His own divine ends. And that answer would have been complete and clear. One might believe or disbelieve in the divine significance of Napoleon. For one who believed in it, all the history of that period would have been comprehensible, and there would have been nothing contradictory in it.
But modern history cannot answer in that way. Science does not accept the view of the ancients as to the direct participation of the Deity in the affairs of mankind, and therefore must give other answers.
Modern history, in answer to these questions, says: ‘‘You want to know what this movement means, what it arose from, and what force produced these events? Listen.
‘‘Louis XIV. was a very haughty and self-willed man; he had such and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed France badly. Louis’s successors, too, were weak men, and they, too, governed France badly. And they had such and such favourites, and such and such mistresses. Moreover, there were certain men writing books at this period. At the end of the eighteenth century there were some two dozen men in Paris who began to talk all about men being equal and free. This led people all over France to fall to hewing and hacking at each other. These people killed the king and a great many more. At that time there was in France a man of genius—Napoleon. He conquered every one everywhere, that is, he killed a great many people, because he was a very great genius. And for some reason he went to kill the Africans; and killed them so well, and was so cunning and clever, that on returning to France he bade every one obey him. And they all did obey him. After being made Emperor he went to kill people in Italy, Austria, and Prussia. And there, too, he killed a great many. In Russia there was an Emperor, Alexander, who was resolved to re-establish order in Europe, and so made war with Napoleon. But in 1807 he suddenly made friends with him, and in 1811 he quarrelled again, and again they began killing a great many people. And Napoleon took six hundred thousand men into Russia, and conquered Moscow, and then he suddenly ran away out of Moscow, and then the Emperor Alexander, aided by the counsels of Stein and others, united Europe for defence against the destroyer of her peace. All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies; and the united army advanced against the fresh troops raised by Napoleon. The allies vanquished Napoleon; entered Paris; forced Napoleon to abdicate, and sent him to the island of Elba, not depriving him, however, of the dignity of Emperor, showing him, in fact, every respect, although five years before, and one year later, he was regarded by every one as a brigand outside the pale of the law. And Louis XVIII., who, till then, had been a laughing-stock to the French and the allies, began to reign. Napoleon shed tears before the Old Guard, abdicated the throne, and went into exile. Then the subtle, political people and diplomatists (conspicuous among them Talleyrand, who succeeded in sitting down in a particular chair before any one else, and thereby extended the frontiers of France) had conversations together at Vienna, and by these conversations made nations happy or unhappy. All at once the diplomatists and monarchs all but quarrelled; they were on the point of again commanding their armies to kill one another; but at that time Napoleon entered France with a battalion, and the French, who had been hating him, at once submitted to him. But the allied monarchs were angry at this, and again went to war with the French. And the genius, Napoleon, was conquered; and suddenly recognising that he was a brigand, they took him to the island of St. Helena. And on that rock the exile, parted from the friends of his heart, and from his beloved France, died a lingering death, and bequeathed all his great deeds to posterity. And in Europe the reaction followed, and all the sovereigns began oppressing their subjects again.’’
It would be quite a mistake to suppose that this is mockery—a caricature of historical descriptions. On the contrary, it is a softened-down picture of the contradictory and random answers, that are no answers, given by all history, from the compilers of memoirs and of histories of separate states to general histories, and the new sort of histories of the culture of that period.
What is strange and comic in these answers is due to the fact that modern history is like a deaf man answering questions which no one has asked him.
If the aim of history is the description of the movement of humanity and of nations, the first question which must be answered, or all the rest remains unintelligible, is the following: What force moves nations? To meet this question modern history carefully relates that Napoleon was a very great genius, and that Louis XIV. was very haughty, or that certain writers wrote certain books.
All this may very well be so, and humanity is ready to acquiesce in it; but it is not what it asks about. All that might be very interesting if we recognised a divine power, based on itself and always alike, guiding its peoples through Napoleons, Louis’, and writers; but we do not acknowledge such a power, and therefore before talking about Napoleons, and Louis’, and great writers, we must show the connection existing between those persons and the movement of the nations. If another force is put in the place of the divine power, then it should be explained what that force consists of, since it is precisely in that force that the whole interest of history lies.
History seems to assume that this force is taken for granted of itself, and is known to every one. But in despite of every desire to admit this new force as known, any one who reads through very many historical works cannot but doubt whether this new force, so differently understood by the historians themselves, is perfectly well known to every one.
