War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [774]
Their theory, fit for primitive and peaceful periods of history, when applied to complex and stormy periods in the life of peoples, during which various powers arise simultaneously and struggle with each other, has the inconvenience that a legitimist historian will prove that the Convention, the Directoire, and Bonaparte were only breaches of power, while a republican and Bonapartist will prove—the one, that the Convention, and the other, that the empire was the real power, and that all the rest were breaches of power. It is obvious that the explanations of power by these historians, mutually refuting each other in this fashion, can be fit only for children of the most tender age.
Recognizing the falseness of this view of history, another sort of historian says that power is based on the conditional handing over to rulers of the sum total of the wills of the masses, and that historical figures have power only on condition of carrying out the program which the will of the people has tacitly agreed to prescribe to them. But what those conditions consist in the historians do not tell us, or if they do, they constantly contradict each other.
Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes the goal of the movement of a people, sees those conditions as the greatness, wealth, freedom, enlightenment of the citizens of France or some other state. But to say nothing of the contradictions of historians as to what those conditions are, even allowing for the existence of a single program of those conditions common to all, we will find that the historical facts almost always contradict this theory. If the conditions under which power is handed over consist in wealth, freedom, enlightenment of the people, then why do a Louis XIV and an Ivan the Terrible quietly live out their reigns, while a Louis XVI and a Charles I are executed by their people? To this question the historians answer that the activity of Louis XIV, being contrary to the program, affected Louis XVI. But why did it not affect Louis XIV and XV; why did it affect precisely Louis XVI? And what is the term of this effect? To these questions there neither are nor can be any answers. Equally little explanation is given by this view of the reason why the sum total of wills is not transferred from its rulers and their successors for several centuries, but then suddenly, in the course of fifty years, is transferred to the Convention, the Directoire, Napoleon, Alexander, Louis XVIII, again to Napoleon, to Charles X, to Louis Philippe, to the republican government, to Napoleon III. While explaining these quickly occurring transfers of wills from one figure to another, especially to do with international relations, conquests, and alliances, these historians must involuntarily recognize that part of these phenomena are not regular transfers of wills, but accidents, depending now on cunning, now on error, or perfidy, or the weakness of a diplomat, or a monarch, or a party leader. So that the majority of historical phenomena—civil wars, revolutions, conquests—are presented by these historians not as the results of transfers of free wills, but as results of the false application of the will of one or several men, that is, again, as breaches of power. And therefore historical events of this sort, too, are presented by historians as deviations from theory.
These historians are like the botanist who, having observed that some plants emerge from the seed with two cotyledons, would insist that everything that grows, grows only by doubling itself into two leaves, and that a palm, and a mushroom, and even an oak, branching out in its full growth and no longer having any resemblance to two leaves, deviate from the theory.
Historians of the third sort recognize that the will of the masses is transferred to historical figures conditionally,