The Catholic Counterrevolutionary

Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre (1753–1821) was a Savoyard magistrate, diplomat, and counterrevolutionary thinker. Born in Chambéry, a French-speaking city then under the rule of the Kingdom of Sardinia but now part of France, he spent much of his life in exile. His family was not ancient: his grandfather was a draper, and his father, a lawyer and magistrate like himself, was ennobled for distinguished public service.

Maistre was a man of strong affections, charitable inclinations, and many friendships, who suffered from his separation from his family during the upheavals of the time. His wit, charm, intelligence, and forceful manner made him a social lion wherever he went, which helped him personally as well as professionally: the poverty of the Sardinian kingdom, his loss of property during the French Revolution, and the expense of keeping up the appearances required by his position while ambassador to Russia, meant he relied on dinner invitations to eat. 

He was widely and deeply read and possessed a remarkable ability to tear into writers’ arguments and assess their strong and weak points. He had contempt for Voltaire, for example, even personally, but admired his style, distinguished the value of his various works, and even remarked on his native good sense.

As a man of affairs leading an unsettled life in unsettled times, Maistre was a close and unsentimental observer of how the world works. His realism regarding social functioning and human limitations led him to doubt the power of human design in politics. A people’s political life is as it is for reasons that cannot be changed very much, he thought, so a nation always had the government that was best for it—or at least the one it deserved. As long as the nation lasted, its government would change gradually just as the nation changed. The role of the statesman was to secure benefits and avoid dangers through measures that aligned with his nation’s fundamental habits, institutions, and character.

In contrast, the attempt to radically transform a political system is much more likely to degrade it, perhaps catastrophically, than to change it for the better. Free institutions in England worked as well as they did because Englishmen live there. The French Revolution, which the example of England helped inspire, had led instead to a string of unworkable paper constitutions and a government fit only for war, violence, and tyranny. Likewise, he thought, the Russian government should move very slowly and cautiously with regard to education and reforms like the abolition of serfdom. Otherwise, the lack of popular preparation, the vehement impatience of the Russian character once aroused, and the practical weakness of nonpolitical restraints like that of religion could lead to disaster.

His realism also led him to an unclouded vision of crude realities, including violence. His writings contain some unflinching, even horrific, passages. In particular, one on war and another on the figure of the executioner and his necessity to the social order, shock people, and have led some to think him obsessed. In fact, he only makes a point of such brutal matters in a very few places where he evidently wanted to provoke his readers. His viewpoint was undoubtedly affected not only by his work as a diplomat and magistrate in violent times, but also by his work as a young man in a Catholic apostolate that accompanied condemned criminals to the scaffold.

When Maistre wrote for publication, it was for political and polemical purposes. His sense of the general intractability of human life complicated his writing efforts. What can writing do, if everything is as it should and must be? That and other complications mean that his thought points in a variety of directions and is often misinterpreted even by intelligent readers. Thus, Isaiah Berlin famously made Maistre out to be a proto-fascist based on the logic of his argument that each nation had a “national dogma” that the state should defend even with deadly force. But this ignores Maistre’s fundamental emphasis on history as providential and political willfulness as futile and destructive. 

As Maistre told a friend, his purpose in writing was less to demonstrate that a particular argument he made was right than to provoke his readers into clarifying their own views. He therefore used a dazzling rhetorical style featuring striking and often paradoxical assertions that could lead to overstatement. Thus, as a critic of America, where he saw political contrivance without roots in the past, he predicted that an American capital city named after General Washington would never be built. His point was that a great city could not be planned or invented but must grow organically.That prediction, of course, misfired: he should have laid more stress on his related point that the American republic was new, its history and circumstances unique, and not well-understood in Europe, so it had little use as an example for Europeans. 

Some of his works were published after his death, even though he had opined that works not published by living authors should not be published at all. One he did intend to be published was his greatest work, St Petersburg Dialogues: or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, where the notorious “proto-fascist” passages on war and capital punishment can be found. But the book was entirely a dialogue between characters, and so we cannot assume that Maistre believed some of the extreme things his characters said.

For example, “the Count” advocates hanging intellectuals who foment dissent against a nation’s fundamental principles (the national dogma). But Maistre interrupted the Count’s diatribe with a comment from “the Senator,”  who, alarmed that the Count was becoming overly excited, diplomatically proposes that, since the night air had turned chilly, they should all go to bed to avoid illness.

As a political writer, Maistre believed in authorial discretion, and was not primarily concerned with working through the details of a particular political system. He presented seemingly invulnerable logical arguments in favor of absolutism, for example. But he was always a realist, and noted in rare asides that no rule was universal, and—for example—resistance against tyranny was an unavoidable fact that would inevitably be legitimized when successful. However, he did not want to draw attention to such points or try to make them part of a system.

His analysis and reasoning tend to reflect the Enlightenment thought he grew up with and engaged with as a political intellectual. As a result, they sometimes sit oddly with his deepest commitments, which are Catholic. Thus, his analysis lacks the appeals to natural law and Church authority that are typical of Catholic tradition. His book The Pope, for example, defended papal infallibility in a way that he self-consciously acknowledged was unusual and possibly questionable, by making it fit the necessity of a final decision maker in any system of government. And his posthumously published book Letters on the Spanish Inquisition defended the Inquisition partly by debunking myths, but more basically by appealing to the fundamental interest all societies share in defending what he referred to as their national dogmas. (In an age of “hate speech” laws, it seems that more liberals and moderates should admit the force of that argument than in the recent past.)

