GREGORY CLAEYS MAISTRE, JOSEPH DE (1753–1821)

GREGORY CLAEYS MAISTRE, JOSEPH DE (1753–1821)

Count Joseph de Maistre, born in Chambéry, Savoy, in 1753, was one of the most original and influential of all counter-revolutionary thinkers. His political ideas and above all his interpretation of the revolution profoundly marked the thought of the Legitimist supporters of the ousted Bourbon monarchy in the nineteenth century. Maistre has also attracted interest in the twentieth century due to resonances detected between his thought and, first, that of fascist intellectuals such as d’Annunzio and, second, that of post- modern critics of the Enlightenment. Despite Maistre’s undoubted gifts as a writer and polemicist, his more extreme conclusions have repelled both nineteenth- and twentieth- century liberal readers, who have found his insistence on the themes of sacrifice,

Entries A-Z 427

irrationality, violence and obedience to supreme authority unsettling. This has led to interpretations of Maistre as both an extreme reactionary, a spokesman for absolutism buttressed by violence and as a precursor of fascism with its glorification of violence and irrationality. Maistre was, however, much more than the propagandist of monarchical authority. Whilst his most celebrated work, Considerations on France (Considérations sur la France) was a violent polemic, the ideas he expressed in this work and explored in his other writings are of lasting significance. Maistre’s denunciations of the revolution and the Enlightenment philosophy that he identified at its heart were coupled with a concern to investigate the nature of political order and authority, within a framework of the providential action of God on man and society.

Joseph de Maistre was born on 1 April 1753 in Chambéry, capital of Savoy, the French-speaking province of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. The Maistre family had risen from trade to law and public service, culminating in the 1778 grant of nobility awarded to Joseph’s father François-Xavier, Second President of the Senate of Savoy, for his role in the codification of the Royal Constitutions. Joseph de Maistre duly became a successful magistrate and entered the Senate himself in 1788. His interests however went well beyond the law—in fact it appears from the contents of his library that law was the least of his interests, concentrating instead on belles-lettres, arts, sciences, history and theology. Maistre was also drawn to mysticism, a trait that expressed itself in his membership of a highly esoteric illuminist Masonic lodge into which he was initiated in 1778. Other important elements in Maistre’s intellectual formation lie in his membership of the Jesuit Congregation of Our Lady and the Confraternity of the Black Penitents, in whose iconography symbols of death featured prominently and whose devotional duties included keeping vigil with condemned criminals awaiting execution. A religiosity that stressed on God’s terrible justice, playing upon guilt, fear and punishment, goes some way to explaining Maistre’s abiding and almost pathological fascination with sacrifice, bloodshed and expiation. The decisive event in Maistre’s life was however the invasion of Savoy by the armies of the French Republic in 1792. It was in response to the revolution, in his self-imposed exile in Lausanne, 1793–7, that Maistre formulated the key elements of his political philosophy and began his literary career. After a brief interlude in Venice and Piedmont he was appointed Sardinian ambassador to Saint Petersburg, 1802–17, during which time he composed what are considered his finest works, above all the Saint-Petersburg Dialogues (Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg) and The Pope (Du pape) . When Maistre died in Turin on 26 February 1821, after a brief spell as a minister of state and head of the magistrature, he left a literary legacy that would nourish and shape counter-revolutionary thought over the rest of the century.

Fundamental to Maistre’s political vision was an exceptionally bleak view of man, informed by powerful notions of original sin. Maistre denied that the virtuous suffered; punishment was visited on man, and as irredeemably sinful and corrupt man was always deserving of punishment. Man’s nature held within it an insatiable lust for power and an inclination for violence, which found its outlet in warfare, which was no aberration but mankind’s habitual state. Maistre’s vision of man led to several important anti- Enlightenment conclusions. First, man was a social being; there was therefore no state anterior to society and hence no social contract as postulated by Locke. Second, sovereignty was both necessary and fundamental. History, which Maistre referred to as ‘experimental politics’, proved that man was not born for liberty. Rousseau, whom

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 428

Maistre accused of having corrupted politics, had ignored the factual evidence, namely that slavery was the natural state of most of humanity before the introduction of Christianity. Man was however not solely sinful, possessing an instinct of the divine alongside his innate degradation. This meant that men’s social impulses could bear the imprint of the divine will and the truths universally accepted by men were to a lesser or greater extent true. Man either acted in accordance with God, in which case his actions were creative, or acted apart from God, in which case his actions were destructive. Legitimate, stable government was therefore aligned with the divine will.

