Considerations on France
1796 political pamphlet by Joseph de Maistre
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Through French Revolution, Monarchy and Napoleon
Thesis
Maistre stated that France has a divine mission as the principal instrument of good and evil on Earth. He interpreted the Revolution of 1789 as a providential event in which the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Ancien Régime in general, instead of directing the influence of French civilization to the benefit of mankind, had promoted the atheistic doctrines of the 18th-century philosophes. He claimed that the crimes of the Reign of Terror were the logical consequence of Enlightenment thought as well as its divinely-decreed punishment for spreading Enlightenment ideas.
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Reception
Maistre's political pamphlet quickly established his European reputation as a formidable defendant of throne and altar. The pretender to the throne of France, the future king Louis XVIII, sent Maistre his greetings upon the publication. To honour Maistre for his work, Napoleon made him French against his will in 1802.
The circumstances at the time of its publication in 1796 meant that Maistre's call for a restoration of the monarchy remained unanswered. But in 1814, when his program was implemented, Maistre would be regarded as a prophet. The prominent French author Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, who was an admirer of Maistre, spoke of a "delayed explosion" and compared it to a cannonball shot with an unusually long interval between the flash and the boom.
Style
The work has received much attention for its stylistic qualities. The prominent literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve called it a 'sublime pamphlet.' Scholar of Romanticism Charles L. Lombard characterized it as primarily a creative work, filled with paradox and drama. French historian Jean-Louis Darcel suggested that the most seductive aspect of the work was its tone:
The sparkle of the visionary, a prophetic tone, and in its best pages, an apocalyptic lyricism linking up with the scriptural origins of Judeo-Christian civilization, this is what seemed new, what struck the first readers.
Historian of ideas Carolina Armenteros, who has written four works on Maistre, characterized the prose style as follows:
The Considérations sur la France (1797) uses the ancient technique of deinôsis, a Greek term signifying the religious horror that mortals experience in the presence of a terrifying divinity. The imprecations, vociferations and vituperations of his style are so many codes of his anti-modernity.
According to French historian Pierre Glaudes, Maistre's appropriation of Burke's notion of the sublime provided him with both an interpretive key for understanding the Revolution and a new rhetoric for elucidating and imposing its transcendent meaning. In this way, politics and æsthetics are portrayed as intimately bound together.