Joseph de Maistre 1753 – 1821

Joseph-Marie, Count de Maistre, was a Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, and political philosopher and one of the most powerful counter-Enlightenment voices of the early nineteenth century. Driven from his homeland by the French revolutionary armies, he served as Sardinian ambassador to St Petersburg from 1803 to 1817, where he wrote most of his major works. Considerations on France argued that the Revolution was a divine punishment for Enlightenment hubris, while The St Petersburg Dialogues and Pope defended throne and altar against the new liberal order. His polemical brilliance and bleak anthropology have continued to attract readers from across the political spectrum.

Joseph de Maistre was born in 1753 at Chambery in Savoy, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, into a magisterial family of recent ennoblement. Educated by Jesuits and trained in law, he served as a senator of Savoy until the French invasion of 1792 forced him into exile. From 1803 to 1817 he was the Sardinian envoy at the court of Tsar Alexander I in St Petersburg, where he composed most of his major works.

His writings include Considerations on France (1797), the Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809), On the Pope (1819), the dialogues Saint Petersburg Evenings (published posthumously in 1821), and the polemical Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon. Returning to Turin late in life as Minister of State, he saw published in his last years the works that would carry his reputation through the nineteenth century.

Maistre wrote against the Revolution and the Enlightenment with a stark theological politics: the legitimacy of sovereignty rests on its divine, prerational origins; the executioner is the keystone of social order; constitutions are the work of grace and habit, never of paper. His providentialist conservatism shaped the French Catholic right, fascinated Baudelaire and Carlyle, and provided Isaiah Berlin with one of his central case studies in the counter-Enlightenment. He died at Turin in 1821.