It was with reference to the central question of sovereignty that Maistre embarked upon a biting critique of Rousseau’s work in an incomplete manuscript subsequently published as Study on Sovereignty (Étude sur la souveraineté). That Maistre should attack Rousseau is in itself significant; those who see Maistre as a throwback to the divine-right theories of Bossuet neglect his engagement with the Enlightenment, his consistent efforts to refute Voltaire and Rousseau. This fragment of 1794 reveals the theoretical position that Maistre was to amplify and reiterate in later works. The constitutions of nations were neither the work of man, nor the product of deliberation, nor capable of being written. Constitutions were the political way of life that had been bestowed on a particular nation, and different forms of government were appropriate to different nations. Just as governments were the works of nature, the mode of exercising sovereignty decreed by the Creator, not the work of nations, so men submitted to sovereignty out of an instinctive feeling that it was sacred. This belief in the sacred nature of sovereignty was fundamental: government, Maistre asserted, was a religion that lived through political faith, and called for submission and belief. Just as the application of individual reason to religion annihilated religious sovereignty, so individual discussion of government annihilated political sovereignty. The sovereign, as sovereign, was above judgement. Sovereignty, in whatever way it was organized, was therefore always unequivocal and absolute, and the will of the sovereign was always invincible. To attempt to limit the sovereign was to destroy it. This did not, Maistre stressed, prevent men from instructing rulers of their needs and presenting their grievances. Indeed Maistre himself was a believer in intermediate bodies such as the parlements.

One conclusion of these arguments was thoroughly Burkean: national dogmas and useful prejudices, which necessarily included religion, were the secure base on which governments were to be founded. Another was the relativist judgement that the best government possible was that which was capable of producing the greatest amount of happiness and strength for the greatest number of men for the longest time. The third, which has been seized upon by those who wish to identify Maistre as a proto-totalitarian, was that authority should be submitted to without question: patriotism is identified with individual abnegation. When applied to the revolution these arguments amounted to a devastating critique. The attempt to create a constitution ex novo on an a priori basis was absurd, an impossibility and the abstract reasoning of the revolutionaries chimerical; neither the concept of universal laws nor than of universal man existed. The concept of the sovereignty of the people and national representation was likewise chimerical; the French Republic only assured a greater level of oppression. As an assault on sovereignty the revolution was a criminal exercise, driven by the Enlightenment loathing of authority. Moreover the Enlightenment had not only made the revolution possible by corroding moral bonds through sapping religion, but it marked the revolution as satanic. The

Entries A-Z 429

revolution was thus to be interpreted in Manichean terms, as radically evil, a fight to the death between Christianity and Philosophism, as Maistre put it. This interpretation was destined to resonate throughout the nineteenth century.

Yet the scope of Maistre’s Considerations on France of 1797 went far beyond these arguments. First, it should be noted that it had an immediate political purpose: to strengthen the royalist cause by proving that the restoration of the monarchy was natural, inevitable and would not be, as liberals such as BENJAMIN CONSTANT argued, a revolution in reverse, but a restoration of peace and stability accompanied by the recognition of liberty and the amnesty of crimes. Maistre marshalled arguments to prove that the French Republic, despite its feats of arms, was destined to collapse. Monarchy was the natural government of France whereas history proved the impossibility of an enduring large republic, a form of government that had never occurred and therefore could never last. Despite his belief that governments underwent modification, Maistre’s historical vision was static. Yet when it came to the means of restoration, Maistre advanced a novel argument: not only would the Restoration succeed because it was in harmony with the divine will, but also it would succeed through the operation of the divine will. Considerations was not merely a polemic against the revolution, it was an exposition of the operation of Providence, an explanation of the rationality hidden within the irrational. The revolution, paradoxically, was an act of Providence and the revolutionaries were the instruments God had chosen to punish a fallen France. France possessed a national mission, as did every nation, and her deviation from this role as the eldest daughter of the Church marked her out as guilty. The French were the accomplices of the national crime of the revolution, stained with the blood of Louis XVI, and it was their destiny to savour its bitter consequences. If Louis XVI’s death was an expiatory sacrifice, the great majority of the victims of the revolution were guilty and it was the destiny of the revolution to accomplish the punishment of the guilty, in contrast to the moderate and merciful justice that the counter-revolution would display. In this reading the revolution became a great regenerative force, designed to purify France. Nor was the revolution confined to France, but a historical watershed; the purification of the corrupt French Church was to prepare a moral revolution across Europe, without which social bonds would dissolve and chaos ensue.

