Although the traditional judgement concerning Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) has been nuanced by recent scholarship,1 it does not differ much from the one sketched at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Ballanche, who described him as “a man of antique doctrines, a prophet of the past, and a brutal defender of a world that was disappearing and that he wanted to resuscitate in vain.”2 Similarly, at the end of the same century, Émile Faguet portrayed the Savoyard counter-revolutionary as “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.”3
In fact, Maistre’s reaction to the Enlightenment’s core philosophy, and, by extension, to the Revolution of 1789, brought to light a “philosophy of authority” that did not fail to disquiet his readers, both contemporary and posthumous. Despite this, and the fact that our academic culture does not recognize him as a great classical author, Maistre is often mentioned in syntheses and anthologies of the history of ideas, political philosophy4 and literature.5
After all, can we not see echoes of his denunciation of the planning and constructivist will of modern society both in the political reflections of Carl Schmitt6 and in contemporary neoliberal doctrine?7 In an alternate field of political philosophy, have not important Marxist authors, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, drawn the attention of their readers to the extreme lucidity of Maistre’s criticism of the Enlightenment project, however much they devalued the theological premises and conclusions of his thought?8
Finally, if we move to the field of literature, has it not been argued that Maistre’s works contributed substantially to the aesthetic triumph of the French “romantic reaction,” which was an objection to democracy, the republic, social equality, bourgeois individualism and industrial society, from Baudelaire to Balzac and Barbey d’Aurevilly,9 not to mention the echoes left by his works in great exponents of nineteenth century Russian literature, especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky?10
Despite the weight and importance of some of these considerations, when it comes to taking stock of the figure of Maistre in the historiography of the French Revolution, the researcher who undertakes this task faces two antagonistic realities.
On the one hand, there is a prominent effort by some historians to reduce the historiographical importance of the Maistrian interpretation of the 1789 Revolution, whose providentialist reading of the phenomenon has been criticised in the name of a supposed lack of interest by the Savoyard count in the social, political and economic causes leading to the great event. Renowned specialists in the historiography of the Counter-Revolution, such as Jacques Godechot11 and Massimo Boffa,12 have proposed criticisms of Maistre’s interpretation in this vein. However, beyond the tendentious anachronism present in some critiques,13 the authors err not only by disregarding the various layers of reading underlying that providentialist interpretation, but also by ignoring the fact that Maistre’s critique of the Revolution was not limited to the metapolitical or religious content of the Considérations sur la France (1797), certainly his most important and notorious attack on the Revolution, but far from being his only one.
On the other hand, an attentive assessment of the historiography of the French Revolution categorically disproves the monochrome picture of the Savoyard sketched by certain authorities on the subject. In spite of his anathemas directed against the Revolution, Maistre’s interpretation of the revolutionary phenomenon can be considered, among those written in French during and against the Revolution, as one of the very few that has not fallen into oblivion, as evidenced by the constant references and citations by historians of the most diverse ideological and political shades. In this respect, John McManners14 and Alice Gérard15 have observed that Considérations sur la France, the work responsible for Maistre’s literary reputation within the framework of the Counter-Revolution and conservative thought,16 had the merit of identifying the involvement of the aristocracy both in triggering the Revolution and aggravating it, as well as linking the Terror to the disastrous belligerent policy of French émigrés and European princes, in what has come to be called the “theory of circumstances.”17 Interestingly, some of the greatest exponents of the classical historiography of the Revolution, namely François Mignet,18 Jules Michelet,19 Albert Sorel20 and Albert Mathiez,21 drew on Maistre’s Considérations to illustrate the intimate connection between French national defence and the Terror.
Even Edgar Quinet, a prominent critic of the Terror and Jacobinism within the liberal-republican tradition, referred to Maistre and his “theory of circumstances”22 to refute such appropriation by the republican intellectuals and politicians of his time, and thus illustrate his own judgement about the Revolution, which for him failed precisely because the revolutionaries proved incapable of definitively severing the ties that bound them to the absolutist and Catholic past. Contrary to Maistre, and much of the classical historiographical tradition about the French Revolution that followed him from the last decades of the nineteenth century, and for whom the French revolutionary government represented a totally unprecedented political phenomenon on the great stage of human historical drama, Quinet interpreted the Jacobin government and the Terror as an atavistic return by the revolutionary leaders to the principles and practices of the absolutism of the ancien régime. Here he cited Richelieu and Louis XIV, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and the dragonades against the Fronde. From the perspective of power, it was all about raw and naked violence, leaving the nation with nothing but fear and servitude.23
As rightly pointed out by Mona Ozouf, the importance of Maistre’s Thermidorian pamphlet went far beyond its undeniable and substantial contribution to the formulation of a key concept for the understanding of the revolutionary phenomenon, precisely the “theory of circumstances” for the Terror. In the view of this most talented exponent of the revisionist historiographical tradition of the French Revolution in the late twentieth century, Maistre’s denial of the separation of a “good” Revolution from a “bad” one culminated in a reading of a “bloc-Revolution” that would have a great future within the heteroclite currents of the French right.24
Like Edmund Burke, Maistre identified in the Enlightenment’s utopia, that is, in the project of (re)founding society through individualistic reason (which the Savoyard saw emerging from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation) oriented according to adventitious or “revolutionary”‘ epistemological criteria for the time, the causes of the political instability of the successive revolutionary governments (and even of the restored monarchies) and, ultimately, of the Terror. This is why he considered it impossible to separate a “happy era” of the Revolution from what Benjamin Constant and, after him, the liberal historiography of the Restoration, starting with Madame de Staël’s Considérations, classified as a betrayal of good and beautiful principles. According to Maistre, “no doubt the French Revolution has lasted long enough to go through several phases; nevertheless, its general character has never varied, and from its birth there was evidence of what it would become.”25
It is worth noting that some of Furet’s conclusions, especially those found in Penser la Révolution française (1978), have a close affinity with Maistre’s thesis on the French revolutionary process.26 Moreover, it is also possible to credit Maistre with having predicted, with extraordinary accuracy, not only the threat of a totalitarian degeneration of the democratic-revolutionary ideal,27 but above all, the location (Russia)28 and certain particularities in the formation of this happening, such as the dissemination on Russian soil of a new philosophical current coming from Germany, and which, impregnated with Kantianism and “Spinozism,”29 would sow revolutions characterised by an unheard-of radicalism.
