Napoleon and Contingency

Just a quick book note today. The Simms book, EUROPE, is a very ambitious effort to put between two covers a discussion of the modern history (mostly the old-fashioned sort of history -- politics, war, and diplomacy) of the named continent.


The book gives to this convoluted subject matter, ranging from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to headlines in the early 21st century, fewer than 700 pages. Excluding the lengthy source notes gives you just 530 pages.
Personally, I'm a sucker for Big Picture books like this.


Anyway: one of the themes of Simms' book is contingency. There was nothing inevitable, Simms tells us, "about the defeats of Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler."
Charles V was the King of Spain, and the Holy Roman Emperor, at the time when Spain was conquering much of the New World. Charles' big defeat was in his efforts in his Imperial capacity to suppress the Protestant Reformation. (He did keep it out of Spain, though!)
Louis XIV, France's Sun King, made his nation the dominant power in Europe (and a player of considerable importance in North America).  But he too suffered reversals. In the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 he had to abandon French claims to Lorraine, and he had to give up his support for the Stuarts in England, recognizing William III as the lawful King there.


On the issue of contingency, though, I'd like to focus on the third of the above examples. where is the contingency in Bonaparte's defeat? Simms thinks it possible, had the winter of 1812-13 been less severe, that Napoleon could have cemented his military position deep inside Russia, including of course Moscow. If that had happened, it is further a possibility "that further setbacks might have sparked palace revolution against Alexander."


That is, after all, a lot like what happened in 1917. Czarist setbacks in a war against Germany were critical to the sparking of a revolution in Russia, and that allowed the Germans a separate peace on their eastern flank. [Yes, I know it didn't ultimately do the Kaiser any good. Still, that reflection makes the Napoleon counter-factual more intriguing.]


Let's turn this book note into an opportunity for philosophical reflection.


What exactly do we mean when we say that the bitterness of that weather in 1812-13 was a "contingency"?


We don't necessarily mean that it was a matter of chance in a cosmic sense, do we? That is, I could still believe that weather is a thoroughly deterministic system (if only all the pertinent facts were known) and still see Simms' point here.


What we mean, I submit, is that the weather in Russia that year was a matter outside the scope of what we usually call "history," the study of the development of human societies. The weather was exogenous to the history of 19th century Europe,not endogenous.


Simms is saying that European history, and we might hypothesize human history generally, is not a closed system. It is continuously receiving stimulus from without.


And that is a point worth making, if only because it excludes the theorizing of a Spengler or Toynbee, who seem to require that history have its own laws, its own endogenous chains of cause and effect.