The ascension was brought about by a man of a very different stamp.
Count Joseph de Maistre was born at Chambéry in Savoy in 1754. The De
Maistre family, which belonged to the highest class of the bureaucracy,
had immigrated from France at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
In the boy's home his father's severe, imperious spirit, with its
strong tone of old-fashioned piety, ruled supreme. Joseph, who was the
eldest of ten children, was trained in such absolute obedience that
even when he was at the University of Turin he never allowed himself
to read a book without first writing to ask his father's permission.
From a very early age he was devoted to serious study. He learned seven
languages, which is an uncommon thing for a Frenchman to do even now,
and was more uncommon then. He entered the civil service, became, like
his father before him, a magistrate in his native town and a senator,
and married at the age of thirty-two.
Two children had been born to him when the French Revolution broke out
and made a complete change in his life. Savoy was incorporated with
France, and to remain faithful to his king Joseph de Maistre gave up
his home; he had to choose between becoming a citizen of the French
Republic and having all his property confiscated, and he chose without
hesitation. For a few years he lived in Switzerland. Here he wrote his
first work, _Considérations sur la France_ (published anonymously in
London in 1797), and made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël. Though
he considered that her head had been turned by modern philosophy (in
his opinion an inevitable consequence in the case of any woman), he
acknowledged her to be "astonishingly brilliant, especially when she
was not trying to be so." They bickered and wrangled, but were none the
less good friends.
In 1797, when the King of Sardinia was obliged to leave his continental
territories and take refuge on his rocky island, Count de Maistre
happened to be in Turin. He fled to Venice, arriving after many
hairbreadth escapes, and there he and his family suffered great
privations. From 1800 to 1802, as chief magistrate of Sardinia, he
laboured hard to improve the slovenly administration of justice which
he found prevailing there. In 1802 the deserted king sent him as
envoy-extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to St. Petersburg. His
acceptance of this appointment obliged him to part from his wife and
children, to whom he was tenderly attached. The pay was so miserable
that it barely sufficed to cover his own necessary expenses--he could
not afford to provide himself with a fur-lined coat. But in Russia, now
passing through the most prosperous period of the reign of Alexander
I, De Maistre's capacities found scope for development, and this poor
ambassador of a petty power succeeded in winning the Emperor's entire
confidence. The strength and purity of his character, his pronounced
royalist and conservative views, his knowledge, his sagacity, and his
wit ensured him a prominent place at a court whose sovereign knew how
to appreciate both an uncommon character and remarkable talent.
Although by birth a Piedmontese, and as a diplomatist to a certain
extent a cosmopolitan, Joseph de Maistre belongs by his language--and
not by that alone--to French literature. All his literary theories
were French, and there was much that was French in his intellectual
idiosyncrasy. Not only was France always in his eyes the chief power
in Europe, and the King of France, as "the most Christian king," the
main bulwark of monarchy and Christianity, but he was at heart on the
side of France even when it was for his ideas that her enemies were
waging war upon her. In spite of everything he rejoiced when Republican
France defeated the army of the allied monarchs. For what they desired
was the division of France, the annihilation of its power. "But our
descendants, who will think with indifference of our sufferings and
dance upon our graves, will make very light of the excesses which we
have witnessed and which have preserved undivided the most delectable
kingdom after that of heaven." He desires the defeat of the Jacobins,
but not the ruin of France, which would be equivalent to the inevitable
intellectual relapse of the human race.
[Illustration: DE MAISTRE]
In a manner he felt himself to be a Frenchman. All his life long he
proclaims, and by his actions proves, himself to be the loyal subject
and servant of the King of Sardinia; but, when he is more than usually
ill rewarded for his services, the thought strikes him that it was
really by a kind of mistake of nature that he was not born a Frenchman.
We read in one of his letters (_Correspondance diplomatique_, i. 197):
"I cannot get rid of the feeling that, let me do what I will, I am
not the man to suit His Majesty. Sometimes in my poetic day-dreams I
imagine that nature, carrying me in her apron from Nice to France,
tripped on the Alps (a very excusable thing in an old lady) and let
me fall into Chambéry. She ought by rights to have gone straight to
Paris, or at any rate to have stopped at Turin, where I could have
developed properly; but on the 1st of April 1754 the irreparable
mistake was made. I discover in myself a certain Gallican element, for
which, be it observed, I have all due respect." Thus it is not merely
permissible but obligatory to set De Maistre's name first on the list
of the men who brought about the powerful reaction in France against
the fundamental ideas of the eighteenth century.