The triumph of individualism in the moral and/or social spheres, of liberalism in the economic field (with all the asymmetries and misery it leaves in its wake) – something that Maistre, an assiduous reader, writer and practitioner of nascent economic science in his own country, did not ignore30 – of materialism or empiricism at the epistemological level, of the democratic ideal underlying the concept of popular sovereignty in politics, such, according to our author, are the great works of the modern “spirit” consecrated by the Revolution, which “has no limits apart from the world.”31
Similarly, and contrary to the opinion of Jacques Godechot and Massimo Boffa, it will not be difficult to demonstrate that, among the “sins” of Maistre’s interpretation of the Revolution, there is certainly not a question of his having made a tabula rasa of French and European history. After all, in Réflexions sur le protestantisme (1798)32 and in De l’Église gallicane (1821), he argued that the French Revolution must be understood in the light of a long process, which was initiated by the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, and developed in the opposition of the Jansenists and the French parlements to the absolutist monarchy following the death of Louis XIV.
Apart from the radical rhetoric of Maistre’s political militancy (and one can find equally or more radical arguments in defence of orthodoxy in the writings of a humanist like Thomas More addressed to Luther), it remains true that the core of the historical genealogy outlined by the counter-revolutionary Savoyard finds wide support in contemporary historical scholarship about the relevant role of religious dynamics both in the crisis of the ancien régime and in the origins of the 1789 Revolution.33 Note the following passage from De l’Église gallicane:
Great revolutions, great moral, religious, or political upheavals, always leave something behind them. Calvinism was born in France; its homeland, vigorous enough to vomit the poison, will nevertheless remain notably affected by it. We saw then what we see continually in all revolutions; they end, but the spirit that gave them birth survives them. … The spirit of the sixteenth century was nourished and propagated in France principally by the Parlements, and especially the one in Paris. … Protestant in the sixteenth century, rebellious and Jansenist in the seventeenth century, and finally, philosophic in the last years of its life, too often the Parlement showed itself in contradiction with the true fundamental maxims of the State. … The Calvinist germ, nourished in this great body, became much more dangerous when it changed its name and called itself Jansenism.34
According to Maistre, the Gallican doctrines of the French clergy were a disguised Jansenism, which, although born within the framework of the Counter-Reformation, developed certain aspects that came to be regarded by its contemporary critics and by twentieth-century academic historiography as tendentially Calvinist, in terms of both doctrine and politics. In other words, Jansenism in France played the role of a thread linking the two great transformational phenomena of social and political life in the West (until then), namely the Reformation and the French Revolution. It is precisely because the Maistrian Bildung represents a syncretism of such disparate elements as his Jesuit education (which, among other things, inculcated knowledge of classical authors) and eighteenth-century philosophie,35 that his analysis went as deeply into the French past as did Tocqueville and Taine. But these French authors had two generations of historians of the Revolution behind them.36
In the light of more recent historiographical debates about this pre-revolutionary theological-political dynamic,37 it would be no exaggeration to say that the eighteenth century was as much or more a century of religious controversy than of Enlightenment. An attentive and qualified reader of the twenty-first century, immersed as he is in a political culture in an advanced stage of secularisation, has certain difficulties in attributing due weight to those disputes, which, however, were directly responsible for undermining the theological and political foundations of the absolutist monarchy.
Condemnations of Jansenism by both the French monarchy (1695) and the papal bull Unigenitus (1713)38 rekindled the antagonism between some of the greatest victims of seventeenth-century absolutism (the cause of divine grace as opposed to that of free will, of the anti-hierarchical Church, of priests against bishops, of parliamentarians and lawyers without “office” against clerical politics) and its beneficiaries (the cause of free will, the hierarchical church, the Court, the bishops and the Jesuits). These controversies not only dominated the French political scene until the mid-1770s, but, in a residual yet no less relevant way, were echoed in what much of the historiography considers the beginning of the Revolution’s dérapage,39 namely the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790).
Research guided by the political and cultural assumptions of the Revolution, exemplified in the works of Sarah Maza,40 Keith M. Baker,41 David Bell,42 Dale Van Kley,43 and Catherine Maire,44 has even demonstrated that the process of forming the sphere of “public opinion” as a political tribunal, and hence the germs of a republican culture in absolutist France, was closely linked to the religious controversies surrounding the bull Unigenitus (1713).45
Beyond his polemical discourse (which was in no small part due to the humanistic outlook of our author’s prose, which prioritised the rhetorical defence of the tradition he held to be true over its systematic exposition), Maistre noted that the implicit challenge of the opposition of the Jansenists and the parlements to the monarchy of divine right lay, like Calvinism, in the tendency to desacralise everything that stood between God and the individual’s conscience. By reserving divinity to the former alone, that coalition disrupted Baroque piety’s complex mechanisms of hierarchical transmission.46
Moreover, historiographical interest in Joseph de Maistre’s intellectual production can be justified by the fact that he was one of the first political thinkers to insert a major event such as the French Revolution into the concept of “long historical duration.” In doing so he contributed directly to the formation of a conceptual tradition in historiography, one which, separated from the polemical content of conservative reaction and enriched by advancements in research and historical methodology, guides the way we interpret the genesis of the modern world, at least in the West.
