A Brief Biography
Born in Chambéry to a recently ennobled Savoyard family, Joseph de Maistre received a Catholic, likely Jesuit, and erudite education. His maternal grandfather Demotz, owner of one of Savoy’s best libraries, took a great interest in the education of his eldest grandson, and had the boy’s tutor bring him into his study twice a day to check on his progress. Demotz ensured that young Joseph received a thorough grounding in the Greek and Latin classics and bequeathed to him his library, which the book-devouring young man would gradually expand into Savoy’s best private library.
Contrary to what might be surmised given its owner’s eventual political preferences, this was not a library composed only of the ancient and medieval classics: on the contrary, the moderns were abundantly represented, including the Enlightenment writers that middle-aged Joseph would attack so fiercely decades later, but that he emulated admiringly in his adolescent notebooks, enthusing about Mireabeau and starting even his own encyclopédie. Not that the worldly knowledge of the ancients, medievals, and moderns formed Maistre entirely: such knowledge mixed too with a Catholic spirituality that would have a major impact on his life and work, and that was notably represented by the devotional mysticism of Saint Francis of Sales.
Young Maistre trained in law at the University of Turin and on finishing his studies entered Savoy’s legal establishment, rising fairly quickly through the ranks to become a magistrate and Senator of the province. He seems, during these years, to have been very busy not only as a lawyer and bibliophile, but also as a Freemason and family man. Writing during those years was only for his own pleasure – as when he penned the Dialogue between Mr. Dennis and the President on the Force of Law, an unfinished piece on moral theory whose central theme – the executions of the innocent – would haunt him throughout his life, especially after the French Revolution. Maistre’s rhetorical and writing skills were well-known in Savoy and during his legal career he wrote twice under commission, producing the Eulogy of Victor-Amédée III in 1775 and the Discourse on the Magistrate’s External Character in 1784.
Besides occasional pieces for private or local consumption, though, the young Maistre never showed, despite his intellectual and writing talents, any aspirations to become a writer: his later musings on the inferiority of the written word, that poor human image of the divine, spoken Logos, probably explains this, as does the traditional aristocratic avoidance of engagement in lucrative professions. But the French Revolution changed all that. Having first welcomed 1789 as the executor of much-needed reform, Maistre would soon find in his religious faith the inspiration of other attitudes. One incident that seems to have shocked him was the beating, in Chambéry, of pregnant women on their way to Mass. Attacks on traditional institutions, along with the general violence that accompanied the Revolution, turned his mind increasingly against it, and engendered his conviction that the spirit that inspired it was, as he notoriously put in the Considerations on France (1797), ‘Satanic’. It is little wonder, therefore, that when the French revolutionary army invaded Savoy in 1792, Maistre chose to emigrate, leaving the entirety of his property, including his precious library, to be confiscated by the revolutionary regime.
The beginning of Maistre’s exile was also that of his writing career. Realizing that the Revolution had been made with books, Maistre resolved that it should also be fought with books; and conceiving of the Revolution as a modern fall, he thought it necessary that his aristocratic self should ‘fall’, too, into the polemical written word. His first publication of the revolutionary years was the Letters of a Savoyard Royalist to his Compatriots, written largely in Lausanne in 1793. Though almost unnoticed with the exception of the last, which went rapidly through two editions, these pieces earned Maistre experience as a pamphleteer and displayed his polemical style for the first time. Their preoccupation with sovereignty also led him to write the two essays, unpublished during his lifetime, where he developed for the first time the core of his social and political thought. These were On the State of Nature and On the Sovereignty of the People, refutations of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1753) and Social Contract (1762), respectively. Though strongly critical of the Genevan, these writings also borrowed heavily from his philosophy, transforming his ideas to form the fundamentals of Maistre’s brand of conservatism.
The first published work to develop these core thoughts, and also to bring Maistre international notice as a thinker and writer, was the Considerations on France of 1797. It was the Considerations that condemned the Revolution as a providential punishment designed to heal France – an argument that the text rendered famous thanks to its brilliant rhetoric, but that had actually been first expressed by Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. And it was the Considerations too that, taking its cues from Hume’s account of the English Revolution in the History of England, predicted that the Bourbons would re-ascend the French throne.
Having led an errant and financially difficult life in Switzerland and Italy during 1795-99, Maistre, unconditionally loyal to the House of Sardinia that ruled Savoy before the French invasion, was appointed regent of Sardinia. In this post he ceased writing, devoting all his time to his duties and to a happy family life. His days, however, were marred by his continual disputes with the viceroy Charles-Felix over the administration of justice on the island. The case of the Sardinian Pala, executed without valid proof after being framed by government associates for a crime he didn’t commit, and for whose life Maistre pleaded unsuccessfully after thoroughly investigating the case, left him with a deep feeling of injustice that probably contributed, despite his unwavering loyalty to the reigning house, to his later disappointment with kings.
