From the close of the year 1811 an intensified arming and concentrating of
the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces—millions
of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army—moved from
the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811
Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the
forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that
is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature.
Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes,
frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries,
incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the
annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed
them did not at the time regard as being crimes.
What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The
historians tell us with naïve assurance that its causes were the wrongs
inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental
System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes
of the diplomatists, and so on.
Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich,
Rumyántsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have
taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have
written to Alexander: “My respected Brother, I consent to restore the
duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg”—and there would have been no war.
We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries. It
naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England’s
intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally
seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war was
Napoleon’s ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the war
was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the war was
the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old
soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving
them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need of
re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of that time
that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between Russia and
Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon,
and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It is natural that
these and a countless and infinite quantity of other reasons, the number
depending on the endless diversity of points of view, presented themselves
to the men of that day; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that
happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning,
these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions
of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon
was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was
astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection
such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence:
why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of
Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed
by them.
To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away
by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with
unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present
themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them
we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us
equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared
to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the
cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the
event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to
serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to
withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of
Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and
a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so
many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.
Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw
beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would
have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second
term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been a
war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had
Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic
government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent
dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French
Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have
happened. So all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to
bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it
had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human
feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows,
just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to
the west, slaying their fellows.
The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to
hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn
into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise,
for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event
seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable
circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have
taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the
real power—the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and
guns—should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals,
and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and
complex causes.
We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational
events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not
understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably,
the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims,
and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing
this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed
at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in
which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which
is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive
life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the
attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is
irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of
millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man
stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the
more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and
inevitability of his every action.
“The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.”
A king is history’s slave.
History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses
every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.
Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that
it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples *—as
Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him—he had never
been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while
thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive
life—that is to say, for history—whatever had to be performed.
The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and by
the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and
co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the
nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg’s wrongs,
the movement of troops into Prussia—undertaken (as it seemed to
Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the French
Emperor’s love and habit of war coinciding with his people’s inclinations,
allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenditure on
those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages to compensate for
that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received in Dresden, the
diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of contemporaries, were
carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace, but which only wounded
the self-love of both sides, and millions of other causes that adapted
themselves to the event that was happening or coincided with it.
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its
attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by
the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because
the boy standing below wants to eat it?
Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in
which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who
finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth
is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the
apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or
wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to,
and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says
that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last
navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the
so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels
they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in
an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of
history and predestined from eternity.