In the words of an important scholar, “Maistre describes the general movement of modern times as the progressive realisation of an ideal for which the Enlightenment gave the formula: Protestantism, ‘philosophism’ and the French Revolution are only moments in a single project, which expresses itself in the Protestant revindication of the ‘right of examination’ as well as in the philosophic imperative to ‘think for oneself’ or in the revolutionary will to found the State on the sovereignty of individuals.”47
Therefore, the principal objective of my research was to reconstruct, through a systematic study of Maistre’s conspicuous production (preserved in the fourteen volumes of his published Œuvres complètes, not counting the numerous and unreleased “reading notes” or Registres de lectures,48 an indispensable primary source for the researcher), the various levels or layers of his interpretation of the French Revolution, seeking to re-evaluate and measure not only his role in the historiography of this great phenomenon, but also the dimensions of his contribution to the history of ideas and contemporary politics.
To put it another way, this study was guided by the ambitious design of scrutinising as carefully as possible everything the Savoyard wrote about the French Revolution (without omitting comparisons and dialogue with the historiography of the Revolution), and, by extension, about Modernity, its inseparable double, in order to reconstruct the processes that led him from his defence of monarchical authority (1793–1798) to his criticism of the spirit of modern times (1803–1821).
Admitting as methodologically valid what Lawrence Stone has suggested, which is, that “any analysis of so complex a thing as a revolutionary challenge to an established regime … must necessarily range backwards over a long period of time and be multi-causal in its approach, laying as much stress on institutional defects and ideological passions as on social movements and economic changes …,”49 I believe there is sufficient reason to reconsider Maistre’s interpretation of the “presuppositions” and dynamics of the French Revolution and Modernity.
Moreover, this book intends to constitute an interface between the historiography of the French Revolution and the history of ideas, and, in terms of reference and methodological inspiration for the analytical reading of Maistre’s texts and those of his contemporaries, I believe it is appropriate to adopt the procedures of the “Cambridge School,” whose goals were defined as follows by Quentin Skinner:
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.50
As postulated by Peter Laslett in his classic study on John Locke, our first objective consisted in “a modest historian’s exercise,” that is, “to establish” Maistre’s text “as he wanted it read, to fix it in its historical context,” the Savoyard’s “own context,” demonstrating “the connection of what he thought and wrote with the Maistre “of historical influence.”51 This procedure allowed me to delineate what our author intended to communicate when he composed his discourses, when writing at the time he wrote, and to the specific audiences he had in mind.
The present work is thus divided into three parts. In the first, as the title itself “Maistre and the Theological-Political Causes of the French Revolution” indicates, I intend to go back to the origins of Maistre’s interpretation of this phenomenon, illustrating how the political and linguistic contexts of emigration during the Revolution were characterised by a number of factors. These include his personal testimony of revolutionary upheavals in the Swiss Protestant cantons, the reading of the principal pamphlets in circulation, such as those of the counter-revolutionary Edmund Burke or those authored by the Huguenots Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant, etc., and by the prominent participation of Jansenists and Protestants in the early stages of the French Revolution. These were decisive for the conception of his particular interpretation, one which, stripped of its “exaggerations,”52 established very plausible hypotheses and was, not infrequently, close to those that have been consecrated by the various disciplines of the social sciences on the intimate relationship between Protestantism and the process of “disenchantment of the world” that led to the Revolution of 1789 and continued after it.
In addition, the advance of Gallican theses by French liberal politicians and writers during the Restoration, which were welcomed by much of the local nobility and clergy in their opposition to a new Concordat between the pope and the restored monarch Louis XVIII, ignited again an historical discussion about the role played by the absolute monarchy itself in undermining the moral and religious foundation of its power, especially through the opposition of the Jansenists and the parlements to the bull Unigenitus.
The eighteenth-century background to this Restoration discussion is important to keep in mind. During the years 1730 from to 1750, as a result of the papal bull Unigenitus, there had been a serious crisis that had arisen over “the denial of the sacraments” controversy,53 which had been resolved in favour of the Jansenist priests and faithful under the aegis of the state absolutism expressed by the “Four Gallican articles of 1682” (expounded by none other than Bishop Bossuet), as both Maistre and Tocqueville respectively observed. After Chancellor Maupeou’s coup d’État against the parlements (1771–1774), subsequent criticisms of Unigenitus by Jansenist publicists culminated in censorship of the religious orientation of the higher clergy. By ricochet, this development affected the Bourbon absolute monarchy to the point of engendering a theoretical advocacy of the Estates General based on a theological terminology tributary to late-medieval Gallican conciliarism.
A similar appeal to the Estates General would not only be taken up on almost the same lines by the aristocratic and parlementary opposition to monarchical reforms on the eve of the Revolution (1787–1788), but would also contribute decisively to the (unexpected) revolutionary outcome of a process that had begun as an almost universally celebrated “patriotic” opposition of the nation to ministerial despotism under the leadership of the once “Jansenist” Parlement of Paris, and which would soon lead to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 and culminate in the radically anti-clerical atmosphere seen in later phases of the French Revolution.
The second part of this study, “From Bacon to Locke: A Devout Humanist Critic of Modernity,” deals with Maistre’s extensive and complex epistemological critique of Enlightenment philosophy. In the three chapters that compose it, I tried to demonstrate that underlying the evident theological or devout content of his critique, there was also an argument informed by humanist and rationalist motives, both in form and content.
Chapters four, “An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon, or The Humanistic Roots of Maistre’s Counter-Revolutionary Ethos,” and six, “Unlocking the Human Mind: The Critique of Locke’s Epistemology or a Devout Humanist Defence of Human Dignity,” are intended to situate the reader in the discursive context underlying the elaboration of Maistre’s critique of the epistemologies of Bacon and Locke. The contents of this critique, whether through openness and constant recourse to classical philosophy (not only Plato, but also Aristotle), or whether by the centrality attributed to man in his system of thought (the defence of free will, his dignity in the order of Creation, and his active intellect in the investigation of ends), are compared in the light of specific currents in the vast and heterogeneous tradition of humanist thought.
