Everything about Joseph De Maistre totally explained
Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre (
April 1,
1753-
February 26,
1821) was a
French-speaking Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, writer, and philosopher. He was one of the most influential spokesmen for a counter-revolutionary and
authoritarian conservatism in the period immediately following the
French Revolution of
1789. Despite his close personal and intellectual ties to
France, de Maistre remained throughout his life a subject of the
King of Sardinia, whom he served as member of the Savoy Senate (1787-1792),
ambassador to
Russia (1803-1817), and minister of state to the court in
Turin (1817-1821).
De Maistre argued for the restoration of hereditary
monarchy, which he regarded as a
divinely sanctioned institution, and for the indirect authority of the
Pope over temporal matters. According to de Maistre, only governments founded on the Christian constitution, implicit in the customs and institutions of all European societies but especially in that of
Catholic European monarchies, could avoid the disorder and bloodletting that followed the implementation of
rationalist political programs, such as that of the 1789 revolution. An enthusiastic believer in the principle of established
authority, which the Revolution sought to destroy, de Maistre defended it everywhere: in the
State by extolling the monarchy, in the Church by exalting the privileges of the papacy, and in the world by glorifying
God's providence.
Early life
De Maistre was born at
Chambéry, in the
Duchy of Savoy, which at the time belonged to the
Kingdom of Sardinia. His family was of
French origin and had settled in Savoy a century earlier, eventually attaining a high position and
aristocratic rank. His father had served as president of the Savoy Senate and his younger brother,
Xavier de Maistre, would later become a military officer and a popular writer of fiction.
Joseph was probably educated by the
Jesuits. After the Revolution, he became an ardent defender of their Order as he came increasingly to associate the spirit of the Revolution with the spirit of the Jesuits' traditional enemies, the
Jansenists. After completing his training in the law at the
University of Turin in 1774, he followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a Senator in 1787.
Response to the French Revolution
De Maistre, a member of the progressive
Scottish Rite Masonic lodge at Chambéry from 1774 to 1790, was initially sympathetic to reform movements in France and supported the efforts of the magistrates in the
Parlements to force King
Louis XVI to call the
States-General. As a landowner in France, de Maistre might have been eligible to join that body, and there's some evidence that he contemplated that possibility. He was alarmed, however, by the decision of the States-General to join the three orders of
clergy,
aristocracy, and
commoners into the single legislative body that became the
National Constituent Assembly, and he turned strongly against the course of events in France after the revolutionary legislation of
August 4,
1789 was passed (see
August Decrees).
De Maistre was the only native Senator who fled Savoy after a French revolutionary army invaded the region in
1792. He briefly returned to Chambéry the following year but eventually decided that he couldn't support the French-controlled regime and departed for
Switzerland, where he visited the salon of
Germaine de Staël and discussed politics and theology with her. De Maistre then began his career as a counterrevolutionary writer with works such as
Lettres d'un royaliste savoisien ("Letters from a Savoyard Royalist," 1793),
Discours à Mme. la marquise Costa de Beauregard, sur la vie et la mort de son fils ("Discourse to the Marchioness Costa de Beauregard, on the Life and Death of her Son," 1794) and
Cinq paradoxes à la Marquise de Nav... ("Five Paradoxes for the Marchioness of Nav...," 1795).
In
Considerations sur la France ("Considerations on France," 1796), he maintained that France had a
divine mission as the principal instrument of
good and of
evil on
earth. De Maistre considered the Revolution of 1789 as a
Providential occurrence: the monarchy, the
aristocracy, and the whole of the
old French society, instead of using the powerful influence of French civilization to benefit mankind, had instead promoted the destructive
atheistic doctrines of the
eighteenth-century philosophers. The crimes of the
Reign of Terror were at once the apotheosis and logical consequence of the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century, as well as the divinely decreed punishment for it.
In
1803 de Maistre was appointed as the King of Sardinia's diplomatic envoy to the court of
Russia's
Tsar,
Alexander I in
Saint Petersburg. From
1817 until his death, he served in
Turin as a
magistrate and minister of state for the Kingdom of Sardinia.
