Joseph de Maistre
Based on Wikipedia: Joseph de Maistre
In 1793, a French revolutionary army marched into Chambéry, and a forty-year-old lawyer fled for his life. He would spend the next quarter-century in exile, becoming one of the most ferocious critics of everything the French Revolution stood for. His name was Joseph de Maistre, and he would teach Europe how to be conservative—not by instinct, but by intellectual design.
That's a remarkable transformation for a man who once praised the American Revolution in a public address, declaring that "Liberty, insulted in Europe, has winged its flight to another hemisphere." The young Maistre was a Freemason, a reformer, even something of a liberal. He supported the French magistrates who pressured King Louis XVI to convene the Estates General—the assembly that would soon spiral into revolution.
What changed him? One date stands out: August 4, 1789.
The Night That Made a Reactionary
On that evening, the newly formed National Assembly—which had controversially merged aristocrats, clergy, and commoners into a single body—passed the August Decrees. In a fever of enthusiasm, the nobles voluntarily surrendered their feudal privileges. Serfdom was abolished. The tithe was eliminated. Tax exemptions vanished. In a single night, a thousand years of social hierarchy began to dissolve.
For Maistre, this wasn't liberation. It was the beginning of chaos.
He had been a senator in the Savoy Senate, following his father's footsteps in government service. His family had worked their way up over generations—his grandfather had been a draper and city councilman, his father a magistrate who eventually earned the title of count. Maistre understood hierarchy not as oppression but as the natural order that allowed civilization to function. When the revolutionaries began dismantling that order in the name of reason, he saw catastrophe coming.
The Reign of Terror proved him right—or so he believed.
The Counter-Revolution Gets a Philosopher
Maistre's exile became his education. After fleeing Chambéry, he tried to find a position at the royal court in Turin—the capital of Piedmont-Sardinia, the kingdom he served—but failed. He returned briefly, then departed again for Lausanne, Switzerland. There, at the salon of Madame de Staël, one of the most brilliant women in Europe, he began to forge his ideas into weapons.
His first major work, "Considerations on France," published in 1796, laid out a stunning argument. France, he claimed, had a divine mission. The French Revolution wasn't merely a political upheaval—it was God's punishment for a nation that had abandoned its calling. The monarchy, the aristocracy, the entire old regime had failed their sacred duty. Instead of using French civilization to benefit mankind, they had promoted the atheistic doctrines of Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau.
The Reign of Terror? That was the logical consequence of Enlightenment thinking. Reject God and tradition, Maistre argued, and you get the guillotine.
This was not just nostalgia dressed up in philosophy. Maistre was developing something genuinely new: a systematic defense of authority that didn't simply appeal to tradition or divine right, but analyzed why societies needed hierarchy to function at all.
The Problem of Authority
Here's Maistre's central insight, and it remains provocative today: any attempt to justify government purely through reason will fail.
Why? Because rational arguments can always be countered by other rational arguments. If you try to ground political authority in logic alone, you create endless debates about legitimacy. Is this law just? Is that ruler truly qualified? Does this policy serve the common good? Every question invites another question, and soon you have philosophers arguing while the streets burn.
Maistre's solution was radical in its conservatism. Political authority, he insisted, must rest on something that people cannot—and must not—question. It must be compelling but non-rational. And in Europe, that something had to be religion. Specifically, the Pope.
This wasn't mere theocracy. Maistre made a practical argument: societies need a final authority, someone who can make decisions that stick. In his 1819 book "Du Pape" (On the Pope), he argued that political and spiritual authority should ultimately converge in Rome. Only then could Europe find the stability it had lost.
He told a group of French aristocrats in exile: "You ought to know how to be royalists. Before, this was an instinct, but today it is a science."
That sentence captures something essential about Maistre. He wasn't asking people to blindly follow kings. He was asking them to understand why society needs authority in the first place, and then to consciously support the institutions that provide it.
The Diplomat Who Converted Russians
In 1802, Maistre received a strange assignment. The King of Piedmont-Sardinia—now ruling from the island of Sardinia after Napoleon's armies had seized Turin—sent him to Russia as ambassador to Tsar Alexander I.
It was a minor post for a minor kingdom in a time of war. Maistre had few official duties. But he made the most of his fourteen years in Saint Petersburg.
He became a fixture in Russian aristocratic circles, charming the wealthy and well-born with his conversation and conviction. Some of his friends converted to Roman Catholicism under his influence—a remarkable achievement in Orthodox Russia. And he wrote. The long winters gave him time to produce his most important philosophical works.
His observations of Russian life would later prove historically significant in an unexpected way: Leo Tolstoy drew on Maistre's diplomatic memoirs and correspondence as source material for "War and Peace."
The Executioner's Paradox
Maistre's most disturbing—and most famous—passage concerns the executioner. In his posthumously published "Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg" (Saint Petersburg Dialogues), he describes this figure with a kind of horrified fascination:
The executioner is both essential and untouchable. Society needs him to function—he enforces the law's ultimate sanction—yet he is shunned as a monster. He touches the condemned and becomes contaminated by association with death. His house stands apart. His family marries only among its own kind.
For Maistre, the executioner embodied a dark truth about civilization. Order requires violence. Justice demands blood. The social contract, that elegant fiction of Enlightenment philosophers, rests on the scaffold.
This wasn't sadism on Maistre's part—though critics have accused him of something close to it. He was making a theological point. In his view, evil exists because of its place in a divine plan. The blood sacrifice of the innocent somehow returns humanity to God through the expiation of the guilty. He saw this as a law of human history "as unquestionable as it is mysterious."
