Will Young

Joseph de Maistre (portrait by Karl Vogel von Vogelstein, ca. 1810)

Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre (1 April 1753- 26 February 1821) was a French-speaking Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, writer, and philosopher. He was one of the most influential spokesmen for a counter-revolutionary and authoritarian conservatism in the period immediately following the French Revolution of 1789. Despite his close personal and intellectual ties to France, de Maistre remained throughout his life a subject of the King of Sardinia, whom he served as member of the Savoy Senate (1787-1792), ambassador to Russia (1803-1817), and minister of state to the court in Turin (1817-1821).

De Maistre argued for the restoration of hereditary monarchy, which he regarded as a divinely sanctioned institution, and for the indirect authority of the Pope over temporal matters. According to de Maistre, only governments founded on the Christian constitution, implicit in the customs and institutions of all European societies but especially in that of Catholic European monarchies, could avoid the disorder and bloodletting that followed the implementation of rationalist political programs, such as that of the 1789 revolution. An enthusiastic believer in the principle of established authority, which the Revolution sought to destroy, de Maistre defended it everywhere: in the State by extolling the monarchy, in the Church by exalting the privileges of the papacy, and in the world by glorifying God's providence.

Biography

An 1856 map of the Kingdom of Sardinia, with the Duchy of Savoy in yellow on top left. De Maistre was born in the Duchy in 1753.

De Maistre was born at Chambéry, in the Duchy of Savoy, which at the time belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia. His family was of French origin and had settled in Savoy a century earlier, eventually attaining a high position and aristocratic rank. His father had served as president of the Savoy Senate and his younger brother, Xavier de Maistre, would later become a military officer and a popular writer of fiction.

Joseph was probably educated by the Jesuits. After the Revolution, he became an ardent defender of their Order as he came increasingly to associate the spirit of the Revolution with the spirit of the Jesuits' traditional enemies, the Jansenists. After completing his training in the law at the University of Turin in 1774, he followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a Senator in 1787.

De Maistre, a member of the progressive Scottish Rite Masonic lodge at Chambéry from 1774 to 1790, was initially sympathetic to reform movements in France and supported the efforts of the magistrates in the Parlements to force King Louis XVI to call the States-General. As a landowner in France, de Maistre might have been eligible to join that body, and there is some evidence that he contemplated that possibility. He was alarmed, however, by the decision of the States-General to join the three orders of clergy, aristocracy, and commoners into the single legislative body that became the National Constituent Assembly, and he turned strongly against the course of events in France after the revolutionary legislation of 4 August 1789 was passed (see August Decrees).

De Maistre was the only native Senator who fled Savoy after a French revolutionary army invaded the region in 1792. He briefly returned to Chambéry the following year but eventually decided that he could not support the French-controlled regime and departed for Switzerland, where he visited the salon of Germaine de Staël and discussed politics and theology with her. De Maistre then began his career as a counterrevolutionary writer with works such as Lettres d'un royaliste savoisien ("Letters from a Savoyard Royalist," 1793), Discours à Mme. la marquise Costa de Beauregard, sur la vie et la mort de son fils ("Discourse to the Marchioness Costa de Beauregard, on the Life and Death of her Son," 1794) and Cinq paradoxes à la Marquise de Nav... ("Five Paradoxes for the Marchioness of Nav...," 1795).

In 1803 de Maistre was appointed as the King of Sardinia's diplomatic envoy to the court of Russia's Tsar, Alexander I in Saint Petersburg. From 1817 until his death, he served in Turin as a magistrate and minister of state for the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Political and moral philosophy

In Considerations sur la France ("Considerations on France," 1796), De Maistre maintained that France had a divine mission as the principal instrument of good and of evil on earth. De Maistre considered the Revolution of 1789 as a Providential occurrence: the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the whole of the old French society, instead of using the powerful influence of French civilization to benefit mankind, had instead promoted the destructive atheistic doctrines of the eighteenth-century philosophers. The crimes of the Reign of Terror were at once the apotheosis and logical consequence of the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century, as well as the divinely decreed punishment for it.

His short book Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines ("Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions," 1809), centres on the idea that constitutions are not the artificial products of study but come in due time and under suitable circumstances from God, who slowly brings them to maturity in silence. After the appearance in 1816 of his French translation of Plutarch's treatise On the Delay of Divine Justice in the Punishment of the Guilty, de Maistre published in 1819 his masterpiece Du Pape ("On the Pope"). The work is divided into four parts. In the first he argues that, in the Church, the pope is sovereign, and that it is an essential characteristic of all sovereign power that its decisions should be subject to no appeal. Consequently, the pope is infallible in his teaching, since it is by his teaching that he exercises his sovereignty. In the remaining divisions the author examines the relations of the pope and the temporal powers, civilization and the welfare of nations, and the schismatic Churches. He argues that nations require protection against abuses of power by a sovereignty superior to all others, and that this sovereignty should be that of the papacy, the historical saviour and maker of European civilization. As to the schismatic Churches, de Maistre believed that they would, with time, return to the arms of the papacy because "no religion can resist science, except one."