Based on two of Maistre’s writings on Russian education (1810–1811), the fifth chapter offers an account of his curious devout and humanist theory on the history of civilisation or European manners, a theory that would be fully developed and constitute the principal argument of Du pape.
The third and final part of the book (An Ultramontane Savoyard) opens with a text (the seventh chapter) which, as indicated by its title, “Under the Sign of Duality: Joseph de Maistre and the House of Savoy in the Age of Democratic Revolution,” sheds light on the complex question surrounding Maistre’s identity; he was a man who was neither French nor Italian, but Savoyard. It would be impossible to understand Maistre’s heterodox counter-revolutionary and diplomatic positions (marked by an unequivocal Francophilia and an irremissible antipathy to the House of Austria, with whom his sovereigns had established a matrimonial alliance) without examining this question.
Contrary to what the émigrés and the overwhelming majority of European counter-revolutionaries wished, Maistre did not favour the military defeat of the French revolutionaries by the armies of the coalition.54 Fully aware of the new dimension conquered by the sphere of public opinion, in his view, the Revolution could only be defeated internally, from within France, and not by the external intervention of foreign powers. Like his Swiss correspondent, also an eminent counter-revolutionary, Jacques Mallet du Pan (with whom he maintained an assiduous friendship during his exile in Lausanne, 1793–1797), Maistre realised how much the Jacobin revolutionary dynamic was fed by the propaganda and military maneuvers of the allied powers.
Furthermore, and taking into account the deeply precarious situation of the House of Savoy within Europe’s power framework after the French revolutionary explosion, Maistre could not but fear the consequences of an excessive aggrandizement of the House of Austria in an eventual victory of the coalition army. Since France, from the advent of monarchical centralisation under the Valois, had played the role of a counterweight to the hegemony of the House of Habsburg (later House of Austria) in Europe, the Savoyard émigré considered the preservation of French power (even under the condemnable and unwanted revolutionary or Napoleonic guise) a sine qua non condition for the future re-establishment of the European political balance of power.
Although he never expressed an Italian nationalist sentiment, the Savoyard Count was nonetheless an involuntary, though not negligible, actor in the later process of political unification of the Italian peninsula, as would later be recognised by none other than the protagonist of that episode, the Count of Cavour.
The eighth chapter, “Du pape or an Ultramontane Manifesto,” deals with Maistre’s most influential work (along with Considérations sur la France) in a long discussion that develops and reworks in an original way the historical and political role played by Christianity in the history of civilisation and the development of European manners.
In Du pape, Maistre articulated and engaged in broad cultural debates that were occurring in two distinct geographical or political centers. In France, there was the broad French discussion about the compatibility of Christianity and political freedom (and/or the material and moral progress of humanity). This was a controversy that began under the Thermidorian republic (through the posthumous and enormously influential Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain by Condorcet, the learned philosopher and revolutionary politician) and that raged throughout the Consulate and the Restoration (giving rise to such classics as Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme and Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne). Du pape echoed as well the intense cultural and political debates occurring in the Russian Empire during and after the Napoleonic wars (in which Maistre himself, through his pedagogical writings, was one of the main protagonists), which were marked by the emergence of a significantly anti-Western and anti-Catholic nationalist-orthodox sensibility among influential local aristocrats and publicists.
My conclusion with respect to Du pape, which largely explains the poor reputation Maistre had earned among liberal authors from the mid-nineteenth century on, is that it was a work that, in spite of its indelibly partisan character, envisioned a theological and political project that was curious as well impractical and utopian, and that offered anti-imperialist, pluralist (or, in current terminology, multipolar) and rationalist diplomatic precepts.
The ninth and final chapter (“In His Image and Likeness: Maistrian Humanism and Providentialism in the Face of Enlightenment and Revolution”) is dedicated to the analysis of Maistrian providentialism, which is characterised by a comprehensive cosmological perspective that encompassed not only the Savoyard counter-revolutionary’s historical vision and his interpretation of the French Revolution, but also his anthropological and political concepts.
Faced with the challenge of interpreting Maistre’s devout humanist conception in the light of his providentialist view of history (and, within it, an exalted view of the origin and the destination of man that reconciled human free will with divine omnipotence and omniscience), the scriptural exegesis of the Alexandrian patristic theologian Origen proved to be a valuable “tunnel” in identifying the surprisingly common threads that link the Christian humanism developed by the Neoplatonic humanism of Florentine authors such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and the Savoyard Count.
Fundamentally, this comparative exercise makes possible a better understanding of the epistemological premises that served Maistre as the basis for crafting his refutation of Enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary principles. Instead of starting from a radically negative anthropological concept of the human condition, as both Berlin and Cioran read him, and which would culminate in ultramodern anticipations of totalitarian political theories denying freedom,55 Maistre, from a Christian humanist framework (which owed much to Origen), integrated and dialectically reworked the cultures inherited from the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment.
Divided into two parts, this chapter not only develops the implications of Maistrian humanism, but also presents an interpretation of the French Revolution and the Terror in the light of his providentialist concept of history, which, far from resulting in an anti-humanist denial of human freedom (and, by extension, of history itself), culminates in the radical affirmation of the ontological dignity of man. Paradoxically, this devout perspective has important affinities with the ethical and moral presuppositions of a specific current of humanism, which contrasted diametrically with the modern enlightened cosmological and anthropological perspectives, and whose well-meaning eagerness to elevate the human condition socially and politically through sapere aude (“dare to know,” the battle cry of the Enlightenment) and the revolt against all “infamous” impostors, promoted a kind of ontological “relegation” of humanity to mere biological, natural and zoological considerations.
