the fact that modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked.
If the purpose of history be to give a description of the
movement of humanity and of the peoples, the first questionin the absence of a reply to which all the rest will be
incomprehensibleis: what is the power that moves peoples?
To this, modern history laboriously replies either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was very proud,
or that certain writers wrote certain books.
All that may be so and mankind is ready to agree with it,
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but it is not what was asked. All that would be interesting
if we recognized a divine power based on itself and always
consistently directing its nations through Napoleons, Louis-es, and writers; but we do not acknowledge such a power,
and therefore before speaking about Napoleons, Louis-es,
and authors, we ought to be shown the connection existing
between these men and the movement of the nations.
If instead of a divine power some other force has appeared, it should be explained in what this new force
consists, for the whole interest of history lies precisely in
that force.
History seems to assume that this force is self-evident
and known to everyone. But in spite of every desire to regard it as known, anyone reading many historical works
cannot help doubting whether this new force, so variously
understood by the historians themselves, is really quite well
known to everybody.
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Chapter II
What force moves the nations?
Biographical historians and historians of separate nations understand this force as a power inherent in heroes
and rulers. In their narration events occur solely by the will
of a Napoleon, and Alexander, or in general of the persons
they describe. The answers given by this kind of historian to the question of what force causes events to happen
are satisfactory only as long as there is but one historian
to each event. As soon as historians of different nationalities and tendencies begin to describe the same event, the
replies they give immediately lose all meaning, for this force
is understood by them all not only differently but often in
quite contradictory ways. One historian says that an event
was produced by Napoleon’s power, another that it was produced by Alexander’s, a third that it was due to the power of
some other person. Besides this, historians of that kind contradict each other even in their statement as to the force on
which the authority of some particular person was based.
Thiers, a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon’s power was based
on his virtue and genius. Lanfrey, a Republican, says it was
based on his trickery and deception of the people. So the
historians of this class, by mutually destroying one another’s positions, destroy the understanding of the force which
produces events, and furnish no reply to history’s essential
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question.
Writers of universal history who deal with all the nations
seem to recognize how erroneous is the specialist historians’ view of the force which produces events. They do not
recognize it as a power inherent in heroes and rulers, but as
the resultant of a multiplicity of variously directed forces.
In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, a general
historian looks for the cause of the event not in the power of
one man, but in the interaction of many persons connected
with the event.
According to this view the power of historical personages, represented as the product of many forces, can no longer,
it would seem, be regarded as a force that itself produces
events. Yet in most cases universal historians still employ
the conception of power as a force that itself produces events,
and treat it as their cause. In their exposition, an historic
character is first the product of his time, and his power only
the resultant of various forces, and then his power is itself a
force producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and others, for
instance, at one time prove Napoleon to be a product of the
Revolution, of the ideas of 1789 and so forth, and at another
plainly say that the campaign of 1812 and other things they
do not like were simply the product of Napoleon’s misdirected will, and that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in
their development by Napoleon’s caprice. The ideas of the
Revolution and the general temper of the age produced Napoleon’s power. But Napoleon’s power suppressed the ideas
of the Revolution and the general temper of the age.
This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not only
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does it occur at every step, but the universal historians’ accounts are all made up of a chain of such contradictions.
This contradiction occurs because after entering the field of
analysis the universal historians stop halfway.
To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the sum of the components must equal the
resultant. This condition is never observed by the universal historians, and so to explain the resultant forces they
are obliged to admit, in addition to the insufficient components, another unexplained force affecting the resultant
action.
Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813
or the restoration of the Bourbons plainly assert that these
events were produced by the will of Alexander. But the
universal historian Gervinus, refuting this opinion of the
specialist historian, tries to prove that the campaign of
1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons were due to other
things beside Alexander’s willsuch as the activity of Stein,
Metternich, Madame de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte Chateaubriand, and others. The historian evidently decomposes
Alexander’s power into the components: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, and the restbut the sum of the components, that
is, the interactions of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame
de Stael, and the others, evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of millions of Frenchmen
submitting to the Bourbons. That Chateaubriand, Madame
de Stael, and others spoke certain words to one another only
affected their mutual relations but does not account for the
submission of millions. And therefore to explain how from
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these relations of theirs the submission of millions of people resultedthat is, how component forces equal to one A
gave a resultant equal to a thousand times Athe historian
is again obliged to fall back on powerthe force he had deniedand to recognize it as the resultant of the forces, that is,
he has to admit an unexplained force acting on the resultant. And that is just what the universal historians do, and
consequently they not only contradict the specialist historians but contradict themselves.
Peasants having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say,
according to whether they want rain or fine weather: ‘The
wind has blown the clouds away,’ or, ‘The wind has brought
up the clouds.’ And in the same way the universal historians
sometimes, when it pleases them and fits in with their theory, say that power is the result of events, and sometimes,
when they want to prove something else, say that power
produces events.
A third class of historiansthe so-called historians of
culturefollowing the path laid down by the universal historians who sometimes accept writers and ladies as forces
producing eventsagain take that force to be something quite
different. They see it in what is called culturein mental activity.
The historians of culture are quite consistent in regard
to their progenitors, the writers of universal histories, for
if historical events may be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one another in such and such ways,
why not explain them by the fact that such and such people wrote such and such books? Of the immense number of
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indications accompanying every vital phenomenon, these
historians select the indication of intellectual activity and
say that this indication is the cause. But despite their endeavors to prove that the cause of events lies in intellectual
activity, only by a great stretch can one admit that there
is any connection between intellectual activity and the
movement of peoples, and in no case can one admit that intellectual activity controls people’s actions, for that view is
not confirmed by such facts as the very cruel murders of the
French Revolution resulting from the doctrine of the equality of man, or the very cruel wars and executions resulting
from the preaching of love.
But even admitting as correct all the cunningly devised
arguments with which these histories are filledadmitting
that nations are governed by some undefined force called an
ideahistory’s essential question still remains unanswered,
and to the former power of monarchs and to the influence
of advisers and other people introduced by the universal
historians, another, newer forcethe ideais added, the connection of which with the masses needs explanation. It is
possible to understand that Napoleon had power and so
events occurred; with some effort one may even conceive
that Napoleon together with other influences was the cause
of an event; but how a book, Le Contrat social, had the effect
of making Frenchmen begin to drown one another cannot
be understood without an explanation of the causal nexus
of this new force with the event.
Undoubtedly some relation exists between all who live
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nection between the intellectual activity of men and their
historical movements, just as such a connection may be
found between the movements of humanity and commerce,
handicraft, gardening, or anything else you please. But why
intellectual activity is considered by the historians of culture to be the cause or expression of the whole historical
movement is hard to understand. Only the following considerations can have led the historians to such a conclusion:
(1) that history is written by learned men, and so it is natural and agreeable for them to think that the activity of their
class supplies the basis of the movement of all humanity,
just as a similar belief is natural and agreeable to traders,
agriculturists, and soldiers (if they do not express it, that is
merely because traders and soldiers do not write history),
and (2) that spiritual activity, enlightenment, civilization,
culture, ideas, are all indistinct, indefinite conceptions under whose banner it is very easy to use words having a still
less definite meaning, and which can therefore be readily
introduced into any theory.
But not to speak of the intrinsic quality of histories of
this kind (which may possibly even be of use to someone for
something) the histories of culture, to which all
