War and Peace

Seven years pass since the French invasion of Russia. Tsar Alexander evolves his policies, changing from the liberal views of his early reign to a more reactionary and conservative approach. The narrator reflects that the evolution of a politician’s outlook can complicate their place in history. Historical figures are a mixture of good and bad because they are human. Reducing causality to the actions of so-called great men (such as Napoleon or Alexander) makes for flawed historical analysis. However, the narrator suggests that accepting that events are incomprehensibly complicated paradoxically provides a unified and coherent conception of history. Wars and invasions are the product of a long series of unrelated chance occurrences; they are not isolated incidents but the result of a complex event chain that can never be understood in its entirety.

The narrator views Napoleon’s career as the product of millions of random incidents. His rise to power, his military campaigns, his defeat in Russia, and his reemergence after exile happen more because an untold number of individual decisions and actions take place than because Napoleon is an inherently great man. However, because Napoleon and others around him consider him great, his influence on history becomes outsized. Trying to understand the truth of history will always be impossible because of the sheer complexity of events.