Ignoring the problematic relationship between the Enlightenment and the human ontological debasement (or, to the taste of contemporary ethics, the dilution of human status in a new, absorbing and totalising immanent entity that the ideology of the Enlightenment consecrated as “Nature”) on the pretext of celebrating or defending the “secular State” and the values that are rightly or wrongly attributed to it, seems tantamount to evading contemporary problems. It is not the primary purpose of this historiographical work to deepen awareness of the crises of civilisation in our time, but this study suggests that Maistre’s humanist perspective could help us deal with such issues as biopolitics and what has been characterised as a techno-fascist Fourth Industrial Revolution carried out under the triumphant aegis of a global capitalism that threatens to absorb everything, including the consciences (not to mention the pockets) of its fiercest critics of yesterday.
See e.g. Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Jean-Yves Pranchère, L’autorité contre les lumières: la philosophie de Joseph de Maistre (Geneva: Droz, 2004); Cara Camcastle, The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy; Philippe Barthelet, ed., Joseph de Maistre. Les Dossiers H (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2005); and Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794–1854.
P.-S. Ballanche, Essai de palingénésie sociale, in Œuvres, vol. 3 (Paris and Geneva, 1830), 259.
Émile Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvième siècle, 1st series (Paris: Lecène & Oudin, 1891), 1–2.
See e.g. Alice Gérard, La Révolution francaise: mythes et interprétations, 1789–1970 (Paris: Flammarion, 1970); Pierre Manent, “Joseph de Maistre,” in Dictionnaire des Œuvres Politiques, eds. Francois Chatelet, Olivier Duhamel and Evelyne Pisier (Paris: P.U.F., 1986); Massimo Boffa,“Joseph de Maistre,” in Dictionnaire Critique de la Révolution française, eds. François Furet & Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 1013–20; Jacques Godechot, “Joseph de Maistre,” in L’État de la France pendant la Révolution, 1789–1799, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Découverte, 1988); Bruno Bongiovanni & Luciano Guerci, eds., L’Albero della Rivoluzione: le interpretazioni della Rivoluzione francese (Turin: Einaudi, 1989); M. Prélot & G. Lescuyer, eds. Histoire des idées politiques (Paris: Dalloz, 1992), 632–8; Denis Huisman, entries on Maistre’s Considérations sur la France and Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, in Dicionário de Obras Filosóficas, Portuguese translation by Ivone Castilho Benedetti (São Paulo: Martis Fontes, 2000), 80–1, 395–6; Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 322–3.
When considering Maistre’s reaction to the Enlightenment philosophy, Gustave Lanson concluded that “his abstract and reasoned mind” was nothing more than a “philosophe enemy of philosophes,” which explains both the stylistic resourcefulness and the ideological radicalism of his writings. Cf. G. Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1895), 898. Ferdinand Brunetière, another celebrated historian of French literature, opposed the common view that had become dominant among the Savoyard’s liberal critics, according to whom he could be seen as a “Voltaire retourné” (“Voltaire returned”), arguing instead that the author of Considérations sur la France and Du pape should rather be considered a “theologian of Providence” and, in this sense, a “corrupted Bossuet.” If, in common with Bossuet, Brunetière saw him as an “apologist for war and the executioner,” an “uncompromising theologian,” and an “absolute theocrat,” on the other hand, his “sharp and insulting, paradoxical and often imprudent character, often separates him sharply from the firm and sure common sense embodied by Bossuet.” Despite its notably critical tone towards Maistre, the brief essay on the Savoyard counter-revolutionary ends with praise: “As for us, to conclude on his account, we can, I believe, with his qualities and faults, include him among our great writers. We must be grateful to him for the love he had for France, whom he eulogised in Les soirées, whose providential mission he had celebrated throughout the centuries in the Considérations, and to whom he had never ceased, in all his works, to address adjurations and advice.” At the end of Chapter 11, which dealt with Bonald, Brunetière observed that the French traditionalist’s thought was less influential than Maistre’s, due to the dogmatic and abstract style of the former, whereas the Savoyard writing was “vibrant,” just like that of Lamennais. F. Brunetière, Histoire de la littérature française classique 1515–1830, vol. 4: Le Dix-Neuvième Siècle (Paris: C. Delagrave, 1919), 2nd ed., ch. 12, 106, 108, 113–4.
Schmitt drew on the thought of the counter-revolutionaries, and that of Maistre in particular, in his fight against the rationalism of the Enlightenment expressed in the abstraction of speculative constructions without roots in history. In his Political Theology (1922), the German jurist appealed to Maistre’s political judgements to reject the concept of popular sovereignty – which in his view only intensified the class struggle and exposed German society to a constant “state of exception” – and demonstrate that political authority should be exercised by a single sphere of power, in the name of “decisionist” necessity and the suppression of the crises engendered by parliamentary deliberations and the class struggle. In The Concept of the Political (1927), Schmitt grosso modo echoes a key concept of traditionalist authors (especially by Maistre) about human corruption by original sin, while advancing a sharp critique of liberal ideals – which, supported by an optimistic anthropology, expressed the “radical negation” of the State – and the Weimar Republic, as he considered it impossible to establish and preserve a society without observing the conflict between “friend” and “enemy” (the latter term being understood as anything that posed a threat to national interests, and, in the Germanic context of the twenties of the last century, communism).
However, it must be remembered that a religious worldview, and more particularly one of a providentialist nature (the core of Maistrian thought), is absolutely absent from the thought of the secularised German jurist, for whom politics (and its decisionist sphere) should be detached from the yoke of morality (Political Theology). Moreover, Schmitt differed from Maistre both in his anti-Semitism and in his condemnation of Freemasonry. On Schmitt’s appropriation of Maistre and the differences between them, see J. Zaganiaris, Spectres contre- révolutionnaires: interprétations et usages de la pensée de Joseph de Maistre, XIX–XXe siècles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), ch. 7.
The convergence between the counter-revolutionary thinking of the Savoyard Count and the neoliberal theses was developed respectively by S. Rials, “La droite ou l’horreur de la volonté,” in Révolution et Contre-Révolution au XIXe siècle, ed. S. Rials (Paris: DUC/Albratros, 1987), 53–6; G. Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution ou l’histoire désespérante (Paris: Imago, 1989), 180; and Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 17.
