Joseph de Maistre

Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre (1753–1821) was a Savoyard magistrate, diplomat, and writer whose works after the French Revolution constituted the most uncompromising intellectual counter-attack on Enlightenment political philosophy produced in his generation. Where Burke had argued from English constitutional precedent that the Revolution’s rationalist redesign of society would fail in its own terms, Maistre argued from a more radical theological premise: that all legitimate political order rests on foundations — providence, custom, sacrificial expiation, the historic continuity of the Church — that the rationalist project does not merely overlook but actively dissolves.

Maistre was a serious philosopher, not a polemicist, though his rhetoric is often violent. The conservatism in his work is theological, sovereigntist, and traditionalist; it accepts none of the Enlightenment’s premises and proposes a wholly different account of how political legitimacy is constituted, transmitted, and lost.

Key Takeaways

• Savoyard diplomat, jurist, and Counter-Enlightenment philosopher whose response to the French Revolution became the founding statement of European traditionalist conservatism.
• Considérations sur la France (1797) and Du Pape (1819) argued that legitimate political authority is not constructed by rational deliberation but received through providence, custom, and the historic Church.
• Treated by Isaiah Berlin as the philosophical originator of twentieth-century reactionary politics; treated by Russell Kirk and his school as the necessary Continental complement to Burke.

History And Context

Maistre was born at Chambéry in the Duchy of Savoy, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He trained as a lawyer at the University of Turin, joined the Savoy magistracy in 1774, and was an active member of the Scottish Rite Freemasonry of the late ancien régime — a fact later admirers preferred to minimise but which is part of the intellectual record. The 1792 French invasion of Savoy drove him into exile; he served the King of Sardinia as ambassador to Russia from 1803 to 1817, returning to a position on the Royal Council of Turin until his death.

The intellectual setting matters. By 1797, when Considérations sur la France appeared anonymously, the Revolution had cycled through constitutional monarchy, Jacobin Terror, and Thermidorian reaction; the Directory was in power; Napoleon had not yet seized control. Maistre’s argument was not that the Revolution had failed for contingent reasons of bad leadership but that its philosophical premises — that political society is contractually constructed by rational individuals, that legitimate authority derives from the consent of the governed, that inherited institutions can be redesigned from first principles — were each false in ways that determined the outcomes the world was watching.

His later major works — Du Pape (1819), Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (published posthumously 1821) — extended the argument into ecclesiology and moral philosophy. Du Pape defended papal infallibility as the necessary apex of any stable European order, half a century before the doctrine’s formal definition at Vatican I (1870).

The Conservative Position

Three of Maistre’s positions have shaped the conservative tradition in distinct ways.

First, the rejection of contractarianism. Maistre held that no actual political society had ever been founded by rational consent of its members, that the historical record was instead one of conquest, custom, providence, and accumulated sovereignty, and that the Enlightenment’s contractual fiction was therefore both historically false and politically dangerous — dangerous because it implied that any existing arrangement could be dissolved by withdrawing the fictional consent on which it was supposed to rest. The argument runs in parallel to Burke’s critique in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) but reaches a more drastic conclusion: not that the rationalist project should be moderated by inherited wisdom, but that it should be rejected at its premises.

Second, the providential reading of history. The famous passage in Considérations sur la France on the executioner — that civil order rests on a foundation of expiatory violence which polite society prefers not to examine — is the most concentrated statement of his metaphysics: that human history is shaped by forces above human design, that catastrophes are intelligible as expiations, and that the Revolution itself, however terrible, was the providential punishment of a society that had abandoned its theological foundations. The reading is not fatalist; it is the basis for a politics of patient acceptance of the existing order combined with the cultivation of religious continuity.

Third, the doctrine of sovereignty. Du Pape argued that any political order requires a final, unappealable authority on questions of moral truth; that in Catholic Europe this had historically been the papacy; that the Reformation’s substitution of national sovereigns and parliaments for that authority was the proximate cause of the Revolution; and that the restoration of European order required the restoration of the papal magisterium as the apex of an integrated political-ecclesiastical settlement. The argument is the most extreme form of what would later be called integralism.

Differing Positions

Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990, with the long essay “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism”) read Maistre as the philosophical ancestor of twentieth-century reactionary politics and a forerunner of fascism’s irrationalist politics of violence and authority. The reading has been challenged on textual grounds by Owen Bradley and Carolina Armenteros, who treat it as a projection of mid-twentieth-century anxieties onto a writer whose actual commitments were to Catholic legitimism, not to the romanticised state of fascist doctrine.

Within conservatism, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind placed Maistre as a Continental complement to Burke, while Roger Scruton (a more cautious admirer) treated Considérations as essential reading and Du Pape as a curiosity. Liberal-conservative writers have always treated the integralism as historically defunct and presently impossible; traditionalist Catholic readers continue to draw on it. The Anglo-American conservative reception is selective: Maistre’s diagnosis of revolutionary rationalism is widely accepted, his theological positive programme much less so.

References

1. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1797]), chs. 1–3.
2. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993 [1821]), 1st and 6th dialogues.
3. Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), 91–174.
4. Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), introduction and chs. 1–2.