He was born at Honfleur and remained throughout his life a lover of his native Normandy. His father, a rich manufacturer, wanted him to take over the business but his literary vocation prevailed. He went to live in Paris, where he studied law and, after a prolonged stay in Germany, entered the Foreign Office. He had strongly developed literary and artistic tastes, was an enthusiastic musician, and wrote both poetry and novels ; but he was not a socialite. He was the first cousin to the philosopher Georges Sorel.
Academic life
Anxious to understand present as well as past events, he was above all a student. In 1870 he was chosen as secretary by M. de Chaudordy, who had been sent to Tours as a delegate in charge of the diplomatic side of the problem of national defence. He proved a most valuable collaborator, full of finesse, good temper, and excellent judgment, and at the same time hard-working and discreet. After the war, when Emile Boutmy founded the Ecole libre des sciences politiques. Sorel was appointed to teach diplomatic history, a duty which he performed with striking success. Some of his courses were converted into books: Le traité de Paris du 20 novembre 1815 ; Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande ; and the Précis du droit des gens which he published in collaboration with his colleague Theodore Funck-Brentano.
Writings
In 1875 Sorel left the Foreign Office and became general secretary to the newly created office of the Présidence du sénat. Here again, in a position where he could observe and review affairs, he performed valuable service, especially under the presidency of Audiffret-Pasquier, who was glad to have Sorel's advice in the most serious crises of internal politics. His duties left him, however, sufficient leisure to enable him to accomplish the great work of his life, L'Europe et la révolution française. His object was to repeat the work already done by Heinrich von Sybel but from a less restricted point of view and with a clearer and calmer understanding of the chessboard of Europe. He spent almost thirty years in the preparation and composition of the eight volumes of this diplomatic history; volume 1 appeared in 1885; volume 8 in 1904. Francis Herrick says, "it is still the best analysis of the European state system in the eighteenth century and the classic introduction to the study of revolutionary and Napoleonic diplomacy." He was not merely a conscientious scholar; the analysis of the documents, mostly unpublished, on French diplomacy during the first years of the Revolution, which he published in the Revue historique, shows with what scrupulous care he read the innumerable despatches which passed under his notice. He was also, and above all things, an artist. He drew men from the point of view of a psychologist as much as of a historian, observing them in their surroundings and being interested in showing how greatly they are slaves to the fatality of history. It was this fatality which led the rashest of the Conventionals to resume the tradition of the ancien régime, and caused the revolutionary propaganda to end in a system of alliances and annexations which carried on the work of Louis XIV. This view is certainly suggestive, but incomplete; it is largely true when applied to the men of the French Revolution, inexperienced or mediocre as they were, and incompetent to develop the enormous enterprises of Napoleon I.
Literary works
In the earlier volumes the reader is struck by the grandeur and relentless logic of the drama which the author unfolds. In the later volumes the reader may begin to have reservations, but the work is so complete and so powerfully constructed that it commands its audiences admiration. Side by side with this great general work, Sorel undertook various detailed studies more or less directly bearing on his subject. In La Question d'Orient au XVIIIe siècle, les origines de latriple alliance, he shows how the partition of Poland on the one hand reversed the traditional policy of France in eastern Europe, and on the other hand contributed towards the salvation of republican France in 1793. In the Grands écrivains series he was responsible for Montesquieu and Mme de Staël. The portrait which he draws of Montesquieu is all the more vivid for the intellectual affinities which existed between him and the author of the Lettres persanes and the Esprit des lois. Later, in Bonaparte et Hoche en 1797, he produced a critical comparison which is one of his most finished works. In the Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs he prepared vol. i. dealing with Austria. Most of the articles which he contributed to various reviews and to the Temps newspaper have been collected into volumes: Essais d'histoire et de critique, Lectures historiques, Nouveaux essais d'histoire et de critique, Etudes de littérature et d'histoire. These writings contain a great deal of information and ideas not only about political men of the last two centuries but also about certain literary men and artists of Normandy. Honours came to him in abundance as an eminent writer and not as a public official. He was elected a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques on the death of Fustel de Coulanges, and of the Académie française on the death of Hippolyte Taine.
Criticisms
Sorel's work, especially on the downfall of Napoleon, has come under much criticism recently by revisionist historians. His view was that Napoleon was legitimately fighting for the long-established French aim of 'natural frontiers' and that Napoleon merely inherited a foreign 'situation' and therefore did not create his own foreign policy, which has been contended by recent historians, such as Matthew MacLachlan and Michael Broers. They stressed that Napoleon was a nonconformist general and that his actions abroad did not conform with any traditional French foreign policy.
Later years
His speeches on his two illustrious predecessors show how keenly sensible he was of beauty and how unbiased was his judgment, even in the case of those whom he most esteemed and loved. He had just obtained the great Prix Osiris of 100,000 francs, conferred for the first time by the Institut de France, when he was stricken with his last illness and died at Paris. He was associated with Turkish poets like Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and the historian Yusuf Akçura.