Both authors concluded that the rational ideals of emancipation within a bourgeois-industrial society tend to produce their own negation, by reverting to a scientific mythology reproducing human reification and alienation, and from this they concluded that “terror and civilization are inseparable.” Adorno and Horkheimer recognised that, beyond the Maistrian authoritarian tone, the epistemological diatribes that the Savoyard had addressed to Bacon and Locke (Examen de la philosophie de Bacon, of 1816, and Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, of 1821) contained a pertinent and innovative criticism of this immanentist utopia of rational domination over the world (through scientism and technicism), which, in the words of Maistre, brought into its bosom “stupefaction” by science. J. de Maistre, Examen de la philosophie de Bacon, in O.C., VI: 41. Cf. M. Horkheimer & T. Adorno, La dialectique de la Raison (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 24–95. See also the interesting essay by Michael Kohlhauer: “A Dialectical Reading of Joseph de Maistre by Herbert Marcuse,” in Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers: From Friedrich von Gentz to Isaiah Berlin, eds. C. Armenteros & R. Lebrun (Boston: Brill, 2011), 171–86.
A. Compagnon, Les antimodernes: de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 126.
Vera Miltchyna, “Joseph de Maistre’s Works in Russia: A Look at their Reception,” in Joseph de Maistre’s Life, Thought and Influence: Selected Studies, ed. R. Lebrun (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 242–3.
Referring to Maistre and his providentialist interpretation present in the Considérations, Godechot highlighted the polemical character and the little interest in the causes and development of the Revolution of his analysis, concluding from this that it had little or no historiographical value. Jacques Godechot, “As grandes correntes historiográficas da Revolução Francesa, de 1789 aos nossos dias,” in Revista de História 39, 80 (1969): 425.
For his part, Massimo Boffa issued the following judgement on Maistre: “Why recommend the reader’s attention to Joseph de Maistre? The interest of his work is in effect far from being incontestable. … When he treats the French Revolution, a theme that will haunt him all his life, he reveals himself to be a mediocre historian. … For him it was not important to know how the Ancien Régime could have engendered the catastrophe by which it was going to founder, nor was his first concern that of an historian. That will be the concern of the Doctrinaires, of Tocqueville and of liberal thought: to anchor the revolution in the history of France. This was totally foreign to Maistre. The ambiguous image of an evolution where heterogeneous factors interpenetrate did not stimulate his mind, which was tempted by the mirage of a summarily Manichean opposition between the representation of a monarchical order of divine right and a revolutionary Satanism.” Massimo Boffa, “Joseph de Maistre: la défense la souveraineté.” Le Débat 39, 2 (March-May 1986): 81. This judgement would be mitigated in the entry on “Maistre” that he wrote for the Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1988), eds. François Furet & Mona Ozouf.
As well as the works of J. Tulard and Peter Davies, which requires the Savoyard counter-revolutionary to have a historical culture typical of a twentieth-century social historian. See J. Tulard’s Introduction to Maistre’s Considérations sur la France (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1980), 24, and Peter Davies, The Extreme Right in France, 1789 to the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), 32–3.
John McManners, “The Historiography of the French Revolution,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 8: The American and French Revolutions 1763–93, ed. A. Goodwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 621–2.
Alice Gérard, A Revolução Francesa: mitos e interpretações, Portuguese translation by Sérgio Joaquim de Almeida (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1999), 28.
In a posthumously published writing, G. Lefebvre, commenting on the interpretations hostile to the Revolution (and the author had in mind the works of Augustin Cochin and Pierre Gaxotte), observed that they were deeply tributary to the original interpretations of Maistre and Barruel. See G. Lefebvre, Réflexions sur l’histoire (Paris: François Maspero, 1978), 229.
In the first chapter of his Considérations, Maistre stated that: “Robespierre, Collot or Barère never thought to establish the revolutionary government or the Reign of Terror; they were led to it imperceptibly by circumstances.” See J. de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, ch. 1; Considerations on France, ed. and trans. by Richard Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5.
Read the following quotation from chapter 2 (“Reflections on the Ways of Providence in the French Revolution”) of Maistre’s Considérations reproduced in Mignet’s Histoire de la Révolution: “But our descendants, who will worry very little about our sufferings and will dance on our graves, will laugh at our present ignorance; they will easily console themselves for the excesses that we have seen and that will have preserved the integrity of the ‘most beautiful’ realm after that of heaven.” F. Mignet, Histoire de la Révolution française depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1814 (Paris: F. Didot père et fils, 1824), 271 [the Maistrian excerpt can be found at Considérations sur la France, ch. 2; Considerations on France, 16]. In this work, classified by F. Furet as the “liberal vulgate” of the French Revolution’s historiography in the 1820s and 1830s, two revolutions were distinguished, that of 1789 and that of the year II, the first corresponding to the historically “necessary” victory of the third estate over the nobility, the second to the victory of the popular classes over the bourgeoisie (an episode provoked by internal and external resistance to the changes proposed by the Revolution). Through this procedure (that is, by appealing to historical necessity and to the “theory of circumstances” that Maistre had mobilised to describe the Terror), Mignet returned the Revolution entirely to the liberal camp, which received it completely purged of its “cursed” part (the Terror), since Jacobinism had become a by-product of the Counter-Revolution.
