Joseph de Maistre

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Joseph de Maistre

Western philosophy 18th-century philosophy
Portrait of de Maistre by von Vogelstein, 1810c. 1810
Full name	Joseph de Maistre
Birth	1 April 1753(1753-04-01)
Death	26 February 1821 (aged 67)
School/tradition	Conservatism, Counter-Enlightenment
Influenced by Plato, Plutarch, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke
Influenced Charles Baudelaire, Juan Donoso Cortes, Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, George Fitzhugh, Francisco Franco, Pat Buchanan

Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre (1 April 1753 – 26 February 1821) was a French-speaking Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, writer, and philosopher. He was the most influential spokesmen for hierarchical authoritarianism in the period immediately following the French Revolution of 1789. Despite his close personal and intellectual ties to France, 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).

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 Maistre, only governments founded upon a Christian constitution, implicit in the customs and institutions of all European societies but especially in Catholic European monarchies, could avoid the disorder and bloodshed that followed the implementation of rationalist political programs, such as the 1789 revolution. Maistre was an enthusiastic proponent of the principle of hierarchical authority, which the Revolution sought to destroy; he extolled the monarchy, he exalted the privileges of the papacy, and he glorified God's providence.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Political and moral philosophy 3 Influence and repute 3.1 American conservatism 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 Work in English translation 8 External links

[edit] Biography

Maistre was born in 1753 at Chambéry, in the Duchy of Savoy, which belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia.^[1] His family was of French origin and had settled in Savoy a century earlier, attaining an aristocratic rank.^[2] His father had served as president of the Savoy Senate and his younger brother, Xavier de Maistre, become a military officer and a popular writer of fiction.^[2][3]

Joseph was probably educated by the Jesuits.^[2] After the Revolution, he became an ardent defender of their Order, increasingly associating 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.

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, Maistre was eligible to join that body, and there is some evidence that he contemplated that possibility.^[4] 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 against the course of events in France after the revolutionary legislation of 4 August 1789 was passed (see August Decrees).

Maistre fled Savoy after a French revolutionary army invaded the region in 1792. He briefly returned to Chambéry the following year, but decided that he could not 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. Maistre then began his career as a counter-revolutionary 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).^[1]

In 1803 Maistre was appointed 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.

[edit] Political and moral philosophy

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In Considerations sur la France ("Considerations on France," 1796), Maistre maintained that France had a divine mission as the principal instrument of good and of evil on earth. He considered the Revolution of 1789 a Providential occurrence: the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the whole of the old French society, instead of using the influence of French civilization to benefit mankind, had promoted the destructive atheistic doctrines of the eighteenth-century philosophers. The crimes of the Reign of Terror were the apotheosis and logical consequence of the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century, and the divinely decreed punishment for it.

His short 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), Maistre argues that constitutions are not artificial products but come from God, who slowly brings them to maturity. 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, in 1819 Maistre published 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 is 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 is 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 the papacy, the saviour and maker of European civilization. As to the schismatic Churches, Maistre believed that they would fall into philosophic indifference as Catholicism was the only religion capable of resisting science.^[2]

Besides a voluminous correspondence, 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 Maistre considers 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, in which Maistre proposes his own solution to the age-old problem of the existence of evil. He argues that evil throws light upon the designs of God. The shedding of blood, the expiation of the sins of the guilty by the innocent, is for Maistre a law as mysterious as it is indubitable, the principle that propels humanity in its return to God, supplying an explanation for the existence and the perpetuity of war.

[edit] Influence and repute

Maistre can be counted, with the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, as one of the fathers of European conservatism. Since the 19th century, however, his providential, authoritarian, "throne and altar" conception of conservatism has declined in comparison with the more pragmatic conservatism of Burke. His stylistic and rhetorical brilliance, on the other hand, have made him enduringly popular as a writer and controversialist. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 describes 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."^[2] Alphonse de Lamartine, though a political enemy, could not but admire the splendour of Maistre's prose:

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.

—Alphonse de Lamartine, Souvenirs et portraits^[5]

Maistre's critique of the Enlightenment, especially its rationalism, made him an attractive countercultural figure. For example, the Decadent poet Charles Baudelaire declared himself a disciple of the Savoyard counter-revolutionary.^[6]

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"^[7]

Isaiah Berlin in his Freedom and Its Betrayal views his writings as "the last despairing effort of feudalism...to resist the march of progress". In his lecture Two Enemies of the Enlightenment he describes him as an angry man. However in his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox Berlin acknowledges his influence upon Tolstoy's philosophy of history in his novel War and Peace.

[edit] American conservatism

Pat Buchanan in his 2006 book State of Emergency describes Maistre as a "great conservative". When Jonah Goldberg attacked Maistre for disagreeing with the notion that "humanity is universal" and asserting that "transcending one's particular identity was impossible,"^[8] Paul Gottfried described Goldberg's attempt to link him to modern day African-American identity politics as "thoroughly dishonest and/or abysmally stupid."^[9] 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.^[10]

[edit] See also

• Latin Conservatism

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Buchanan, Patrick (2007). State of Emergency. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0312374364. 
• Ghervas, Stella (2008). Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l'Europe de la Sainte-Alliance. Paris: Honoré Champion. ISBN 2745316699. 
• Lebrun, Richard A. (1988). Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0773506454. 
• Lombard, Charles (1976). Joseph De Maistre. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0805762477. 
• This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.

[edit] Work in English translation

• Memoir on the Union of Savoy and Switzerland (1795).
• Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809, English translation 1847).
• The Pope: Considered in His Relations with the Church, Temporal Sovereignties, Separated Churches and the Cause of Civilization (1817, English translation 1850).
• Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisition (1822, English translation 1851)
• Blum, Christopher Olaf (editor and translator), 2004. Critics of the Enlightenment. Wilmington, Delaware : ISI Books.
  • 1798, "Reflections on Protestantism in its Relations to Sovereignty". 133-56.
  • 1819, "On the Pope". 157-96.
• Lively, Jack, 1965. The Works of Joseph de Maistre. Macmillan.

[edit] External links

• The Joseph de Maistre Homepage at the University of Manitoba
• Works of Joseph de Maistre in English Translation