Joseph de Maistre

Maistre, Joseph de (1753–1821)

Count Joseph de Maistre was a major theorist of the Counter-Enlightenment, whose writings inspired generations of French Catholic royalists and stimulated thinkers diverse as Saint- Simon, Auguste Comte and Charles Maurras. He is known especially for his providential interpretation of the French Revolution, his support for a Bourbon Restoration in France, his opposition to all contractual theories of government, his arguments in favour of papal infallibility, his philosophical speculations on violence and bloodshed, his critique of John Locke’s epistemology and his attack on Francis Bacon’s ‘scientism’.

1 Life

Born in Chambéry, the capital of Savoy, then part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, Maistre was educated by the Jesuits and at the local royal college and then earned law degrees from the University of Turin. Like his father, he served as a magistrate in the province’s highest court during the years before the French Revolution. Following the French invasion of Savoy in 1792, Maistre fled Chambéry, and served as a Piedmontese diplomat in Lausanne (1793–7) and St Petersburg (1803–17). His subsequent legal career included service as head of the court system in Sardinia (1800–3) and as justice minister of Piedmont-Sardinia (1818–21). Though French in language and culture, Maistre was always a loyal subject of the north Italian kingdom.

Despite his legal career and the inheritance of a substantial legal library, Maistre’s private notebooks suggest that he was most deeply interested in humanistic subjects such as philosophy, theology, politics and history. In addition to his native French and the Greek and Latin he acquired as part of an excellent classical education, Maistre read English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German. His works testify that he was very well read in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin classical authors, Renaissance and seventeen-century authors, and all the major figures of the European Enlightenment. Maistre’s involvement in the culture of his time is also revealed by his early initiation into a rather ‘mystical’ branch of French Freemasonry. Although he appears to have abandoned active participation by the time of the Revolution, most interpreters agree that this experience played a significant role in the evolution of his thinking.

In the years preceding the French Revolution, Maistre had been a sympathetic observer of reformist efforts in the neighbouring kingdom of France, but the events of the summer of 1789 (especially the joining together of the three orders, the transformation of the Estates General into the National Assembly and the revolutionary legislation of the night of 4 August 1789, which did away with the privileges of the nobility and the Church) turned him against the Revolution. By the time a French army invaded his native province in September of 1792, Maistre’s intellectual opposition to the Revolution and all it stood for was firmly fixed. He fled Chambéry, first to Piedmont, and then to Switzerland, where he settled in Lausanne and began a new career as a diplomat and counter-revolutionary propagandist. His first propaganda effort, four Lettres d’un royaliste savoisien (Letters of a Savoyard Royalist) (1793), intended for circulation in French-occupied Savoy, revealed the dilemma of a purely political royalism in an age of democratic revolution. These letters defended the record of the old government in Savoy and tried to enlist enlightened self-interest as a basis of continued loyalty to the old ruler. By the summer of 1794, however, Maistre abandoned a purely political analysis in favour of a providential interpretation of events that depicted the Revolution as both a divine punishment (for eighteenth-century atheism and immorality) and a divinely-ordained means for regenerating France. The political dilemma of the Savoyard royalist had found its resolution in a religious vision of redemption.

2 Works

Maistre’s first major work, Les Considérations sur la France (Considerations on France) (1797), which incorporated this providential interpretation of the French Revolution, established his reputation as a defender of throne and altar. Maistre had read Edmund Burke, and he shared Burke’s emotional revulsion against the ‘immorality’ and ‘atheism’ of the Revolution. His works echoed Burke’s themes, including reverence for established institutions, distrust of innovation, and defence of prejudice, aristocracy and an established church. Maistre differed from Burke primarily in his stress on the role of divine providence in human affairs, and in his vigorous defence of traditional European monarchy, Roman Catholicism and strong papal authority.

Maistre’s later works reveal a shift in emphasis from politics to basic philosophical and theological issues. His Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (Essay on the Generative Principles of Political Constitutions) (written in 1807 and published in 1814) generalized the conservative political principles on which he had based his Considerations on France. Du Pape (The Pope) (1817) argued forcefully for infallible papal authority as necessary for European political stability. Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (St. Petersburg Dialogues) (1821) explored many philosophical and theological issues in witty dialogue form, while an appendix, called ‘Enlightenment on Sacrifices’, developed his ideas about suffering and violence. Finally, his Examen de la philosophie de Bacon (An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon) (1836) blamed the seventeenth-century English writer for much of the materialism and atheism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (see Bacon, Francis; Enlightenment, Continental)

While not a professional or even very systematic philosopher, Maistre sharply challenged many of the assumptions and dogmas of the Enlightenment. Critical of John Locke’s theory of knowledge (see Locke, John §2), which had emphasized sense experience as the explanation for human knowing, Maistre defended the notion of ‘innate ideas’, which he understood as inherent human aptitudes without which, he argued, experience would remain meaningless. On philosophical and historical grounds he denied the premises of social contract theories of government (see Contractarianism) and argued that social order and effective government rest more on political culture and the divinely ordained course of history than the choices of citizens. Written in a powerful and beautiful prose, which has earned the author a high place in French literary history as well as in intellectual history, Maistre’s writings continue to challenge the assumptions, ideas and sensibilities of our modern world.

Maistre has been sharply criticized for the extremism of his views, and in particular for his scandalous reflections on the social role of the executioner, on war and on bloodshed. His speculations were certainly original. He rejected what he condemned as naive Enlightenment forms of rationality, and sought to understand the irrational and violent dimensions of social and political life. Perhaps he is best viewed as an innovative theorist of violence, rather than its advocate.

3 Influence

Just as paradox and irony are characteristic of Maistre’s writings, so paradox has been characteristic of his reputation and influence. Liberal critics, condemning him as a hopelessly obscurantist reactionary, have failed to recognize the extent to which his thought was indelibly marked by the Enlightenment. Catholic admirers, recognizing his religious sincerity and high moral purpose, have too readily assumed his orthodoxy. Though Maistre reacted with moral indignation against the ‘crimes’ of the Revolution, he produced a political theory that owed as much to the assumptions of the philosophes as to traditional Catholic thought. French Catholic royalists, charmed by his splendid style, accepted his diagnosis of the satanic nature of the Revolution and his prescription of an alliance between throne and altar, and so his writings helped perpetuate an intransigent opposition to republican government. Though he had laboured sincerely for the welfare of both state and church, ironically his influence in France may well have been detrimental to both religion and political stability. And paradoxically, though often paraded by Catholic apologists for having ‘answered’ the Enlightenment and the Revolution, the acuteness of his insights and the power of his style seem to have been best appreciated by such heterodox thinkers as Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Charles Maurras, Carl Schmitt, E.M. Cioran and Isaiah Berlin.