Joseph de Maistre Quotes on Politics
Joseph de Maistre’s Considerations on France (1796), the Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809), and the late Saint Petersburg Dialogues (1821) gave Counter-Revolutionary political philosophy its most uncompromising statement against the Enlightenment political project. The central thesis is that political institutions worth having are not the products of rational deliberation among free and equal individuals but the providential developments of generations of historical experience — written constitutions can ratify what already exists in a people’s customs and habits but cannot generate stable political life from rationalist first principles, and the French Revolutionary attempt to do so produced the Terror as its inevitable consequence. The framework, drawing on the broader European Counter-Enlightenment tradition, shaped subsequent French and broader European conservative thought through Bonald, Chateaubriand, and the integralist Catholic traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Quotes
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“Every nation has the government it deserves.”
Original text: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite. | Letter 76, on the topic of Russia's new constitutional laws (27 August 1811); published in Lettres et Opuscules . The English translation has several variations, including "Every country has the government it deserves" and "In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve." The quote is popularly misattributed to better-known commen -
Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“Where there is no judge, there is no political society.”
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Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“The hangman is the foundation of social order.”
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Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“Reason cannot govern the world; only authority can.”
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Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“Man is too wicked to be free.”
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“All grandeur, all power, all subordination, rest on the executioner.”
First Dialogue," p. 20 -
“To know the nature of man, the most direct and wisest way undoubtedly is to know what he has always been. Since when can theories be opposed to facts? History is experimental politics; this is the best or rather the only good politics.”
p. 21 -
“Nations are barbarian in their infancy but not savage. The barbarian is a proportional mean between the savage and the citizen. He already possesses no end of knowledge: he has habitations, some agriculture, domestic animals, laws, a cult, regular tribunals; he lacks only the sciences .”
p. 25 -
“Men never respect what they have made themselves. This is why an elective king never possesses the moral power of a hereditary sovereign, because he is not noble enough, that is to say he does not possess that kind of greatness independent of men and that is the work of time .”
p. 72 -
“In the Koran as in the Bible , politics is divinized, and human reason, crushed by the religious ascendancy, cannot insinuate its isolating and corrosive poison into the mechanisms of government, so that citizens are believers whose loyalty is exalted to faith , and obedience to enthusiasm and fanaticism .”
p. 78 -
“The wiser nations are, the more public spirit they possess, the more perfect their political constitution, the fewer constitutional laws they have, for these laws are only props, and a building only needs props when it has become out of plumb or when it has been violently shaken by an external force. The most perfect constitution of antiquity was without contradiction that of Sparta, and Sparta has not left us a single line of its public law. It justly boasted of having written its laws only in the hearts of its children.”
p. 84 -
“Government is a true religion : it has its dogmas, its mysteries, and its ministers. To annihilate it or submit it to the discussion of each individual is the same thing; it lives only through national reason, that is to say through political faith , which is a creed .”
p. 87