The Hedgehog and the Fox

¹Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821), seventh conversation: OEuvres complètes de J. de Maistre (Lyon/Paris, 1884–7) [hereafter OC] v 33–4; Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal etc., 1993) [hereafter SPD] (from which the translations of this conversation in the notes are taken) 222–3. ‘People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like. In particular, they tend to consider them as occurring at one place, whereas they cover two or three leagues of country. They ask you seriously: How is it that you don’t know what happened in this battle, since you were there?

Whereas it is precisely the opposite that would often have to be said. Does the one on the right know what is happening on the left? Does he even know what is happening two paces from him? I can easily imagine one of these frightful scenes. On a vast field covered with all the apparatus of carnage and seeming to shudder under the feet of men and horses, in the midst of fire and whirling smoke, dazed and carried away by the din of firearms and cannon, by voices that order, roar and die away, surrounded by the dead, the dying, the mutilated corpses, seized in turn by fear, hope and rage, by five or six different passions, what happens to a man? What does he see? What does he know after a few hours? What can he know about himself and others? Among this crowd of warriors who have fought the whole day, there is often not a single one, not even the general, who knows who the victor is. I will restrict myself to citing modern battles, famous battles whose memory will never perish, battles that have changed the face of Europe and that were lost only because such and such a man thought they were lost; they were battles where all circumstances being equal and without a drop of blood more being shed on either side, the other general could have had a Te Deum sung in his own country and forced history to record the opposite of what it will say.’

¹ ibid. 35; SPD 223. ‘Have we not even seen won battles lost? […] In general, I believe that battles are not won or lost physically.’

² ibid. 29; SPD 220. ‘In the same way, an army of 40,000 men is physically inferior to another army of 60,000, but if the first has more courage, experience and discipline, it will be able to defeat the second, for it is more effective with less mass. This is what we can see on every page of history.’

³

ibid. 31 (omitted by mistake in SPD). ‘It is opinion that loses battles, and it is opinion that wins them.’

¹ ibid. 32; SPD 221. ‘What is a lost battle? […] It is a battle one believes one has lost. Nothing is more true. One man fighting with another is defeated when he has been killed or brought to earth and the other remains standing. This is not the way it is with two armies; the one cannot be killed while the other remains on its feet. The forces are in equilibrium, as are the deaths, and especially since the invention of gunpowder has introduced more equality into the means of destruction, a battle is no longer lost materially, that is to say because there are more dead on one side than the other. It was Frederick II, who understood a little about these things, who said: To win is to advance.

But who is the one who advances? It is the one whose conscience and countenance makes the other fall back.’

² ibid. 33; SPD 222. ‘It is imagination that loses battles.’

³ Letter of 14 September 1812 to Count de Front: OC xii 220–1. ‘Few battles are lost physically – you fire, I fire: […] the real victor, like the real loser, is the one who believes himself to be so.’

⁴ [More literally: ‘We told ourselves very early on that we had lost the battle, and we did lose it.’] War and Peace, vol. 3, part 2, chapter 25, T xi 206; W 855.

¹ Albert Sorel, ‘Tolstoï historien’, Revue bleue 41(January–June 1888), 460–9. This lecture, reprinted in revised form in Sorel’s Lectures historiques (Paris, 1894), has been unjustly neglected by students of Tolstoy; it does much to correct the views of those – e.g. P. I. Biryukov, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: biografiya (Moscow, 1906–8), and K. V. Pokrovsky, op. cit. (31/2), not to mention later critics and literary historians, who almost all rely upon their authority – who omit all reference to Maistre. Émile Haumant is almost unique among earlier scholars in ignoring secondary authorities and discovering the truth for himself: see his La Culture française en Russie (1700–1900) (Paris, 1910), 490–2.

² op. cit. (previous note), 462. This passage is omitted from the 1894 reprint (270).