Perhaps because his arguments were not traditionally Catholic, his work was not always well received by Catholic reviewers. He did assert a sort of natural law, that the world was made in accordance with divinely appointed patterns that all things obeyed. In the case of particular human societies, however, the divinely-appointed pattern was whatever had emerged providentially—that is to say, actually and historically. His analysis could thus look rather like historical relativism. Man was intrinsically national and cultural, a nation an organism that was born, developed historically, and embodied a national dogma on which it depended, whatever that dogma might be. As an organism, it also eventually died.

But his apparent relativism was not altogether relative, since he believed national dogmas could not be imposed willfully, and an attempt to do so through revolutionary force would end badly. A counterrevolution would therefore be the opposite of a revolution, less an attempt at radical change than the process whereby a society reverts to form. And he certainly did not believe that all cultures were equal. Christian culture in particular, based on truth and true morality, had uniquely fostered freedom for slaves, equal dignity for women, and progress for science. Without it, knowledge would regress, slavery would return, and the influence of women would become socially destructive. It is not clear he was wrong on these points.

Maistre had a vivid sense of the depth and breadth of modern intellectual confusions. His St. Petersburg Dialogues touches on issues that range from the nature of modern natural science to primitive anthropology, innate ideas, and the origins of language, which he thought a divine gift that was inseparable from thought itself. Some of the views he expressed, like his claim that contemporary savages represent the degraded remnants of a former higher civilization, would be hard to maintain today. Others, like his assertion that man is innately social, so political theories based on autonomous individuality cannot possibly be correct, seem sensible enough. Others, like his criticisms of overly rationalized understandings of science, are extremely penetrating and seem to foreshadow the tendencies of the 20th century and even our postmodern current century.

The basic theme of the Dialogues, though, is theodicy. If God is omnipotent and good, and Providence rules history, why the pervasive bloodshed and suffering? And how can the French Revolution, which he considered uniquely and radically evil, be accounted for? An honest theodicy must provide an explanation for things that seem horrifying. Hence his insistence on the reality of violence, including the violence everywhere intertwined with the social order itself. It needed to be faced.

His thought on such issues may usefully be compared to that of Simone Weil, another brilliant, culturally French, and intellectually radical thinker. Like Maistre, she was vividly aware of the pervasive role of force in the world and the limitations on the human power to guide or change it, and struck by the terrifying figure of the man reduced to an object through extreme suffering. Her initial response to those recognitions was to become a communist. But, after a mystical vision of Christ and disillusionment caused by her experiences during the Spanish Civil War, she became an extremely idiosyncratic Christian. She rejected effective action in the world in favor of an ethic of voluntary suffering in solidarity with the despised, rejected, and afflicted. She tried, for example, to get the Free French to parachute her into Nazi-occupied France so she could serve as a nurse in the Resistance, even though she was in bad health and knew little about medicine.

As a realist and man of affairs trying to do his best in troubled times, and possessed of a less demanding and more sociable temperament, Maistre followed a very different path. He nonetheless concurred on the importance of suffering, including the voluntary innocent suffering that, in the figure of Christ, is at the center of Christianity. So his theodicy of suffering is that sacrifice is universally at the heart of religion, and all suffering is redemptive—it either pays the debt of the guilty sufferer (and we are all guilty and deserve to suffer), or it follows the model of Christ’s innocent suffering for others. 

So, for example, Maistre thought the French Revolution was necessary to punish and purge the infidelity of the French Enlightenment. Further, the successes of the revolutionary armies were necessary to preserve France, which in spite of its great flaws, was a country of great virtues with a great destiny.

Although he devoted his greatest single work to such topics, Maistre doubted the value of theological speculations, suggesting they are better satisfied with what we can know from revelation and Catholic doctrine. He thought we should follow the example of the Church, which defines dogma only when necessary to defend truths that had come under attack. His reflections on providence, sacrifice, and theodicy were intended similarly. The natural sciences, where doubt is useful and experiments can settle questions (and success in which reliably predicts political incompetence), were for him the proper field for free inquiry.

And most readers have indeed found Maistre’s acute observations on a huge variety of nontheological issues more helpful than his theological speculations. These observations have influenced thinkers ranging from Carl Schmitt, who admired Maistre greatly, to Leo Tolstoy, who seems to have derived many of his criticisms of rationalism, along with the emphasis in War and Peace on the confusion of battle and inscrutability of victory, from the Savoyard thinker.

Maistre lived to see the Restoration in France, but did not consider it a true restoration: it was not the Bourbon monarchy, which the Bourbons themselves no longer believed in, that had been restored. So in his view the counterrevolution had failed, confirming the mortality of polities and the intractability of the world. As he commented to a friend soon thereafter, as his end drew near, “I die with Europe, and I die in good company.”

But life goes on. Conservatively inclined readers will still learn from his arguments regarding the importance of authority, settled social principles, and particular culture and circumstances, and the extreme difficulty of forcing changes in the face of such necessities.

Maistre’s thought is also especially valuable in our current world, in which even conservatives have difficulty avoiding sliding into some form of liberalism. He is especially useful in his insistence on reminding us of things liberals like to ignore: the ineradicable irrationalities in human life, the difficulty and precariousness of efforts to restrain their effects, and the perverse and sometimes catastrophic consequences of attempts to eliminate them. In our efforts to resist liberal tendencies, Maistre is a useful guide.