History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize that life in words, even the life of a single nation, appears impossible. The ancient historians all used one method: they described the activity of individuals who ruled, and regarded that activity as representing the whole people. How did individuals make nations act as they wished, and by what was the will of those individuals guided? The ancients met the question by recognizing a divinity that subjected nations to a chosen man and guided that man's will toward predestined ends. For them the questions were solved by belief in the direct participation of the Deity in human affairs.
Modern history, in theory, rejects both principles. It would seem that, having rejected subjection to the Deity and a predetermined aim, it should study not the manifestations of power but the causes that produce it. It has not done this. Having rejected the ancients in theory, it still follows them in practice. Instead of men endowed with divine authority, it gives us heroes with superhuman capacities, or simply men of various kinds, from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses. Instead of the former divine aims of Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, it postulates the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the civilization of humanity, by which is usually meant the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent. From Gibbon to Buckle, two old assumptions remain: nations guided by individual men, and a known aim toward which humanity tends.
In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris, spreads, and is expressed by a movement of peoples from west to east. It collides with a countermovement, reaches Moscow in 1812, then with remarkable symmetry returns to Paris and subsides. In those twenty years fields lie untilled, houses burn, millions migrate, and millions of Christian men professing the law of love slay one another. What made those people burn houses and slay their fellows? Common sense turns to history. If history had retained the ancients' conception it would have said that God gave Napoleon power to reward or punish, and the reply would have been clear. Science will not admit that. So modern history answers with a chain: Louis XIV was proud, his descendants weak, a couple of dozen men in Paris talked of freedom, people slashed one another, a man of genius named Napoleon killed people everywhere, ran from Moscow, was sent to Elba with respect, returned, was sent to St. Helena as a brigand. Tolstoy says it would be a mistake to think this is caricature. It is a mild expression of the contradictory replies historians give. Modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked. The first question, without which the rest are incomprehensible, is: what is the power that moves peoples?