Political and moral philosophy
His little book
Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines ("Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions,"
1809), centers on the idea that
constitutions are not the artificial products of study but come in due time and under suitable circumstances from God, who slowly brings them to maturity in silence. 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, de Maistre published in
1819 his masterpiece
Du Pape ("On the Pope"). The work is divided into four parts. In the first he argues that, in the
Church, the
pope is
sovereign, and that it's an essential characteristic of all sovereign power that its decisions should be subject to no appeal. Consequently, the pope is
infallible in his teaching, since it's by his teaching that he exercises his sovereignty. In the remaining divisions the author examines the relations of the pope and the temporal powers, civilization and the welfare of nations, and the
schismatic Churches. He argues that nations require protection against abuses of power by a sovereignty superior to all others, and that this sovereignty should be that of the papacy, the historical saviour and maker of European civilization. As to the schismatic Churches, de Maistre believed that they would, with time, return to the arms of the papacy because "no religion can resist science, except one."
Besides a voluminous correspondence, de Maistre left two posthumous works. One of these,
L'examen de la philosophie de Bacon, ("An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon,"
1836), develops a spiritualist epistemology out of a critique of Francis Bacon, whom de Maistre considers as a fountainhead of the Enlightenment in its most destructive form. The
Soirées de St. Pétersbourg ("The Saint Petersburg Dialogues",
1821) is a
theodicy in the form of a
Platonic dialogue, where de Maistre proposes his own solution to the age-old problem of the existence of evil. For him, the existence of evil throws light on the designs of God; for the
moral world and the physical world are interrelated. Physical evil is the necessary corollary of moral evil, which humanity expiates and minimizes through prayer and sacrifice. The shedding of blood, the expiation of the sins of the guilty by the innocent is for de Maistre a law as mysterious as it's indubitable, the principle that propels humanity in its return to God and the explanation for the existence and the perpetuity of
war.
Influence
De Maistre can be counted, with the
Anglo-Irish statesman
Edmund Burke, as one of the fathers of European
conservatism. Since the
19th century, however, the providentialist, authoritarian, "throne and altar" strand of conservatism that he represented has greatly declined in political influence when compared to the more pragmatic and adaptable conservatism of Burke. De Maistre's stylistic and rhetorical brilliance, on the other hand, have made him enduringly popular as a writer and controversialist. The
Catholic Encyclopedia of
1910 describes de Maistre's style as "strong, lively, picturesque," and adds, "animation and good humour temper his dogmatic tone. He possesses a wonderful facility in exposition, precision of doctrine, breadth of learning, and
dialectical power." The great liberal poet
Alphonse de Lamartine, though a political enemy, couldn't but admire the lively splendour of de Maistre's prose:
» That brief, nervous, lucid style, stripped of phrases, robust of limb, didn't 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.
De Maistre's attacks on Enlightenment thought have long made him an attractive
countercultural figure in certain circles. For example, the
Decadent poet Charles Baudelaire claimed that de Maistre had taught him "how to think" and declared himself a disciple of the Savoyard counterrevolutionary.
His influence is controversial among American conservatives. Contemporary conservative commentator
Pat Buchanan praises de Maistre, calling him a "great conservative" in his 2006 book
State of Emergency. Along with
paleoconservative theorist
Samuel Francis, Buchanan considers de Maistre an early intellectual precursor on issues of
nationalism and
universalism. When
neoconservative writer
Jonah Goldberg attacked de Maistre in one column for disagreeing with the notion that "humanity is universal" and for suggesting that "transcending one's particular identity was impossible,"
Paul Gottfried questioned Goldberg's credentials as a conservative and his knowledge of de Maistre. Gottfried considers Joseph de Maistre a "formidable literary and intellectual figure" and calls Goldberg's attempt to link him to modern day African-American identity politics "thoroughly dishonest and/or abysmally stupid." Gottfried also writes:
» What Goldberg is really pushing is a form of leftist imperialism reaching back to
Robespierre and
Jacobin France. Goldberg has dusted off the platform of the French revolutionary Left and misnamed it conservatism, while taking a once renowned conservative, Maistre, and assigning him to a neocon version of eternal perdition. It might be properly asked why anyone would mistake the bearers of this view for certified conservatives.
Criticism
Isaiah Berlin counts him, in his
Freedom and Its Betrayal, as one of the six principal enemies of liberty amongst major Enlightenment thinkers. He maintains that Maistre's works were regarded as "the last despairing effort of feudalism in the Dark Ages to resist the march of progress".
Émile Faguet, whom Berlin thinks the most accurate and fairest-minded critic of Maistre in the 19th century, 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"
A great many Enlightenment thinkers loathed Maistre's counter-reformist or counter-revolutionary views, but were at the same time in awe of his style and intellectual prowess. Maistre is painted as a fanatical monarchist and a still more fanatical supporter of papal authority -- a proud bigot, strong-willed and inflexible in all matters, and in possession of potent but rigid powers of reasoning, brilliant but embittered.
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