Joseph de Maistre

Intellectual thought

Politics

In Considérations sur la France ("Considerations on France", 1796), where he argued that the French Revolution was divine punishment for the promotion of Enlightenment thought by the Ancien Régime. In his short book Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions, Maistre repeats his argument from the Considerations that constitutions are not the product of human reason, but rather come from God, who through guided human actions slowly brings them to maturity, with written constitutions being "scraps of paper".

What was novel in Maistre's writings was not his enthusiastic defense of monarchical and religious authority per se, but rather his arguments concerning the practical need for ultimate authority to lie with an individual capable of decisive action as well as his analysis of the social foundations of that authority's legitimacy. In his own words which he addressed to a group of aristocratic French émigrés, "You ought to know how to be royalists. Before, this was an instinct, but today it is a science. You must love the sovereign as you love order, with all the forces of intelligence."

Despite his preference for monarchy, Maistre acknowledged that republics could be the superior form of government, depending on the situation and the people. Maistre also defended the government of the United States because its people were heirs to the democratic spirit of Great Britain, which he felt France lacked. He admired Edmund Burke and is supposed to have read English conservatives and has been linked to Burke's thought, although Burke and de Maistre are more often contrasted. Maistre regarded the constitution of the United Kingdom as "the most complex unity and the most propitious equilibrium of political powers that the world has ever seen".

Religion

Central to Maistre's rejection of the French Revolution was his belief that it was a rupture with the past and the Catholic Church, and that this rupture was the cause of scourges of the revolution such as Robespierre and Napoleon. 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, Maistre published "On the Pope" in 1819, the most complete exposition of his religious conception of authority. According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos. As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question. Maistre went on to argue that authority in politics should derive from religion and that in Europe this religious authority must ultimately lie with the Pope.

Maistre criticised Enlightenment thinkers, particularly the French Encyclopaedists and Rousseau, for treating human beings as fundamentally rational and for grounding their theories in abstract reasoning rather than historical observation. To Rousseau's claim in The Social Contract that "man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains", Maistre retorts by asking why "sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass". After the Revolution, he became an ardent defender of his educators the Jesuits, increasingly associating the spirit of the Revolution with the Jesuits' traditional enemies, the Jansenists. He wrote Letters on the Spanish Inquisition which defended the inquisition.

Ethics

In addition to his voluminous correspondence, Maistre left two books that were published posthumously. Soirées de St. Pétersbourg (1821) is a theodicy in the form of a Platonic dialogue in which Maistre argues that evil exists because of its place in the divine plan, according to which the blood sacrifice of innocents returns men to God via the expiation of the sins of the guilty. Maistre sees this as a law of human history as unquestionable as it is mysterious. Yet contrary to the cliché that links reactionary thought to dogmatism, the fragmentary Soirées de St. Pétersbourg develop a train of thoughts, as Andreas Dorschel puts it, in a searching, tentative and even experimental fashion.

Science

Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon ("An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon", 1836) is a critique of the thought of Francis Bacon, whom Maistre considers to be the fountainhead of the destructive rationalistic thought. Maistre also argued, romantically, that genius plays a pivotal role in great scientific discoveries, as demonstrated by inspired intellects such as Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, contrary to Bacon's theory about conforming to a mechanistic method.

Legacy and reputation

Political thought

Together with the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, Maistre is commonly regarded as one of the founders of European conservatism. Maistre exerted a powerful influence on the Spanish political thinker Juan Donoso Cortés, the French royalist Charles Maurras and his nationalist movement Action Française as well as the German philosopher of law Carl Schmitt.

However, according to Carolina Armenteros, who has written four books about Maistre, his writings influenced not only conservative political thinkers but also the utopian socialists. Early sociologists such as Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon explicitly acknowledged the influence of Maistre on their own thinking about the sources of social cohesion, legitimacy and political authority.

Maistre has been criticized by classical liberals. Literary critic Émile Faguet 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". Political historian Isaiah Berlin regarded Maistre as a proto-fascist in certain respects, arguing that he saw human society as dependent on the recognition and channelling of irrational and destructive impulses by governing elites. Nevertheless, Italian fascism openly rejected Maistre's reactionary conservatism.

Isaiah Berlin regarded Maistre as "the most brilliant and the most polemical of the critics of the philosophy that underlay the French Revolution" pointing to the modernity of much of his thinking. He also put him as one of the more important thinkers within the Counter-Enlightenment.

Literature

Maistre's skills as a writer and polemicist ensured that he continues to be read. Matthew Arnold, an influential 19th-century critic, wrote as follows while comparing Maistre's style with that of his Anglo-Irish counterpart Edmund Burke:

"Joseph de Maistre is another of those men whose word, like that of Burke, has vitality. In imaginative power he is altogether inferior to Burke. On the other hand, his thought moves in closer order than Burke's, more rapidly, more directly; he has fewer superfluities. Burke is a great writer, but Joseph de Maistre's use of the French language is more powerful, more thoroughly satisfactory, than Burke's use of the English. It is masterly; it shows us to perfection of what that admirable instrument, the French language, is capable."

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 describes his writing style as "strong, lively, picturesque" and states that his "animation and good humour temper his dogmatic tone". George Saintsbury called him "unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers and writers of the eighteenth century". Although a political opponent, Alphonse de Lamartine called him the "Plato of the Alps". Admiring the splendour of his prose, Lamartine stated:

"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 [children of the century]."

Maistre was an influence on the Romantic movement, which shared his political organicism and his opposition to rationalism, though Romantic attitudes towards the French Revolution varied individually and by place. Maistre is often referred to as a Romantic. Among those who admired him was the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who described himself a disciple of the Savoyard counter-revolutionary, claiming that Maistre had taught him how to think. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly places Maistre first among his "prophets of the past" [les prophètes du passé] in his book by that name.

Prominent authors and intellectuals have mentioned Maistre in their literature. In Joris-Karl Huysmans' Decadent novel À rebours, Maistre is described as “that impervious sectarian, so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty." Walter Benjamin quotes at length from the Soirées de St. Petersbourg in his analysis of Baudelaire in The Arcades Project. At the beginning of Stendhal's novel Le Rouge et le Noir, Julien Sorel is described as knowing the New Testament and Maistre's Du Pape, "and [believing] in the one as little as in the other." Maistre's observations on Russian life, contained in his diplomatic memoirs and in his personal correspondence, were among Leo Tolstoy's sources for his novel War and Peace.