His first book, written in 1796, already shows the character of the
reaction to which he gives expression, and which he endows with
stubborn consistency. While the Revolution is still proceeding, but
at the moment when the counter-revolution is beginning to make its
influence felt, he eagerly vindicates the two powers which the century
had repudiated--belief in the supernatural and fidelity to political
tradition.
Maintaining that every nation, like every individual, has its mission
to fulfil, he declares that France has guiltily abused the position
of authority given to her in Europe. She stood at the head of the
religious system, and not without reason were her kings called
"the most Christian." As she has used her power to act in direct
contradiction to her mission, it can surprise no one that she is being
brought back to the right path by terrible chastisements. The French
Revolution is marked by _Satanic_ traits, which distinguish it from
anything ever seen before and possibly from anything that will ever be
seen again. Its so-called legislators have issued such a proclamation
as this: "The nation supports no religion," words which would almost
seem to indicate hatred of the Divine Being.
Even Rousseau, though he was "the most mistaken of men," perceived that
it was only a narrow-minded and arrogant philosophy which could suppose
the founders of such religions as the Jewish and the Mahometan to be
nothing but lucky impostors. Philosophy is a disintegrating, religion
alone an organising power. But no religion in the world can be compared
with Christianity. It alone, although it is founded upon supernatural
facts and is a revelation of incomprehensible dogmas, has been believed
for eighteen centuries and been defended by the greatest men of all
ages, from Origen to Pascal. Now it has been dethroned and its altars
have been overturned. Philosophy reigns triumphant. But if Christianity
issues from this ordeal purer and stronger than ever--then, Frenchmen,
make way for the most Christian king, place him on his ancient throne,
lift high his flaming banner (_oriflamme_), and proclaim that Christ
commands, guides, and conquers!
There is no government but theocracy (priestly rule), and every
constitution comes from God. A constitution is never the result of a
contract, and the laws which rule the nations are never written laws,
for those constitutions which are written are never anything but
proclamations of older laws, of which all that can be said is that they
exist because they exist. The constitution of 1795 is, like earlier
revolutionary constitutions, made for _man_. But there is not such
a thing as _man_: "In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen,
Italians, Russians, &c.; I know, too, thanks to Montesquieu, that
there are Persians; but _man_ I have never met; if he exists, it is
contrary to my knowledge." No; when the population, the customs, the
religion, the geographical position, the existing political conditions,
the good and bad qualities of a nation are known, then a constitution
is the solution to the problem of finding the laws suitable for that
particular nation.
De Maistre traces the probable course of the counter-revolution. He
sagaciously demonstrates the unreasonableness of the supposition that
it can only be the outcome of the will of the people. Very possibly a
minority of four or five persons, he says, will give France a king.
Letters from Paris will announce to the provinces that the country
has a king, and the provinces will shout: _Vive le roi!_ With his
obstinate faith in providence he foretells the restoration (even in its
details) at a time when all hopes of such an event seemed indeed to
be built upon sand, and in process of so doing exhibits a fascinating
combination of excessive enthusiasm for the pre-revolutionary
conditions with a practical political sagacity which avoids any
overstraining of principle that would make the restoration of these
conditions impossible. On the delicate question, whether or not the
restoration of the monarchy will entail the return of the national
property to its original owners, he expresses himself with a caution
which is strikingly at variance with the generally confident, defiant
tone of the book. He explains that a revolutionary government is, by
its very nature, an unsteady government. Under it nothing is certain.
As the ownership of national property is not yet, in the opinion of
the general public, free from the reproach originally attaching to it,
a government which considered itself in no way debarred from undoing
what it had done would in all probability lay hands on this property as
soon as it could. "But under a steady, permanent government everything
is permanent, so that even for the acquirers of national property it
is important that the monarchy should be restored; they will then know
what they have to rely upon." In other words, he has at least so much
regard for actual circumstances as to acknowledge that it will not be
possible to reign after the Revolution in exactly the same manner as
before it.
His fundamental political doctrine is that the state is an organism,
that as an organism it possesses real unity, and lives its life by
virtue of a far-off past, from which it refreshes itself as from a
perennial source, and by virtue of an inward, secret fountain of
life. It is not the outcome of discussion and arrangement, but of
an unfathomable mystery. Hence a written constitution signifies
nothing. It is the soul of the nation which gives the nation unity and
permanence, and this soul is the love of the nation for itself and
its national memories. France is not thirty millions of human beings
living between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, but a thousand millions who
have lived there. Our country is nought else but the unity of those
who live, those who have lived, and those who will live in the days to
come on the same fragment of the earth's surface. The fact that one
family is the symbol of the continued existence of this nation leads De
Maistre to monarchy.