Besides a voluminous correspondence, de Maistre left two posthumous works. One of these, L'examen de la philosophie de Bacon, ("An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon," 1836), develops a spiritualist epistemology out of a critique of Francis Bacon, whom de Maistre considers as a fountainhead of the Enlightenment in its most destructive form. The Soirées de St. Pétersbourg ("The Saint Petersburg Dialogues", 1821) is a theodicy in the form of a Platonic dialogue, in which de Maistre proposes his own solution to the age-old problem of the existence of evil. For him, the existence of evil throws light on the designs of God, for the moral world and the physical world are interrelated. Physical evil is the necessary corollary of moral evil, which humanity expiates and minimizes through prayer and sacrifice. The shedding of blood, the expiation of the sins of the guilty by the innocent is for de Maistre a law as mysterious as it is indubitable, the principle that propels humanity in its return to God and the explanation for the existence and the perpetuity of war.

Quotes

• I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make one's flesh creep.

• If occasionally superstition believes in belief, as it is accused of, more often still, you can be sure, pride believes in disbelief.

• False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.

• If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.

• In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.

• Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not.

• Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Influence

De Maistre can be counted, with the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, as one of the fathers of European conservatism. Since the 19th century, however, the providentialist, authoritarian, "throne and altar" strand of conservatism that he represented has greatly declined in political influence when compared to the more pragmatic and adaptable conservatism of Burke. De Maistre's stylistic and rhetorical brilliance, on the other hand, have made him enduringly popular as a writer and controversialist. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 describes de Maistre's style as "strong, lively, picturesque," and adds, "animation and good humour temper his dogmatic tone. He possesses a wonderful facility in exposition, precision of doctrine, breadth of learning, and dialectical power." The great liberal poet Alphonse de Lamartine, though a political enemy, could not but admire the lively splendour of de Maistre's prose:

That brief, nervous, lucid style, stripped of phrases, robust of limb, did not at all recall the softness of the eighteenth century, nor the declamations of the latest French books: it was born and steeped in the breath of the Alps; it was virgin, it was young, it was harsh and savage; it had no human respect, it felt its solitude; it improvised depth and form all at once… That man was new among the enfants du siècle.

De Maistre's attacks on Enlightenment thought have long made him an attractive countercultural figure in certain circles. For example, the Decadent poet Charles Baudelaire claimed that de Maistre had taught him "how to think" and declared himself a disciple of the Savoyard counterrevolutionary.

His influence is controversial among American conservatives. Contemporary conservative commentator Pat Buchanan praises de Maistre, calling him a "great conservative" in his 2006 book State of Emergency. Along with paleoconservative theorist Samuel Francis, Buchanan considers de Maistre an early intellectual precursor on issues of nationalism and universalism. When neoconservative writer Jonah Goldberg attacked de Maistre in one column for disagreeing with the notion that "humanity is universal" and for suggesting that "transcending one's particular identity was impossible," Paul Gottfried questioned Goldberg's credentials as a conservative and his knowledge of de Maistre. Gottfried considers Joseph de Maistre a "formidable literary and intellectual figure" and calls Goldberg's attempt to link him to modern day African-American identity politics "thoroughly dishonest and/or abysmally stupid." Gottfried also writes:

What Goldberg is really pushing is a form of leftist imperialism reaching back to Robespierre and Jacobin France. Goldberg has dusted off the platform of the French revolutionary Left and misnamed it conservatism, while taking a once renowned conservative, Maistre, and assigning him to a neocon version of eternal perdition. It might be properly asked why anyone would mistake the bearers of this view for certified conservatives.

Isaiah Berlin counts him, in his Freedom and Its Betrayal, as one of the six principal enemies of liberty amongst major Enlightenment advocates. He maintains that Maistre's works were regarded as "the last despairing effort of feudalism in the Dark Ages to resist the march of progress". His Two Enemies of the Enlightenment, offers an extended psychological profile of Maistre and his philosophy summarizing him as an angry man. However, Isaiah Berlin in his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox regards Maistre as the major influence behind Tolstoy's entire philosophy of history in War and Peace.

Émile Faguet, whom Berlin thinks the most accurate and fairest-minded critic of Maistre in the 19th century, described Maistre as "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner"

Generally, Enlightenment advocates loathe Maistre's position on the place of revolution in history of nations </ref> and his complete distrust of man, but they are equally in awe of his style and intellectual prowess. They paint Maistre as a fanatical monarchist and a still more fanatical supporter of papal authority -- strong-willed and inflexible, and in possession of potent but rigid powers of reasoning, brilliant but embittered.

References

• Ghervas, Stella. Réinventer la tradition. Alexandre Stourdza et l'Europe de la Sainte-Alliance. Paris, Honoré Champion, 2008. ISBN 978-2-7453-1669-1

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links

• Some writings of de Maistre in English translation
• The Joseph de Maistre Homepage
• "Two Enemies of the Enlightenment" The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library