As for Michelet, the fact that he alludes to Maistre’s Considérations in his Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–1853) only confirms the distinguishable character of the Maistrian interpretation, which, despite representing a radical refutation of the French Revolution, offered the republican professor compelling arguments for his criticism of the feudal remnants and aristocracy of the Ancien Régime: “They were a very heterogeneous class of men, but in general weak and physically decadent, frivolous, sensual and sensitive … This is what M. de Maistre recognises in his Considérations sur la France.” J. Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 1, ed. Gérard Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), Book II, ch. 3, 201. Later on, Michelet referred again to Maistre’s famous pamphlet when he wrote: “The emigrants risked victory, murdering their homeland, to their eternal dishonor. M. de Maistre would have said to them: ‘Oh, you unfortunates, congratulate yourselves on having been defeated by the Convention! Would you then have wanted a dismembered and destroyed France?’” Michelet did not ignore the fact that Maistre targeted the clergy and the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime in his Considérations. Likewise, it is very likely that his source of rhetorical inspiration for the description of Jacobinism as a “terrible machine” came from the same Maistrian pamphlet, especially from the seventh chapter, where the metaphor in question is present on several occasions. See J. Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 2 (Paris: Jules Rouff, 1869), Book XIII, ch. 1, 1469.
Sorel quotes several passages from Considerations, whose author is described as the “most eloquent apologist for the Counter-Revolution,” to illustrate the risks that counter-revolutionary politics brought to French national integrity. See A. Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, Part III: La Guerre aux Rois, 1792–1793 (Paris: Librairie Plon, Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1891), 479. According to the same author, Maistre’s greatest virtue consisted in having understood better than anyone the extent of the Jacobin phenomenon, which, amid the pressures of internal and external wars, had been necessary for the maintenance of French territorial integrity. Cf. A. Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, Part II: La Chute de la Royauté (Paris: Librairie Plon, Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1908), 530, 537, 565.
Albert Mathiez reproduced the following passage from Maistre’s Considérations in his La Révolution française: La Terreur (1922) “What were the royalists asking for when they called for their imagined Counter-Revolution, that is to say, one made abruptly and by force? They requested, in fact, the conquest of France; they requested therefore her division, the annihilation of her influence, and the debasement of her king.” A. Mathiez, The French Revolution (New York: Russel & Russel, 1962), 403–4; J. de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, ch. 2; Considerations on France, 16.
On the theory of circumstances in historiography, see Alice Gérard, A Revolução Francesa …, 28.
“Through the contagion of violence, the theologian M. de Maistre became, ideally, the Robespierre of the clergy. He opposes, in theory, a terrorism of the Church to the terrorism of the Convention. His inexorable God, assisted by the executioner, Christ of a permanent Committee of Public Safety, is the ideal of 1793, but of a 1793 eternalised against the Revolution. In the name of the Church, he admits the system of the Mountain, the Terror, the scaffold – of which he makes an altar – the ‘soil continually soaked in blood,’ everything except the promised liberty, equality, fraternity. In this theology, which truly puts death on the order of day, the Convention’s absolutism remains at the core, without the hope of liberation before the last day of the globe, Robespierre without Rousseau, the means without the end. So great is Catholicism’s hatred for the Revolution that, in order to kill it in the cradle, it borrows from it its hell, and rejects only its heaven.” E. Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française (Paris: Comon et Cie, 1845), 13th Lesson. It is important to emphasise that the core of Quinet’s assumptions in his critical interpretation of the Revolution, later elaborated in La Révolution (1865), is to be found in germ in his 1845 work, where the references to Maistre are abundant. In the 1865 work, Quinet refers to Maistre when dealing with the “Convention.” For Quinet, the Savoyard counter-revolutionary was among those rare interpreters who best penetrated the purpose of the Jacobins, which was to “force a people to be free.” (Book XII, ch. 1). On the identity between the Ancien Régime/Catholicism and the Terror, both politically and morally, see chapters 10 and 14 of Book XVII on the “Theory of the Terror,” in La Révolution.
Mona Ozouf, Presentation of La Révolution en débat by François Furet (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 10.
J. de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, ch. 4; Considerations on France, 39. Despite the difference in objects and conclusions, it would be worth emphasising here some similarities of analysis and style between Maistre and Tocqueville, especially when the latter, in the first volume of his De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835), highlights the character and spirit of the settlers (especially Puritanism) as key explanations for understanding democracy and freedom in the United States: “Go back to the beginning; examine the child even in the arms of his mother; see the exterior world reflected for the first time in the still dark mirror of his intellect. … And only then will you understand the origin of the prejudices, the habits and the passions that are going to dominate his life. … The whole man is there, so to speak, in the infant swaddled in his cradle. … Something similar happens among nations. Peoples always feel the effects of their origin. The circumstances that accompanied their birth and were useful to their development influence all the rest of their course.” A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, trans. by James T. Schleifer, ed. Eduardo Nolla (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), Part I, ch. 2, 46.
F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. by Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 62–3.
George Steiner drew an interesting parallel between Maistre and Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago (1947). G. Steiner, “Aspects of Counter-Revolution,” in The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789–1989, ed. Geoffrey Best (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 148.
“If the Russians, who have a certain tendency to do everything for fun (I do not say make fun of everything), play with this serpent too” – and Maistre is referring to the philosophy of the Enlightenment – “no people will be more cruelly bitten.” Joseph de Maistre, Quatre chapitres sur la Russie (“Appendice au Chapitre Quatrième”), in O.C., VIII: 354. These lines can be read both as a literary prediction (after all, Russia would soon produce some of the best literature of the nineteenth century) and a political one (a more radical Revolution than the French one).
J. de Maistre, Lettre à Ouvaroff sur le projet d’une académie asiatique (1810), in Études de philologie et de critique, ed. S. Ouvaroff (Paris: Didot, 1845), 56.
See in particular Maistre’s Mémoire sur le commerce des grains entre Carouge et Genève (1790), in The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy, ed. and trans. by Cara Camcastle.
Joseph de Maistre, “Letter to M. le Chevalier de Rossi” (10 October 1809), in O.C., XI: 352. In a letter dating from 1808, Maistre reported that his time was witnessing “a fusion of the human race.” J. de Maistre, “Letter to M. le Chevalier de Rossi” (20 January/1February 1808), in O.C., XI: 33; a reflection that would later be ratified in the Soirées: “Everything announces that we are marching towards a great unity that we must salute from afar, to use a religious turn of phrase. We are sorrowfully and very justly ground. But if such miserable eyes as mine are worthy of catching a glimpse of divine secrets, we are ground to be mixed.” J. de Maistre, Soirées (IIe Entretien), O.C., IV: 127; St Petersburg Dialogues, 69. Maistre’s emphases.
