conditionally, under definite and known conditions, and to
show that all limitations, conflicts, and even destructions
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of power result from a nonobservance by the rulers of the
conditions under which their power was entrusted to them;
or (3) that the will of the people is delegated to the rulers
conditionally, but that the conditions are unknown and
indefinite, and that the appearance of several authorities,
their struggles and their falls, result solely from the greater
or lesser fulfillment by the rulers of these unknown conditions on which the will of the people is transferred from
some people to others.
And these are the three ways in which the historians do
explain the relation of the people to their rulers.
Some historiansthose biographical and specialist historians already referred toin their simplicity failing to
understand the question of the meaning of power, seem
to consider that the collective will of the people is unconditionally transferred to historical persons, and therefore
when describing some single state they assume that particular power to be the one absolute and real power, and that
any other force opposing this is not a power but a violation
of powermere violence.
Their theory, suitable for primitive and peaceful periods
of history, has the inconveniencein application to complex
and stormy periods in the life of nations during which various powers arise simultaneously and struggle with one
anotherthat a Legitimist historian will prove that the National Convention, the Directory, and Bonaparte were
mere infringers of the true power, while a Republican and a
Bonapartist will prove: the one that the Convention and the
other that the Empire was the real power, and that all the
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others were violations of power. Evidently the explanations
furnished by these historians being mutually contradictory
can only satisfy young children.
Recognizing the falsity of this view of history, another set
of historians say that power rests on a conditional delegation
of the will of the people to their rulers, and that historical
leaders have power only conditionally on carrying out the
program that the will of the people has by tacit agreement
prescribed to them. But what this program consists in these
historians do not say, or if they do they continually contradict one another.
Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes a nation’s progress, looks for these conditions in the
greatness, wealth, freedom, or enlightenment of citizens of
France or some other country. But not to mention the historians’ contradictions as to the nature of this programor even
admitting that some one general program of these conditions existsthe facts of history almost always contradict that
theory. If the conditions under which power is entrusted
consist in the wealth, freedom, and enlightenment of the
people, how is it that Louis XIV and Ivan the Terrible end
their reigns tranquilly, while Louis XVI and Charles I are
executed by their people? To this question historians reply
that Louis XIV’s activity, contrary to the program, reacted
on Louis XVI. But why did it not react on Louis XIV or
on Louis XVwhy should it react just on Louis XVI? And
what is the time limit for such reactions? To these questions
there are and can be no answers. Equally little does this
view explain why for several centuries the collective will is
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not withdrawn from certain rulers and their heirs, and then
suddenly during a period of fifty years is transferred to the
Convention, to the Directory, to Napoleon, to Alexander,
to Louis XVIII, to Napoleon again, to Charles X, to Louis
Philippe, to a Republican government, and to Napoleon III.
When explaining these rapid transfers of the people’s will
from from one individual to another, especially in view of
international relations, conquests, and alliances, the historians are obliged to admit that some of these transfers are
not normal delegations of the people’s will but are accidents
dependent on cunning, on mistakes, on craft, or on the
weakness of a diplomatist, a ruler, or a party leader. So that
the greater part of the events of historycivil wars, revolutions, and conquestsare presented by these historians not
as the results of free transferences of the people’s will, but
as results of the ill-directed will of one or more individuals,
that is, once again, as usurpations of power. And so these
historians also see and admit historical events which are exceptions to the theory.
These historians resemble a botanist who, having noticed
that some plants grow from seeds producing two cotyledons, should insist that all that grows does so by sprouting
into two leaves, and that the palm, the mushroom, and even
the oak, which blossom into full growth and no longer resemble two leaves, are deviations from the theory.
Historians of the third class assume that the will of the
people is transferred to historic personages conditionally,
but that the conditions are unknown to us. They say that
historical personages have power only because they fulfill
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the will of the people which has been delegated to them.
But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in
the historic leaders but in the nations themselves, what significance have those leaders?
The leaders, these historians tell us, express the will of
the people: the activity of the leaders represents the activity
of the people.
But in that case the question arises whether all the activity of the leaders serves as an expression of the people’s will
or only some part of it. If the whole activity of the leaders
serves as the expression of the people’s will, as some historians suppose, then all the details of the court scandals
contained in the biographies of a Napoleon or a Catherine
serve to express the life of the nation, which is evident nonsense; but if it is only some particular side of the activity of
an historical leader which serves to express the people’s life,
as other so-called ‘philosophical’ historians believe, then to
determine which side of the activity of a leader expresses
the nation’s life, we have first of all to know in what the nation’s life consists.
Met by this difficulty historians of that class devise some
most obscure, impalpable, and general abstraction which
can cover all conceivable occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of humanity’s movement. The most
usual generalizations adopted by almost all the historians
are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, civilization,
and culture. Postulating some generalization as the goal of
the movement of humanity, the historians study the men of
whom the greatest number of monuments have remained:
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kings, ministers, generals, authors, reformers, popes, and
journalists, to the extent to which in their opinion these
persons have promoted or hindered that abstraction. But as
it is in no way proved that the aim of humanity does consist
in freedom, equality, enlightenment, or civilization, and as
the connection of the people with the rulers and enlighteners of humanity is only based on the arbitrary assumption
that the collective will of the people is always transferred
to the men whom we have noticed, it happens that the activity of the millions who migrate, burn houses, abandon
agriculture, and destroy one another never is expressed in
the account of the activity of some dozen people who did
not burn houses, practice agriculture, or slay their fellow
creatures.
History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the
peoples of the west at the end of the eighteenth century and
their drive eastward explained by the activity of Louis XIV,
XV, and XVI, their mistresses and ministers, and by the
lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais, and
others?
Is the movement of the Russian people eastward to Kazan and Siberia expressed by details of the morbid character
of Ivan the Terrible and by his correspondence with Kurbski?
Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by the life and activity of the Godfreys and
the Louis-es and their ladies? For us that movement of the
peoples from west to east, without leaders, with a crowd of
vagrants, and with Peter the Hermit, remains incompre2252
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hensible. And yet more incomprehensible is the cessation of
that movement when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusadethe deliverance of Jerusalemhad been clearly defined by
historic leaders. Popes, kings, and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy Land; but the people did not go, for
the unknown cause which had previously impelled them to
go no longer existed. The history of the Godfreys and the
Minnesingers can evidently not cover the life of the peoples.
And the history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers has
remained the history of Godfreys and Minnesingers, but
the history of the life of the peoples and their impulses has
remained unknown.
Still less does the history of authors and reformers explain to us the life of the peoples.
The history of culture explains to us the impulses and
conditions of life and thought of a writer or a reformer. We
learn that Luther had a hot temper and said such and such
things; we learn that Rousseau was suspicious and wrote
such and such books; but we do not learn why after the
Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why
during the French Revolution they guillotined one another.
If we unite both these kinds of history, as is done by the
newest historians, we shall have the history of monarchs
and writers, but not the history of the life of the peoples.
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Chapter V
The life of the nations is not contained in the lives of a
few men, for the connection between those men and the nations has not been found. The theory that this connection is
based on the transference of the collective will of a people to
certain historical personages is an hypothesis unconfirmed
by the experience of history.
The theory of the transference of the collective will of
the people to historic persons may perhaps explain much in
the domain of jurisprudence and be essential for its purposes, but in its application to history, as soon as revolutions,
conquests, or civil wars occurthat is, as soon as history beginsthat theory explains nothing.
The theory seems irrefutable just because the act of
transference of the people’s will cannot be verified, for it
never occurred.
Whatever happens and whoever may stand at the head
of affairs, the theory can always say that such and such a
person took the lead because the collective will was