After three years of Sardinian sojourn, Maistre’s disputes with Charles-Felix resulted in his appointment as Sardinia’s extraordinary envoy to Saint Petersburg. His task was to negotiate the subsidy that the King of Piedmont-Sardinia received from the Russian government. It was the beginning of the most creative and intellectually productive period of Maistre’s life. Having been obliged to leave his family behind for financial reasons, Maistre was once again intensely active socially, this time at the Russian court. He watched his new environment with fascination, developing an anthropological vocation and keeping a notebook where he recorded the ‘religion and customs of the Russians’. It would not be long before he began new theoretical explorations, completing, in 1809, theEssay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions. Arguing that unwritten constitutions are superior to written ones for the implicit’s greater power to sway hearts, this was the first of several Maistrian texts intended to save Russia from undergoing its own version of the French Revolution.
Maistre’s talents were noticed in Russia as they had been in Savoy, and in 1810 he became educational adviser to Alexander I. In this position, he wrote the Five Letters on Public Education in Russia. The counter-revolutionary aspiration of this work was to implement a humanities- and classics-based national curriculum, contrary to the scientific curriculum – inspired by the Enlightenment – that the liberally minded educational minister Mikhail Speransky was attempting to implement. Just as theConsiderations on France had fed on the unpublished essays on Rousseau, the Letters on Public Education drew on an unpublished theoretical work. This was the Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon (begun ca. 1809), Maistre’s lengthiest work and sole epistemological treatise. It was the Examination that exposed Maistre’s anti-Lockean – and therefore anti-Encyclopédie – perspective on knowledge, combining innatism with the valorization of direct (as opposed to machine- or instrument-mediated) experience.
Maistre’s writing work continued in 1811 with the Four Chapters on Russia, short pieces devoted to advising the Russian government on how best to avoid a revolution, which Maistre believed could only be accomplished if Russia converted to Catholicism, since outside pure Christianity no government could rule without enforcing some variety of slavery (in Russia’s case, serfdom). This insistence on Catholicism’s socio-political advantages, particularly in comparison with Russian Orthodoxy, occupied Maistre’s thoughts increasingly during the 1810s and was probably the major cause of his loss of imperial favor after a mere year of service.
Not that this deterred Maistre in his efforts to Catholicise Russia. He continued an activity he had been practicing discreetly since his arrival in the country, that of converting Russian aristocratic ladies – most notably Madame Swetchine – to the Roman faith. He also became close to the Jesuits – whose Society, at the time dissolved everywhere else, survived only in Prussia, the United States, and the Russian Empire. And he began to compose his great work, On the Pope, a historically informed treatise on papal temporal power that envisioned the pontiffs as Europe’s future peacemakers. Maistre’s insistence on Russia’s Romanization, his status as the Russian court’s most brilliant intellectual figure, and his and the Jesuits’ successes at converting Russian aristocrats to Catholicism eventually led to the imperially ordered expulsion of both him and the Jesuits from Russia. Maistre left the tsar’s lands in 1817.
He did not do so, however, before commencing his other great work, the St. Petersburg Dialogues. Subtitled Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, this highly lyrical text, where Maistre said he had poured everything he knew, attempted to understand how the Divinity works in the universe by identifying God’s traces in the world, deducing laws from these traces, and describing how these laws ultimately maintain, direct, and improve the lives of all beings, both as individuals and in collectives. Especially life-enhancing according to Maistre were the laws of sacrifice: the social integration achieved by ritual violence is the theme of the Clarification regarding Sacrifices, the poetic opuscule that traditionally follows the Dialogues and that is remembered as the first treatise in the sociology of violence, and one of the earliest essays in the anthropology of religion.
Maistre had less than four years to live when he left Russia. He spent them in Piedmont, reunited with his family, preparing On the Pope for publication, (almost) finishing the Dialogues, and serving as Regent of Piedmont’s Great Chancery, a mostly honorary post. Until the end, the Sardinian government remained wary of its odd and famous subject, loyal unto extremity – as proven by the financial penury he endured in Russia, and the honorable services he refused to give to the French and Russian monarchs. For Maistre, enforced marginality translated into political disillusionment, a state of mind that may have affected his health despite his happy family life and close collaboration with his youngest daughter, Constance.
Maistre in his last days was convinced that the kings of his time no longer reigned like the kings of old, a fact which of itself would not have mattered much to him, accepting of change as he was, except that the new kings had become, to his mind, revolutionary. The monarchy might have returned, but the Revolution had triumphed: though apparently defeated, it had overtaken everything, and it had seeped even into the finest cracks of his own thought. ‘I am dying with Europe’, Maistre wrote, and indeed, ill with a Guillain-Barré virus, he died in 1821.
Carolina Armenteros
