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By Root 3569 0

and historians of separate peoples understand this force as the force inherent in heroes and rulers. In their descriptions, events are produced solely by the will of the Napoleons, the Alexanders, or generally of those persons the specialized historian is describing. The answers given by this sort of historian to the question of the force that moves events are satisfactory, but only so long as there is one historian for each event. But once historians of different nationalities and views begin to describe the same event, the answers they give immediately lose all meaning, because each of them understands this force not only differently but often in a totally opposite way. One historian insists that the event was produced by the power of Napoleon; another insists that it was produced by the power of Alexander; a third by the power of some third person. Besides that, historians of this sort contradict one another even in explaining that force on which the power of one and the same person is 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 swindling and on duping the people. So that historians of this sort, by mutually demolishing each other’s propositions, thereby demolish the concept of the force that produces events, and give no answer to the essential question of history.

General historians, who deal with all peoples, seem to recognize the incorrectness of the specialized historians’ view of the force that produces events. They do not recognize this force as the power inherent in heroes and rulers, but as the result of many variously directed forces. In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, the general historian seeks the cause of an event not in the power of one person, but in the interaction of many persons connected with the event.

According to this view, it seems that the power of historical figures, conceived as the result of many forces, cannot be considered a force itself productive of events. Yet general historians in most cases happen to use the concept of power once again as a force in itself productive of events and related to them as a cause. By their account, a historical figure is now the product of his time and his power is only the product of various forces, now his power is a force productive of events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and others, for example, now prove that Napoleon was a product of the revolution, of the ideas of 1789, and so on, and now say outright that the campaign of the year twelve and other events they do not like are only products of Napoleon’s misdirected will, and that those same ideas of 1789 were stopped in their development as a result of Napoleon’s despotism. The ideas of the revolution, the general state of mind, produced the power of Napoleon. The power of Napoleon suppressed the ideas of the revolution and the general state of mind.

This strange contradiction is not accidental. Not only is it encountered at every step, but all the descriptions of the general historians are made up of a consecutive series of such contradictions. This contradiction comes from the fact that, having entered upon the path of analysis, the general historians stop halfway.

To find the component forces equal to a composite or resultant, it is necessary that the sum of the components equal the composite. This condition is never observed by general historians, and therefore, in order to explain the resultant force, they must necessarily allow for an unexplained force, besides the insufficient components, which acts upon the composite.

The specialized historian, describing the campaign of the year thirteen, or the restoration of the Bourbons, says directly that these events were produced by the will of Alexander. But the general historian Gervinus, disproving this view of the specialized historian, aims to show that the campaign of the year thirteen and the restoration of the Bourbons had as their causes, besides the will of Alexander, the activity of Stein, Metternich, Mme de Staël, Talleyrand, Fichte,