Chapter 2
WHAT is the force that moves nations?
Biographical historians, and historians writing of separate nations, understand this force as a power residing in heroes and sovereigns. According to their narratives, the events were entirely due to the wills of Napoleons, of Alexanders, or, generally speaking, of those persons who form the subject of historical memoirs. The answers given by historians of this class to the question as to the force which brings about events are satisfactory, but only so long as there is only one historian for any event. But as soon as historians of different views and different nationalities begin describing the same event, the answers given by them immediately lose all their value, as this force is understood by them, not only differently, but often in absolutely opposite ways. One historian asserts that an event is due to the power of Napoleon; another maintains that it is produced by the power of Alexander; a third ascribes it to the influence of some third person. Moreover, historians of this class contradict one another even in their explanation of the force on which the influence of the same person is based. Thiers, a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon’s power rested on his virtue and his genius; Lanfrey, a Republican, declares that it rested on his duplicity and deception of the people. So that historians of this class, mutually destroying each other’s position, at the same time destroy the conception of the force producing events, and give no answer to the essential question of history.
Writers of universal history, who have to deal with all the nations at once, appear to recognise the incorrectness of the views of historians of separate countries as to the force that produces events. They do not recognise this force as a power pertaining to heroes and sovereigns, but regard it as the resultant of many forces working in different directions. In describing a war on the subjugation of a people, the writer of general history seeks the cause of the event, not in the power of one person, but in the mutual action on one another of many persons connected with the event.
The power of historical personages conceived as the product of several forces, according to this view, can hardly, one would have supposed, be regarded as a self-sufficient force independently producing events. Yet writers of general history do in the great majority of cases employ the conception of power again as a self-sufficient force producing events and standing in the relation of cause to them. According to their exposition now the historical personage is the product of his time, and his power is only the product of various forces, now his power is the force producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, for instance, and others, in one place, explain that Napoleon is the product of the Revolution, of the ideas of 1789, and so on; and in another plainly state that the campaign of 1812 and other events not to their liking are simply the work of Napoleon’s wrongly directed will, and that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their development by Napoleon’s arbitrary rule. The ideas of the Revolution, the general temper of the age produced Napoleon’s power. The power of Napoleon suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of the age.
This strange inconsistency is not an accidental one. It confronts us at every turn, and, in fact, whole works upon universal history are made up of consecutive series of such inconsistencies. This inconsistency is due to the fact that after taking a few steps along the road of analysis, these historians have stopped short halfway.
To find the component forces that make up the composite or resultant force, it is essential that the sum of the component parts should equal the resultant. This condition is never observed by historical writers, and consequently, to explain the resultant force, they must inevitably admit, in addition to those insufficient contributory forces, some further unexplained force that affects also the resultant action.
The historian describing the campaign of 1813, or the restoration of the Bourbons, says bluntly that these events were produced by the will of Alexander. But the philosophic historian Gervinus, controverting the view of the special historian of those events, seeks to prove that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons was due not only to Alexander, but also to the work of Stein, Metternich, Madame de Sta?l, Talleyrand, Fichte, Chateaubriand, and others. The historian obviously analyses the power of Alexander into component forces. Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, and so on, and the sum of these component forces, that is, the effect on one another of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Sta?l, and others is obviously not equal to the resultant effect, that is, the phenomenon of millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. Such and such words being said to one another by Chateaubriand, Madame de Sta?l, and others, only affects their relation to one another, and does not account for the submission of millions. And therefore to explain how the submission of millions followed from their relation to one another, that is, how from component forces equal to a given quantity A, there followed a resultant equal to a thousand times A, the historian is inevitably bound to admit that force of power, which he has renounced, accepting it in the resultant force, that is, he is obliged to admit an unexplained force that acts on the resultant of those components. And this is just what the philosophic historians do. And consequently they not only contradict the writers of historical memoirs, but also contradict themselves.
Country people who have no clear idea of the cause of rain say: The wind has blown away the rain, or the wind is blowing up for rain, according as they are in want of rain or of fair weather. In the same way, philosophic historians at times, when they wish it to be so, when it fits in with their theory, say that power is the result of events; and at times, when they want to prove something else, they say power produces the events.