You don't have to accept this theology to recognize that Maistre was grappling with something real. The modern state still claims a monopoly on legitimate violence. Prisons still exist. Wars still happen. Maistre forced his readers to confront the violence at the foundation of every political order, even the most progressive.
Genius Against Method
Maistre didn't only attack political rationalism. He went after scientific rationalism too, targeting Francis Bacon—the English philosopher often credited with founding the scientific method.
Bacon had argued that science advances through systematic observation and experiment, following careful rules that anyone could apply. Maistre disagreed. In his "Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon," published posthumously in 1836, he argued that the great scientific discoveries came not from following a method but from genius—from inspired intellects like Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton.
This was a Romantic argument before Romanticism had fully arrived. Maistre believed that human creativity and insight transcended mechanical procedures. The universe, in his view, couldn't be captured by formulas alone. It required something like revelation.
The Surprising Pragmatist
For all his fierce monarchism, Maistre could surprise you. He acknowledged that republics might sometimes be the superior form of government. It depended on the situation and the people involved.
He even defended the United States government—a strange position for a man who despised the French Revolution that American ideas had helped inspire. His reasoning was cultural rather than ideological. The Americans, he argued, were heirs to the democratic spirit of Great Britain. They had evolved their institutions organically over time. France, by contrast, was trying to impose abstract principles on a society that had no native tradition of self-government.
This distinction—between organic development and revolutionary imposition—would become central to conservative thought for the next two centuries.
The Founders of Conservatism
Maistre is usually paired with Edmund Burke, the Irish-British statesman who wrote "Reflections on the Revolution in France" in 1790. Together, they're considered the founders of modern European conservatism.
The pairing makes sense. Both men were shocked by the French Revolution. Both defended tradition, hierarchy, and the wisdom embedded in inherited institutions. Both warned that radical change would lead to violence and tyranny.
But they were very different thinkers. Burke was essentially pragmatic, suspicious of abstract theory, content to defend the British constitution without much theological apparatus. Maistre was a systematic theorist who grounded everything in Catholic theology and papal authority. Burke could appeal to Protestants and secularists; Maistre demanded submission to Rome.
Their prose styles differed too. The nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold, comparing them, found Maistre's writing more powerful: "His thought moves in closer order than Burke's, more rapidly, more directly; he has fewer superfluities." Maistre's French, Arnold judged, showed "to perfection of what that admirable instrument, the French language, is capable."
The French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine—who disagreed with Maistre politically—called him "the Plato of the Alps" and praised his style as "brief, nervous, lucid... born and steeped in the breath of the Alps... virgin, young, harsh and savage."
The Dark Legacy
Maistre's influence extended far beyond traditional conservatism. The early sociologists Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon acknowledged their debt to him. Even utopian socialists found something useful in his analysis of social cohesion and authority.
But the darker legacy came in the twentieth century. The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued that Maistre was a forerunner of fascism—that he understood the self-destructive impulses in human nature and intended to exploit them. Berlin saw in Maistre's thought the seeds of modern authoritarianism: the contempt for reason, the worship of power, the mystification of violence.
This interpretation is contested. Italian fascism actually rejected Maistre's reactionary conservatism. The fascists wanted to create something new; Maistre wanted to restore something old. But the accusation sticks, at least partially. Maistre's celebration of hierarchy, his distrust of democracy, his willingness to justify violence in the name of order—all these could be bent to sinister purposes.
The literary critic Émile Faguet delivered perhaps the harshest verdict: Maistre was "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."
The Personal Man
Behind the fierce polemicist was a family man who spent fourteen years separated from his wife and children. Françoise de Morand de Saint-Sulpice waited in Sardinia while her husband wrote books and converted Russian aristocrats in Saint Petersburg. They had three children: two daughters, Adèle and Constance, and a son, Rudolphe, who became a military officer and fought for the Russian Empire at battles including Borodino—the bloodbath that Tolstoy would immortalize in "War and Peace."
Maistre's younger brother Xavier, his godson, became a major general and a popular fiction writer. The family clearly had both military aptitude and literary talent.
When Napoleon finally fell and the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe, Maistre returned to Turin in 1817. He served as magistrate and minister of state until his death on February 26, 1821. He was buried in the Jesuit Church of the Holy Martyrs—appropriate for a man who had spent his life defending the Jesuits against their enemies, whom he associated with the revolutionary spirit he despised.
Why He Still Matters
Joseph de Maistre isn't widely read today outside academic circles. His theological framework seems archaic. His political conclusions—restore the monarchy, submit to the Pope—have no constituency in modern democracies.
Yet his questions remain live. Where does authority come from? Can reason alone justify political order? What happens when traditional institutions collapse? Is there violence at the foundation of every state?
Charles Baudelaire, the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century and a central figure in Romanticism, called himself a disciple of Maistre. The Savoyard counter-revolutionary, Baudelaire said, had taught him how to think.
That's a strange claim from a man who celebrated vice and corruption in his poetry. But perhaps Baudelaire recognized something that Maistre's liberal critics missed: you don't have to agree with a thinker to learn from him. Sometimes the most valuable teachers are those who challenge everything you believe.
Maistre looked at the Enlightenment's promise of reason, progress, and human perfectibility—and he said no. Not because he was stupid or cruel, but because he had watched that promise turn into the guillotine. Whether he was right about the causes, he was certainly right that something had gone terribly wrong.
Two centuries later, we're still arguing about what it was.