《War And Peace》 Epilogue2 CHAPTER IV
by Leo Tolstoy
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.