An undercurrent in Maistre’s thought, and one that did not appear in Considerations, was a far more ominous reading of the revolution. The revolution, he wrote, was not an event, but an epoch. The seeds of the revolution could be found in the revolt of the Reformation, the great rupture in the spiritual unity of Europe, whose doctrines dissolved religious sovereignty and obedience. Closing the epoch of the revolution was therefore far from assured, requiring a wholesale moral revolution. Moreover as an epoch the revolution could not be seen as an aberration, but had to some extent to be accommodated. It was here that Maistre diverged most sharply from the émigrés: he held that the counter-revolutionary project to restore the ancien régime was as chimerical as the ideals of the revolutionaries. A consistent critic of absolutism, in the tradition of the eighteenth-century parlementaires, Maistre therefore deplored the politics of the ‘ultras’ of the Restoration, despite his own reservations about the Charte as a written constitution. The Restoration, it is clear, did not close the epoch of revolution: in The Pope Maistre saw the European sovereignty as weakening and the spirit of individualism

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 430

still working its ravages. At the centenary of the revolution the Catholic right would share this perception of the revolution as an ongoing phenomenon.

Maistre’s abiding fascination with the exercise of power and the nature of sovereignty led him to a sustained theoretical investigation of these themes, as always using material from a huge variety of sources, from European monarchies to pagan societies. He did not discard the conceptual framework that he had developed in Lausanne, but rather worked on drawing out the themes that he had identified. His concern was to identify universal laws and patterns in the exercise of power, a concern that ironically marked him out as a man of the Enlightenment tradition. Examination of these themes led Maistre to consider the issues of sacrifice, the social role of the sacred, rituals and subjugation. It is arguably in his vision of the centrality of these issues to the successful exercise of power that the originality of his thought is located. It is unquestionably here that his notoriety is located.

A government, Maistre maintained, required either slavery or divine power to operate, leading him to argue against the abolition of serfdom in Russia. Divine power in this context was conceived as performing the function of sacralizing the operations of power; governments had to share in the infallibility of religion and take on the aspects of a power that judges but cannot be judged. This led Maistre to find a sacred character in the application of justice; the terrible figure of the executioner stands at the heart of the social order. In a related judgement Maistre saw a terrible logic in the pagan practice of human sacrifice, a distorted recognition of the truths of Christianity (for all religions, Maistre held, had elements of truth within them) and went to the point of proclaiming such sacrifices preferable to the anarchy engendered by atheism. The rituals of coronation and the myths surrounding kingship were necessary to impart a sense of awe and veneration; kingship for Maistre should take on the elements of idolatry. Sovereignty, in the last resort, was neither rational nor legitimate and hence required sacralization, an appeal to the irrational. When it came to legitimacy, sovereignty’s foundation was always illegitimate, and legitimacy was conferred by the passage of time; every stable established government was therefore good. Ultimately, therefore, despite his arguments that power should be limited, absolute only within a prescribed sphere and despite his assurances that a divine law assured that the illegitimate exercise of power tended towards self-destruction, Maistre was a prophet of irrational submission to power. His fundamental conclusion was:

There is a point where faith must be blind, there is likewise a point in politics where obedience must be blind; the mass of men are made to be led, reason itself teaches one to beware of reason and the masterpiece of reasoning is to discover the point at which one must cease to reason.

(Bradley 1999:68)