Arthur Chevallier is publisher and author of several works on Napoleon. He curated the “Napoleon” exhibition (la Villette/Grand Palais). He has just published
Napoleon and Bonapartism
(Que sais-je, January 2021).
Russia has never lacked imagination to justify its conquests.
This country preoccupied with eternity, which has made metaphysics a way of life, even a simple art, sometimes exceptional, is wary of rationality.
The latter would be all the more suspect in that the West would divert it to its advantage, by invoking it to justify, in all areas, its supremacy;
and the West would basically have no sense of otherness.
In his speech delivered at Harvard in 1978, since known as
The Decline of Courage
, Alexander Solzhenitsyn declared:
“Any original culture (…) already constitutes a world apart, full of mystery and unexpectedness for Western thought.
(…) Such has been, for a thousand years, the case of Russia, although Western thought…
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