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.