Sovereignty cannot be divided. Therefore the king does not share his
power with the great of the land. These latter have no privileges, but
they have duties. They form the king's council; they are guardians of
the national unity, inasmuch as they unite the people to the throne,
and guardians of the national continuity, inasmuch as they are the
sustainers of tradition. It is their duty perpetually to proclaim to
the people the benefit of authority, and to the king the benefits of
liberty. The law is, as law, the same for all, therefore destitute of
the pliability which is a necessity if freedom is to be granted and
ensured. An enlightened autocracy secures liberty.
When Bonaparte appears and quickly develops into Napoleon, Joseph
de Maistre is, naturally, his implacable enemy. Nevertheless, he
recognises the autocrat in him. He feels that the unity of the French
nation is embodied in him, and this though he regards him as the
_demonium meridianum_ (see _Correspondance diplomatique_, ii. 65).
In July 1807 he writes: "In those newspapers which are his organs
Bonaparte causes himself to be called the messenger of God. Nothing
could be truer. Bonaparte comes straight from heaven ... as lightning
does." In other words, De Maistre saw in the calamities which Napoleon
brought upon Europe, as in all "heaven-sent" calamities, judgments,
the justice of which did not diminish the guilt of those who executed
them. In 1808, out of love for his country, he did violence to his own
inclinations by endeavouring to obtain an audience of Napoleon for the
purpose of pleading the cause of Sardinia. He took this step not in
his capacity of minister, but privately and on his own responsibility.
Napoleon, though he did not answer De Maistre's letter (written from
St. Petersburg), was evidently impressed by the quality of the man;
he ordered the French ambassador at the Russian court to show him
favour, and did not take his audacity at all amiss. De Maistre's own
court, however, did. It was intimated to him that the Cabinet, to
which he had sent immediate notice of the measure taken, had been
disagreeably surprised by it. He replies proudly and satirically:
"The Cabinet has been surprised! The skies may fall--that is a matter
of no consequence--but heaven preserve us from an unexpected idea!
I am now more than ever persuaded that I am not the man you want. I
can promise you to transact His Majesty's affairs as well as any man,
but I cannot promise never to surprise you. That is a weakness in my
character which I am incapable of curing." He proved the truth of what
he himself somewhere says, that trusting to the constancy of court
favour is "like lying down on the wing of a windmill to sleep soundly."
When vindicating himself he writes: "I know everything that can be said
against Bonaparte; he is a _usurper_, he is a _murderer_; but note
well that he is less of a usurper than William of Orange and less of a
murderer than Elizabeth of England. ... As yet we are not stronger than
God, and we must come to terms with him to whom it has pleased God to
entrust the power" (_Lettres et opuscules_, i. 114.)
Joseph de Maistre spent fourteen years of his life as envoy at St.
Petersburg. The long separation from the female members of his family
was very painful to him, and the cares of a father often weighed
heavily on his mind. It is touching to read in one of his letters
that when he was lying awake at night, over-tired with work, he often
imagined that he heard his youngest little daughter, whom he did not
know, crying in Turin.
As a proof of his favour and esteem for De Maistre, the Czar gave
commissions in the Russian army to his brother and son. The brother
was wounded during the campaign in the Caucasus. The son fought in the
war against Napoleon. "No one," writes the father, "knows what war is
unless he has a son fighting. I do what I can to banish the thoughts of
hewn-off arms and smashed skulls that constantly torment me; then I sup
like a youth, sleep like a child, and awake like a man, that is to say,
early."
The great panegyrist of the executioner and the _auto da fé_ had in
private life a very tender heart. His private utterances often convey
the impression of kindliness, as his public do of whimsical wit.
He perhaps shows most amiably in his letters to his daughter: "You
ask me, dear child, why it is that women are condemned to mediocrity.
They are not. They may become great, but it must be in a feminine way.
