Joseph de Maistre: life, ideas and books

Life

Joseph de Maistre was born in Chambéry, in the Duchy of Savoy, in 1753 and trained as a lawyer. He sat in the Savoy Senate from 1787 to 1792, when French revolutionary armies occupied Savoy and he went into exile. He later served the King of Sardinia as ambassador to the Russian Empire from 1803 to 1817, spending those years in St Petersburg, and then as a minister of state at the court in Turin until his death in 1821.

Ideas

Maistre read the French Revolution as a rupture with the Catholic Church and, in his providential account, as a form of divine punishment. In Considerations on France (1796) he argued that no constitution is the product of human reason alone: constitutions grow gradually, and the written documents of revolutionaries are fragile because they rest on abstraction rather than custom and religious sanction.

He held that monarchy was the most durable form of government and that legitimate authority depends on foundations which subjects accept without constant questioning. In On the Pope (1819) he extended the argument to the Church, maintaining that spiritual authority, ultimately the papacy, underpins temporal order. He was a sharp critic of Enlightenment rationalism, including the thought of Francis Bacon and Rousseau.

Major works

• Letters from a Savoyard Royalist (1793).
• Considerations on France (1796).
• Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809).
• On the Pope (1819).
• St Petersburg Dialogues (1821, published after his death).
• Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon (1836, published after his death).

Why conservatives read him

Maistre is usually paired with Edmund Burke as one of the two founders of European conservatism, though the pairing hides a real difference: Burke defended inherited liberties within a parliamentary order, while Maistre defended authority, hierarchy and religious obedience in a far harder register. Readers value him for the case that political order depends on beliefs that cannot be fully proved, and that societies which discard their foundations discover how much those foundations carried.

His influence ran through the French and Spanish counter-revolutionary tradition, including Juan Donoso Cortés and later the movement around Charles Maurras, and reached writers such as Baudelaire and, in the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt. His observations on Russian life also fed into Tolstoy's research for War and Peace. Critics, notably Isaiah Berlin, have read his emphasis on authority and sacrifice as a forerunner of illiberal politics, and that dispute is part of why he is studied. For American readers he is chiefly a foil: the most uncompromising statement of a view that Russell Kirk and others softened into a defence of prescriptive, gradual and local order.