The Ryazan Road to Ruin by Revolution

Day 234 of A Year of War and Peace

Anyone who has ever attempted to organize a simple family reunion will get a good laugh out of today’s chapter. It’s tough enough to coordinate the schedules, diets and desires of loved ones. Just imagine trying to impose your will on an entire nation composed of Rostovs, Bezukhovs and Bolkonskys! Yet that is exactly what Napoleon has in mind today as he surveys Moscow from the Poklonny Hill:

“Here she is, the reward for all those fainthearted men,” he reflected, glancing at those near him and at the troops who were approaching and forming up. “One word from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient capital of the Tsars would perish. But my clemency is always ready to descend upon the vanquished. I must be magnanimous and truly great. But no, it can’t be true that I am in Moscow,” he suddenly thought. “Yet here she is lying at my feet, with her golden domes and crosses scintillating and twinkling in the sunshine. But I shall spare her. On the ancient monuments of barbarism and despotism I will inscribe great words of justice and mercy…. It is just this which Alexander will feel most painfully, I know him.” (It seemed to Napoleon that the chief import of what was taking place lay in the personal struggle between himself and Alexander.) “From the height of the Krémlin — yes, there is the Krémlin, yes — I will give them just laws; I will teach them the meaning of true civilization.”

We’ve spoken before of Napoleon’s hubris. We’ve also discussed the stabilizing forces of tradition in society. Today these subjects are married. Today Napoleon believes that with “one movement of my hand” he can rearrange the social and political relations of an entire society. He honestly believes that instant proclamations upon an untested, unstudied population will prove more robust than the system the Muscovites themselves have built up through centuries of tinkering trial-and-error.

Napoleon considers the subjects of his conquest to be like so many chess pieces. He need only arrange them in an advantageous position on the chessboard. But people are not chess pieces. People are primates, prone to the same compulsion towards group identity and lethal violence as their evolutionary forebearers.

That’s probably one reason why revolutions are such brutal affairs. Does Napoleon really think his revolution will be so different when he rolls up with all his fancy French ways and starts ordering these Russians around? We’ll see.

Revolutionaries take note.

DAILY MEDITATION