Every creature ought to keep to its own place and not strive after
advantages other than those which properly belong to it. I have a dog
called Biribi, who is a great amusement to us all; if he were to take
it into his head to have himself saddled and bridled to carry me out
into the country, I should be as little pleased with him as with your
brother's English mare if she were to take it into her head to jump on
my knee or to sit down at the breakfast-table with me. The mistakes
some women make come from their imagining that in order to rise above
the common level they must act like men.... If twenty years ago a
pretty woman had asked me: 'Do you not believe that a woman is just as
capable of being a great general as a man?' I should have answered:
'Most undoubtedly I do, Madam. If you commanded an army, the enemy
would fall on their knees to you as I do now, and you would enter their
capital with drums beating and banners flying.' If she had said to me:
'What is there to prevent my knowing as much of astronomy as Newton?' I
should have replied with equal sincerity: 'Nothing whatever, O peerless
beauty! You have but to look through the telescope, and the stars will
consider it an honour to be gazed at by your beautiful eyes, and will
hasten to discover all their mysteries to you.' These are the things
we say to women, both in prose and verse; but the woman who takes such
speeches seriously is uncommonly stupid." After declaring that woman's
mission is to bear and to bring up men, he adds: "But, dear child, I
am for moderation in everything. I believe, speaking generally, that
women ought not to aim at acquirements which are at variance with their
duties, but I am far from thinking that they ought to be perfectly
ignorant. I do not wish them to believe that Pekin is in France, or
that Alexander the Great proposed marriage to a daughter of Louis XIV."
And in a following letter he writes: "I see that you are angry with me
for my impertinent attack on learned women. It is absolutely necessary
that we should make friends again before Easter. The fact that you have
misunderstood me ought to make the process easy. I never said that
women were monkeys; I swear to you by all that is most holy that I have
always thought them incomparably more beautiful, more amiable, and more
useful; but I did say, and this I abide by, that the women who want to
be men are monkeys; for wanting to be learned is wanting to be a man. I
think that the Holy Spirit has shown His wisdom in arranging things as
they are, sad as it may seem. I make my humble obeisance to the young
lady you tell me of, who is writing an epic poem, but heaven preserve
me from becoming her husband; I should live in terror of seeing her
delivered in my house of a tragedy, or possibly even of a farce--for
when talent has once set off, there is no knowing where it will stop."
"The best and most convincing observation in your letter is that upon
the raw material employed in the creation of man. Strictly speaking, it
is only man who is made of dust and ashes, or, not to mince matters, of
dirt, whereas woman was made of a mire that had already been prepared
and elevated to the dignity of a rib. _Corpo di Bacco! questo vuol
dir molto_. You cannot say too much, my dear child, as far as I am
concerned, about the nobility of women, even those of the bourgeois
class; to a man there should be nothing more excellent than a woman,
just as to a woman, &c, &c.... But it is precisely because of the
exalted opinion I have of these noble ribs that I become seriously
angry when I see any of them desiring to transform themselves into
original mire. And now it seems to me that the question is completely
disposed of." (_Lettres et opuscules_, i. 145, 156).
It surprises us to find the strictly orthodox Catholic jesting thus
lightly with Bible legend; but even in his witty and sportive moods
De Maistre is faithful to his reactionary principles. It is one of
his characteristics that a certain piquant wit goes hand in hand with
the violent, dæmonic energy of his attack, an energy which reveals
itself even in the little fact that his favourite expression is _à
brûle-pourpoint_ (in its literal meaning--to fire with the muzzle of
one's pistol upon one's antagonist's coat).
In the _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, in which he already writes of
Bacon with some of that animosity to which he afterwards gave full vent
in a large and erudite work, he makes a humorous observation which is
quite in accord with the newest scientific view of the matter: "Bacon
was a barometer that announced fine weather, and because he announced
it, men believed that it was he who had produced it." And in a letter
he writes: "I cannot tell how there came to be this war to the death
between me and the late Lord Chancellor Bacon. We have boxed like
two Fleet Street boxers, and if he has pulled out some of my hair, I
imagine that his wig no longer sits very straight on his head."
When De Maistre is broaching his favourite theories, his humour is
often very sarcastic, as, for instance, when he discourses, in the
second part of the _Soirées_, on the ways of maintaining _esprit de
corps_. There is much cynicism in such pleasantry as this: "To produce
discipline and the feeling of honour in any corps or society, special
rewards are of less avail than special punishments." He shows how
the idea had occurred to the Romans of making military punishment a
privilege--only soldiers had the right to be beaten with rods made of
the wood of the vine. No man who was not a soldier might be beaten with
such a rod, and no other kind of rod might be used to flog a soldier
with. "I cannot understand how some such idea has not occurred to any
of our modern rulers. If I were asked for advice on the subject, I
should not go back to the vine rod, for slavish imitation is useless.
