Joseph de Maistre

born
April 1, 1753, Chambéry, France
died February 26, 1821, Turin, kingdom
of Sardinia [Italy]
French polemical author, moralist, and
diplomat who, after being uprooted by
the French Revolution in 1789, became a
great exponent of the conservative
tradition.
Maistre
studied with the Jesuits and became a
member of the Savoy Senate in 1787,
following the civil career of his
father, a former Senate president. After
the invasion of Savoy by the armies of
Napoleon in 1792, he began his lifelong
exile in Switzerland, where he
frequented the literary salon of
Germaine de Staël in Coppet. Appointed
envoy to St. Petersburg by the king of
Sardinia in 1803, he remained at the
Russian court for 14 years, writing
Essay on the Generative Principle of
Political Constitutions (1814) and his
best work (unfinished), The St.
Petersburg Dialogues (1821). On his
recall he settled in Turin as chief
magistrate and minister of state of the
Sardinian kingdom.
Maistre
was convinced of the need for the
supremacy of Christianity and the
absolute rule of both sovereign and
pope. He also insisted on the necessity
of the public executioner as a negative
guardian of social order, writing in The
St. Petersburg Dialogues that “all
power, all subordination rests on the
executioner: he is the horror and the
bond of human association. Remove this
incomprehensible agent from the world,
and the very moment order gives way to
chaos, thrones topple, and society
disappears.” A devoutly religious Roman
Catholic, he explained both the French
Revolution and the French revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars as religious
expiation for the sins of the times. He
opposed the progress of science and the
liberal beliefs and empirical methods of
philosophers such as Francis Bacon
(1561–1626), Voltaire (1694–1778),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), and
John Locke (1632–1704). He also wrote On
the Pope (1819) and Letters on the
Spanish Inquisition (1838), an apology
for the punitive role of the Spanish
Inquisition. In both works Maistre
defended absolutism with rigorous logic,
and it was as a logical thinker,
pursuing consequences from an accepted
premise, that Maistre excelled. The
French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67)
acknowledged that it was Maistre who
taught him to think.