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From the close of the year 1811 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 naive 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,
Rumyantsev, 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 way 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 Smolensk 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.
*"To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples."
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 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.
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