Joseph Marie De Maistre Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Joseph Mar ie de Maistre (1753–1821) was a conservative writer, diplomat, and lawyer best remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution (1789–1799) and his defense of throne and altar. For the first half of his life, he lived in provincial obscurity as a lawyer and senator in the independent kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Then the armies of revolutionary France invaded his homeland in 1792, and he fled into exile. He spent the next quarter century abroad in the service of his king, most of it (1803–1817) as ambassador to the court of Tsar Alexander I in St. Petersburg, Russia. There he was a popular salonnière who, at the zenith of his influence, briefly acted as an advisor to both the tsar and the exiled Louis XVIII of France. He returned to his homeland in 1817 and died not long afterwards.

Maistre’s first major published work was Considérations sur la France (Considerations on France, 1797). Although its immediate purpose was to rally support for royalist candidates for the French Directory, it links events in revolutionary France to much broader themes and higher purposes that take it well beyond politics. It also displays Maistre’s considerable stylistic talents as a writer, for which he was much admired, even by his opponents. Considérations is only superficially a counterrevolutionary work. Maistre situates the violence of the 1790s within a providential framework to reveal its true nature as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. In that sense, he welcomed the revolution as a way to expiate the crimes of modern civilization. He also describes bloodshed and conflict as the norm in both natural and human history, making the revolution quite unexceptional in that regard. What was distinctive about it for Maistre was its campaign to destroy Christianity, which he regarded as a political and spiritual disaster.

Du Pape (On the Pope, 1819), Maistre’s uncompromising defense of papal authority and infallibility, was initially coolly received by the Vatican, although it enjoyed considerable posthumous popularity and influence under the conservative pontificate of Pius IX (1846–1878). Just as the only alternative to political authoritarianism for Maistre is political chaos, so the only alternative to a centralized religious authority is religious anarchy, which he called Protestantism, “the sansculottisme of religion.” Maistre understood papal infallibility to mean that the pope is the final court of appeal for Catholics in religious matters.

Les Soirées de St. Pétersbourg (The St. Petersburg Dialogues, 1821) is Maistre’s most philosophical and imaginative book and the work of which he was most proud. While it ranges far and wide, its central theme is the problem of the existence of evil in a world created and governed by God. Maistre depicts the world as pervaded by violence, bloodshed, and sin, in which countless innocent victims are sacrificed to expiate the crimes of the guilty. Beneath this surface appearance of cruelty and injustice Maistre discerned the hand of Providence at work in ways inscrutable to man. For him, humans only have the appearance of agency; the events of this world are really guided by a divine will that is beyond ultimate human comprehension.

Bibliography:

Berlin, Isaiah. “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism.” In The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Edited by H. Hardy, 91–174. London: John Murray, 1990.
Lebrun, R. A. Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988.
Joseph de Maistre’s Life, Thought and Influence: Selected Studies. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
and trans. Maistre Studies. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988.
Maistre, Joseph de. Considerations on France. Edited and translated by R. A. Lebrun. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
The Pope. Translated by Aeneas M. Dawson. Reprint of 1850 edition, with an introduction by R. A. Lebrun. New York: Howard Fertig, 1975.
Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence. Translated and edited by R. A. Lebrun. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.

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