I am delighted to accept the author’s invitation to provide a Foreword for his erudite study of Joseph de Maistre, though given the fact that my name appears so often in both the text and footnotes of this book, I feel both humbled and honoured to be entrusted with the task. The fact is that our friendship and working relationship goes back a long way, to 2006, when José Miguel Nanni Soares, at the time a master’s student, wrote me by email to clear up some doubts he had about Maistre’s Considérations sur la France, whose first translation into Portuguese was being prepared by him.
I met the author for the first time in 2008, when I returned to São Paulo – my first visit to that big city had been in 2005, when another Brazilian scholar, Élcio de Gusmão Verçosa Filho, had arranged for me to teach a course at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) – to serve as the external examiner for Élcio’s Ph.D. On that occasion, J. Miguel helped me by whispering into my ear essential translations during a long oral examination in rapidly spoken Portuguese. Then, in December of that same year we met yet again at the Fifth International Colloquium on Joseph de Maistre at the University of Cambridge, where he presented a paper, “Epilogue: The Reception of Maistre’s Considérations sur la France,” later published in the volume entitled Joseph de Maistre and His European Readers (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), which Carolina Armenteros and I co-edited.
In any case, our author and I became friends, and subsequently when he published his critical scholarly Portuguese translation of Maistre’s Considérations sur la France in 2022 (an expanded and revised version of the one presented during his master’s degree, completed in 2009), I provided an “appreciation” that appeared in Portuguese translation on the inside of the covers of that volume. More recently, when he asked me to provide a similar recommendation for the Portuguese edition of the current study, I again responded positively to his request.
Reading that Portuguese edition persuaded me that J. Miguel had convincingly demonstrated his thesis that Maistre’s interpretation of the French Revolution, as well as his well-justified reservations about the “modernity” emerging in late eighteenth-century Europe, were based on the Savoyard author’s life-long belief in a kind of Christian humanism. My friend had shown that the renowned counter-revolutionary writer’s fundamental position was supported by his extensive study of classical, Christian, and contemporary writings. Clearly enunciated in his many writings, which while certainly polemical, since written in response to perceived contemporary perils, Maistre has continued to attract a wide readership, as our author also demonstrated, both because of the seriousness of the issues he discussed and because of his scintillating literary style.
By this time, very much impressed by my Brazilian colleague’s impeccable and extensive scholarship and linguistic abilities (in the present volume, you will find citations from works published in Spanish, English, French, Italian, as well as his native Portuguese), I was more than happy to respond his request to assist him in producing a solid English translation of his book. I am grateful that, though now in my early nineties, I proved up to the task.
In recommending this volume, I must call attention to two of its unusual features mentioned by José Miguel himself. In his Introduction he declares to his readers the procedures used by the “Cambridge School” for dealing with the history of ideas, and quotes an expert on that School who writes:
What exactly does this approach enable us to grasp about classic texts that we cannot grasp simply by reading them? The answer, in general terms, is I think that it enables us to characterise what their authors were doing in writing them. We can begin to see not merely what arguments they were presenting, but also what questions they were addressing and trying to answer, and how far they were accepting and endorsing, or questioning and repudiating, or perhaps even polemically ignoring, the prevailing assumptions and conventions of political debate.
In researching and writing this study, our author accepted these injunctions and implemented them assiduously. Readers are offered lengthy and detailed accounts, explanations and texts that provide precise and accurate answers to the questions posed by the Cambridge School. We learn all the relevant details of Maistre’s life, the contexts of his life experiences, the writers he read, the questions he and his contemporaries were asking and the answers that were on offer, as well as a multitude of clues as to what Maistre hoped to accomplish with each of his own writings. José Miguel also traces, in detail, how those writings were received, denounced and as often favorably accepted from his time to our own. In effect, readers are offered a very rich harvest of scholarship about an important figure in Western intellectual history.
The last paragraph of the author’s Preface to the English translation alerts readers to the unusual way the book is organised:
… the inclusion of a Chronology (detailing the principal events relating to Maistre’s life and works, as well of those of his time) at the beginning of the work is intended to guide the reader through this more logical-conceptual than an exactly chronological exposition of Maistre’s thought.
To be sure, this logical organisation allows our Brazilian scholar, like a good lawyer, to argue the case for his interpretation very effectively. But, at the same, this structure means that his readers will inevitably encounter some duplication in both factual accounts and quotations introduced to support various facets of his overall interpretation of Joseph de Maistre. In my first reading I was a bit surprised by the duplication, but as I worked with the text, rereading each chapter numerous times, “fine-tuning” the author’s English translation, I came to appreciate how his choice of a logical presentation enabled him to build a very strong case for his thesis.
I must add that any concerns about the logical structure of this book should be mitigated by the contents of book’s very helpful and generously proportioned Introduction, which provides a detailed overview of the author’s interpretation Joseph de Maistre – what might be thought of as the outline of the case that he intends to explain, demonstrate, contextualize and prove in much greater detail in subsequent chapters.
Lastly, a word about an issue that caused a lively debate between us. My practice, when studying Maistre, had been to produce what might be called “straight intellectual history,” with the goal of providing an accurate account of his life and writings – without suggesting to my readers how or why they might find his ideas relevant to their lives or thinking today. Readers of this book will find that my friend, like Joseph de Maistre in his time, uses forceful and provocative prose to persuade readers why his subject’s views, ideas, and positions are still relevant to our current situation. I am happy to wish him well in achieving that goal.
Richard A. Lebrun,
North Vancouver, BC, CA 14 September 2024.