MAISTRE, JOSEPH DE

MAISTRE, JOSEPH DE (1753–1821), Savoyard writer and diplomat.

A provocative and controversial opponent of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the Comte Joseph-Marie de Maistre was as often reviled by nineteenth-century liberals as an unscrupulous apologist of the executioner and the Inquisition as he was praised by French royalists and ultramontane Catholics as a steadfast and loyal monarchist and Catholic. It has only been since the late twentieth century, with the appearance of revisionist interpretations of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and access to Maistre's private papers, that scholars have been able to formulate a reasonably objective assessment of this important and original counter-Enlightenment writer.

A native of Savoy, then a province of the Italian kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, Maistre served that state all his life as a magistrate and diplomat. Born in Chambéry, where he received his early education (in part from the Jesuits), he did his legal training in Turin. Maistre's early career (1772–1792) was in the senate of Savoy (a law court), where he was named a senator in 1788. When the French invaded Savoy in 1792, he fled, at first to Turin, and then to Lausanne, where from 1793 to 1797 he took up a new career as the Piedmontese consul and a counterrevolutionary propagandist. After an interlude as a refugee in northern Italy, and three years (1799–1803) as regent (head of the court system) in Sardinia, he served as the Piedmontese ambassador in St. Petersburg from 1803 to 1817. After his recall to Turin, he ended his career as regent (justice minister) of Piedmont-Sardinia (1818–1821).

Though Maistre had inherited a substantial legal library and followed a legal career for more than half his working life, his notebooks, works, and correspondence suggest that he was always much more interested in broad humanistic subjects than in narrow legal questions. The beneficiary of an excellent classical education, he read Latin, Greek, Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German as well as his native French. Well-versed in the Scriptures, the church fathers, Greek and Latin classical authors, and Renaissance and seventeenth-century authors, he was also thoroughly familiar with all the major authors of the Enlightenment.

Maistre's first major work, which won him immediate renown as a theorist of throne and altar, was Considérations sur la France (Considerations on France), published anonymously in 1797. Construing the Revolution as both a divine punishment and as a providently ordained means for the regeneration of France, Maistre was able to condemn the Revolution and the ideas that it embodied, and, at the same time portray it as a necessary prelude to the restoration of the monarchy. Maistre had read Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France soon after that work appeared in 1790, and he shared Burke's reaction against the violence, "immorality," and "atheism" of the Revolution. Maistre's work echoed Burkean themes, including reverence for established institutions, distrust of innovation, and defense of prejudice, aristocracy, and an established church. Maistre differed from Burke primarily in his providentialism, and in his adamant defense of traditional Roman Catholicism and papal authority.

Maistre's later works reveal a shift from politics to fundamental philosophical and theological issues. His Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (written in 1807 and published in 1814; Essay on the generative principle of political constitutions) generalized the constitutional principles he had enunciated in his Considérations sur la France. Du Pape (1819; On the pope) argued forcefully for infallible papal authority as a prerequisite for political stability in Europe. Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821; St. Petersburg dialogues) published shortly after Maistre's death, explored a host of philosophical and theological issues in witty dialogue form, while an appendix, called an "Enlightenment on Sacrifices," developed Maistre's ideas about suffering and violence. Finally, an Examen de la philosophie de Bacon (published in 1836; Examination of the philosophy of Bacon) located the origins of Enlightenment scientism and atheism in the works of the English writer. Maistre's writings, all distinguished by a vigorous French literary style, include a number of other minor works, some published only long after his death, and an extensive correspondence, most of which has also been published.

Maistre has been criticized for his extremism, and in particular for his reflections on the social role of the executioner, on war, and on bloodshed. His speculations were certainly original; rejecting what he castigated as naive Enlightenment forms of rationality, Maistre struggled to comprehend the irrational and violent dimensions of social and political life. Though his ideas shocked many, he should probably be regarded as an innovative theorist of violence, rather than its advocate.

See alsoBonald, Louis de; Burke, Edmund; Conservatism; French Revolution; Papal Infallibility.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Maistre, Joseph de. Works. Selected translated and introduced by Jack Lively. New York, 1965.

——. Oeuvres complètes contenant ses oeuvres posthumes et toute sa correspondance inédite. Hildesheim, Germany, and New York, 1984.

Secondary Sources

Benoist, Alain de. Bibliographie générale des droites françaises. 4 vols. Paris, 2005. See vol. 4, pp. 13–131 for a complete bibliography of works by and about Maistre.

Bradley, Owen. A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre. Lincoln, Neb., 1999.

Lebrun, Richard A. Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant. Kingston, Ont., 1988.

Richard A. Lebrun