Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

perdent point physiquement.1

A nd again, in a similar strain:

De m8me une armee de .f.O,OOO hommes est inf�rieure physiquement t une autre armee de 6o,ooo: mais si Ia premiere a plus de courage, d'experience et de discipline, elle pourra battre Ia seconde;

car elle a plus d'action avec moins de 1Ila.S$C, et c'est ce que nous

voyons t chaque page de l'histoire.3

And finally:

C'est }'opinion qui perd les batailles, et c'est !'opinion qui les

gagne.'

Victory is a moral or psychological, not a physical issue:

qu'est ce qu'une botailk perdue? . . . Cest une botaille qu'on croit

avDir ptrdut. Rien n'est plus vrai. Un homme qui se bat avec un

autre est vaincu lorsqu'il est tu� ou ter�. et que }'autre est debout;

il n'en est pas ainsi de deux arm�: l'une ne peut @tre tuee, tand.is

que }'autre reste en pied. Les forces se balancent ainsi que les mons,

et depuis surtout que }'invention de Ia poudre a mis plus d'�it�

dans les moyens de destruction, une bataille ne se perd plus mat�riellement; c'est-t-dire parce qu'il y a plus de morts d'un cOt� que de

)'autre: aussi Fr�d�ric II, qui s'y entendait un peu, disait: Yainrrt,

c'tst avanctr. Mais que} est celui qui avance? c'est celui dont Ia

conscience et Ia contenance font reculer l'autrc.6

There is and can be no military science, for 'C'est }'imagination qui

perd les bataill�',8 and 'peu de batailles sont perdues physiquement-

1 J. de Maistre, us Soirlts tk Silitrt-Pittrs6Durg {Paris, 196o), entretien 7,

P· :n8.

I ibid., P· 229.

1 ibid., pp. Z:Z.f.·S· The last sentence ia reproduced by Tolltoy almost

verbatim.

' ibid., p. z:z6.

1 ibid., pp. 226-7.

1 ibid., p. 227.

RU SSIAN TH INKERS

vous tirez, je tire • • . le viritable vainqueur, comme le viritable vainaa,

c'est celui qui croit l'etre'.1

This is the lesson which Tolstoy says he derives from Stendhal,

but the words of Prince Andrey about Austerlitz-'We lost because

we told ourselves we lost' -as well as the attribution of Russian victory

over Napoleon to the strength of the Russian desire to survive, echo

Maistre and not Stendhal.

This close parallelism between Maistre's and Tolstoy's views about

the chaos and uncontrollability of battles and wars, with its larger

implications for human life generally, together with the contempt of

both for the naive explanations provided by academic historians to

account for human violence and lust for war, was noted by the eminent

French historian Albert Sorel, in a little-known lecture to the Ecole

des Sciences Politiques delivered on 7 April 1 888.1 He drew a parallel

between Maistre and Tolstoy, and observed that although Maistre

was a theocrat, while Tolstoy was a 'nihilist', yet both regarded the

first causes of events as mysterious, involving the reduction of human

wills to nullity. 'The distance', wrote Sorel, 'from the theocrat to the

mystic, and from the mystic to the nihilist, is smaller than that from

the butterAy to the larva, from the larva to the chrysalis, from the

chrysalis to the butterAy.' Tolstoy resembles Maistre in being, above

all, curious about first causes, in asking such questions as Maistre's

'Expliquez pourquoi a qu'il y a de plus honorable dons le monde au

jugement de tout le genre lzumoin sons exception, est le droit de vmer

innocemment le song innocent.?',l in rejecting all rationalist or

naturalistic answers, in stressing impalpable psychological and 'spiritual'

-and sometimes 'zoological' -factors as determining events, and in

stressing these at the expense of statistical analyses of military strength,

very much like Maistre in his dispatches to his government at Cagliari.

• Letters, I4 September I8u.

2 Alben Sorel, 'Tolstol historien', Revue bkue 4I (January-June I888),

46o-79· This lecture, reprinted in Sorel's Lectures bisturiqru:s (Paris, I894), has

been unjustly neglected by students of Tolstoy; it does much to correct the views

of those (e.g. P. I. Biryukov and K. V. Pokrovskyin their works cited above [p. 15,

note I; p. 41, note z], not to mention later critics and literary historians who

almost all rely upon their authority) who omit all reference to Maistre. Emile

Haumant is almost unique among earlier scholars in ignoring secondary authorities, and discovering the truth for himself; see his Lil Culture frlmfllist en Rlmie (I700-I9oo) (Paris, I9Io), pp. 490-z.

J op. cit. (p. 6I, note I above), entretien 7, pp. Z l l-I J.

6:z

T H E HEDG E H O G AND T H E FOX

Indeed, Tolstoy's accounts of mass movements-in .battle, and in the

flight of the Russians from Moscow or of the French from Russiamight almost be designed to give concrete illustrations of Maistre's theory of the unplanned and unplannable character of all great events.

But the parallel runs deeper. The Savoyard Count and the Russian

are both reacting, and reacting violently, against liberal optimism

concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress: both furiously denounce the notion that mankind can be made eternally happy and virtuous by rational and

scientific means.

The first great wave of optimistic rationalism which followed the

Wars of Religion broke against the violence of the great French

Revolution and the political despotism and social and economic misery

which ensued : in Russia a similar development was shattered by the

long succession of repressive measures taken by Nicholas I to counteract firstly the effect of the Decembrist revolt, and, nearly a quarter of a century later, the influence of the European revolutions of 1 848-9;

and to this must be added the material and moral effect, a decade later,

of the Crimean debacle. In both cases the emergence of naked force

killed a great deal of tender-minded idealism, and resulted in various

types of realism and toughness - among others, materialistic socialism,

authoritarian neo-feudalism, blood-and-iron nationalism and other

bitterly anti-liberal movements. In the case of both Maistre and

Tolstoy, for all their unbridgeably deep psychological, social, cultural,

and religious differences, the disillusionment took the form of an

acute scepticism about scientific method as such, distrust of all liberalism, positivism, rationalism, and of all the forms of high-minded secularism then influential in western Europe; and led to a deliberate

emphasis on the 'unpleasant' aspects of _human history, from which

sentimental romantics, humanist historians, and optimistic social

theorists seemed so resolutely to be averting their gaze.

Both Maistre and Tolstoy spoke of political reformers (in one

interesting instance, of the same individual representative of them, the

Russian statesman Speransky) in the same tone of bitterly contem�

tuous irony. Maistre was suspected of having had an actual hand in

Speransky's fall and exile; Tolstoy, through the eyes of Prince Andrey,

describes the pale face of Alexander's one-time favourite, his soft hands,

his fussy and self-important manner, the artificiality and emptiness of