War and Peace Ch. 316: The Myth of Great Men

Summary

The French campaign after Moscow, Tolstoy says, was a flight in which the crowd destroyed itself. From the turn onto the Kaluga road to the day their leader fled the army, none of the movements of that crowd had any sense. One might have expected historians, who blame the mass on one man's will, to find this stretch impossible to fit their theory. Instead mountains of books still describe Napoleon's arrangements, maneuvers, profound plans, and the genius of his marshals.

The retreat from Malo-Yaroslavets, when a free road into a well-supplied district lay open, is explained as deep calculation. So is the retreat from Smolensk to Orsha. Krasnoe is told as heroism: Napoleon walked with a birch stick and said he had played emperor long enough and would now act general, then ran away again and left scattered fragments of army behind. Ney's greatness of soul, in these books, consists in slipping by night through forest and across the Dnieper to Orsha, abandoning standards, artillery, and nine tenths of his men. Napoleon's last departure in a warm fur coat, leaving to perish men he had brought there, is presented as characteristic of genius. When elastic reasoning cannot stretch farther, historians produce greatness, a category that sits outside right and wrong. For the great man, they say, nothing is an atrocity.

Tolstoy answers with a measure he will not drop. With the standard of good and evil given by Christ, no human action is beyond comparison, and there is no greatness where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent. To admit a greatness not commensurate with right and wrong is, he says, only to admit one's own meanness. The world has repeated Sublime and Grand for fifty years. The same acts look like genius in libraries and like shame in ordinary speech, and those two languages still sit side by side.

In this chapter:Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Resisting the Rewritten History Loop

Tolstoy shows historians calling Napoleon's abandonment of his army greatness while soldiers froze. Ney's catastrophic losses become soul greatness while the word grand replaces right and wrong.

When a failure gets rebranded as vision, ask who suffered and who wrote the press release.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: the historian

Ordinary language would call Napoleon's flight in a fur coat something a child is taught to be ashamed of. The historian produces greatness, and then nothing is wrong. Grand is a parent-word: it authors the escape so the archive need not feel the shame.

Continue this thoughtThe Essay Is How the Novel Refuses a Steering Mind

Coming Up in Chapter 317

What Russian, reading the last part of the campaign of 1812, has not felt regret, dissatisfaction, and perplexity? Who has not asked how the French were not all captured when our three armies surrounded them in superior numbers, and when the disordered French, hungry and freezing, surrendered in crowds?

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Chapter 316

The Myth of Great Men

This campaign consisted in a flight of the French during which they did all they could to destroy themselves. From the time they turned onto the Kalúga road to the day their leader fled from the army, none of the movements of the crowd had any sense. So one might have thought that regarding this period of the campaign the historians, who attributed the actions of the mass to the will of one man, would have found it impossible to make the story of the retreat fit their theory. But no! Mountains of books have been written by the historians…

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The Myth of Great Men

Summary

Why This Matters