First published in 1870.
As examples, we can cite three important authors who, in different degrees and nuances, recognised such religious dynamics in their works: Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1991); and the excellent work by Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
Joseph de Maistre, De l’Église gallicane, Book I, ch. 2, in O.C., III: 3–4, 5–6, 12; On the Gallican Church, in The Collected Works of Joseph de Maistre, ed. and trans. by R. Lebrun (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, 2009), 3–4, 5–6, 12. Further references to this Edition as follows: On the Gallican Church.
Read Richard Lebrun’s critical biography of Maistre, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant, especially the second chapter.
From G.P. Gooch’s critique of Taine – for whom the latter, in the first two volumes of Les origines de la France contemporaine (1875) dedicated to the ancién régime, failed to observe that English empiricism, with its inductive method, exerted a greater influence on the French Enlightenment (and, by extension, on the Revolution) than Descartes’ deductive method – it would be no exaggeration to conclude that Maistrian analysis has “aged” better than that of its French conservative successor, insofar as it had extracted the multiple developments (moral, psychological, political) of this true epistemological revolution of modern times, as its sharp criticism of Bacon’s and Locke’s theories of knowledge makes abundantly clear. See G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913), 2nd ed., 241.
The reason for preferring to use the combined term “theological-political” should be obvious to an attentive reader of eighteenth-century history. In this period, politics as a discipline and a field of human action was absorbed by theology, from which it has been trying to detach itself ever since the (North) American and French revolutionary experiences of the eighteenth century.
Issued in September 1713 by Pope Clement XI, in response to a request from Louis XIV, the bull condemned a total of 101 propositions in the book Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament (1693), by the Oratorian theologian Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719).
Present in the fifth chapter of La Révolution française (entitled “Le dérapage de la Révolution”) by F. Furet and Denis Richet, the concept that has become famous and a subject of controversy in historiography expresses both a continuity and a rupture with respect to classical historiography (and which is so well expressed in the work of Mignet cited above). Continuity (especially with the liberal tradition), because, according to the authors, the Revolution of 1789–1791, eminently political in character and as an expression of a conscious project of the bourgeois elite, suffered an abrupt and undesirable deviation of course or a dérapage from the year 1792 onwards, when the “democratic” or social revolution of the masses (of a circumstantial and even unconscious character) closed “temporarily to the French bourgeoisie the great road that was supposed to lead it to the calm liberalism of the 19th century.” F. Furet & Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1973), New Edition, 156, 159. And rupture, because unlike classical historiography, for whom the Revolution, despite the democratic-Jacobin upsurge, represented in the end a “bourgeois revolution” (i.e. one that favoured the bourgeoisie), the authors argued, through the concept of dérapage, that the result of the 1792–1794 deviation was precisely the opposite (hindering or delaying the development of a liberal state and society under the aegis of the bourgeoisie). It is important to highlight that Furet’s later perspective on the Revolution, particularly that expressed in Penser la Révolution française (1978), abandoned the concept of dérapage, which distanced him (even more) from the Marxist historiographical tradition, and severed the conceptual ties that previously linked him to the liberal historiography. On the classical liberal view of the Revolution, see note 18 above.
Sarah Maza, “Le tribunal de la nation: les mémoires judiciaires et l’opinion publique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” in Annales E.S.C. 42, 1 (Jan.–Fev. 1987): 73–90.
Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 89, 150–1, 168–70.
David Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 193–4.
Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation: le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 224–8.
As recognised by E. Quinet in Le Christianisme et la Révolution française, 12th lesson: “Should one wish to observe … how the old French society had been condemned for a long time before the Revolution …, it is enough to consider the first monument of the Holy See of the eighteenth century …” [he is referring to the Unigenitus]. “Let it no longer be said, therefore, that the philosophes have shaken the faith. This initiative was taken by an established authority long before theirs. The eighteenth century opens with a greater solemnity than is often said … Here is the first journée of the eighteenth.”
If, as Marcel Gauchet has argued, there is a “law of human emancipation through divine affirmation,” in that the more transcendent the concept of God, the greater its effect on the freedom of a people, it can be deduced that Jansenist Augustinianism carried within it an implicit message of emancipation, no matter how orthodox and pro-monarchical the statements of its founders and illustrious adherents. Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde: une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 53.
Jean-Yves Pranchère, L’autorité contre les lumières, 20–1.
For more details on this subject, see R. Lebrun, “Maistre’s Reading,” in Maistre Studies, ed. Richard Lebrun (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 46.
L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 63.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xiii.
Peter Laslett, ed., Introduction to John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4.
C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, “Joseph de Maistre,” in Portraits littéraires, vol. 2 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1900), 388.
On the issue of “refusal of sacraments” and its cultural and political impacts on the ancien régime, see: John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, vol. 2: The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 487–508; Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 33–8 and 167–172; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of The French Revolution, 39–40; Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 137–60; Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation: le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle, 401–4; William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic resistance to authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin Press, 2000), 59–67; Daniel-Carroll Joynes, “Le réseu des parlementaires jansénistes à Rouen pendant les refus de sacrements,” in Jansénisme et Révolution, ed. Catherine Maire (Paris: Chroniques de Port Royal, 1990), 173–182; Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century, ch. 4.
Maistre explicitly states this viewpoint in the second chapter of Considérations sur la France, in O.C. I, 18, 21; Considerations on France, 16, 18. Cf. P. Glaudes, “France,” in Dictionnaire to Joseph de Maistre: Œuvres, ed. Pierre Glaudes (Paris: Robert Laffont/Bouquins, 2007), 1182.
I. Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 2nd ed., 129–30; Emile M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991), 23.