I should suggest laurel rods." He further proposes that a great
forcing-house should be erected in the capital, exclusively for the
purpose of producing the necessary supply of laurel branches with which
the non-commissioned officers are to belabour the backs of the Russian
army. This forcing-house is to be under the supervision of a general,
who must also be a Knight of St. George of the Second Class, at lowest,
and whose title is to be "Chief Inspector of the Laurel Forcing-House";
the trees are to be attended to by old pensioners of unblemished
character; models of the rods, which must all be exactly alike, are to
be kept in a red case at the War Office; each non-commissioned officer
is to carry one hanging by a ribbon of St. George from his button-hole;
and on the façade of the forcing-house is to be inscribed: This is _my_
tree, which brings forth _my_ leaves.
De Maistre lived at St. Petersburg in great poverty, which he bore
without being humiliated by it. He was distrusted and constantly
left in the lurch by his ungrateful court, which did not even repay
him the sums that from time to time he was obliged to advance out of
his slender means to necessitous fellow-countrymen in Russia. During
these years his theories matured and his intellectual idiosyncrasies
became more marked. The letters, private as well as diplomatic, which
he wrote at this time give us an excellent idea of the spirit and
the general conditions prevailing at the court of Alexander I. Those
written previous to and during Napoleon's campaign in Russia are
especially interesting from the graphic impression they give of the
fears, hopes, panics, and rejoicings produced at that time throughout
the Russian empire by war news, whether true or false. At first De
Maistre is in great anxiety about the issue of the war. He clearly
sees the incompetence of the generals who are appointed to direct the
operations against such a leader as the Emperor of the French. But from
the moment when it is known how ill-equipped the French army is to face
the Russian autumn, not to mention the Russian winter, he is no longer
in doubt; he foresees that Napoleon's fall and the restitution of all
his conquests--events which he had long regarded as certain to happen
sooner or later--are close at hand.
Six of De Maistre's works were written at St. Petersburg. Of these
_Du Pape, De l'Église Gallicane, Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon_,
and _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_ are the most important and the most
characteristic of their author.
The _Soirées_ contain the ideas on the subject of God and the world
upon which his theory of the state is based. Anticipating the objection
that the authority of his absolute monarchs rests upon no foundation,
that they are utterly irresponsible, that, in other words, autocracy is
unjust, he meets it with the preliminary general answer that injustice
is the law of every society, because it is the law of all life on
earth. In nature itself might is right--with the right of the stronger,
plants and animals are perpetually destroying one another. And this
law: Might is right, is far from losing its validity in the world of
man; here also it prevails, as the law of war. War is a perpetually
recurring phenomenon in the life of the human race. Except for a
few years in each century, it has raged from the most ancient times
until now, and it will continue to do so. Human blood will always be
flowing upon earth. For the chastisement of heaven is upon man. To
this conception of war the military profession owes the high position
it holds and always has held. No trade is considered so honourable as
that of the soldier. The human race, taken as a whole, is guilty and
deserves the scourge of war, unjustly though the punishment may fall in
single cases.
It is, then, as the representative of God upon earth that the autocrat
is, in the first place, the war-lord, in the second, the possessor of
the divine and terrible prerogative of _punishing the guilty_. This
prerogative necessarily entails the existence of a man whose profession
it is to execute the punishments ordained by human justice. And such
a man is always to be found--a strange and inexplicable fact, for our
reason is at a loss to discover any motive which can lead a man to
choose such a profession. Hence the character who is the mouthpiece
of De Maistre's own opinions is inspired with a feeling of awe and
reverence by the much misjudged executioner.
According to the general, and, in De Maistre's opinion, entirely
justifiable verdict, every soldier, simply as such, is so noble that
he ennobles even those actions which are generally regarded as the
most degrading; he may exercise the calling of the executioner without
suffering the slightest degradation, so long as he only carries out the
sentence of death upon members of his own profession and uses no other
instruments for the purpose but its weapons. It is not without its
significance that on every page of the Old Testament shines the name,
the Lord of Hosts. No action is more inseparably connected in men's
minds with honour than the innocent shedding of innocent blood. It is
in the very passion of carnage that De Maistre admires the soldier
most. Such a thing has never been known as an army refusing to fight.
It is an irresistible impulse that drives men onward into battle. And
why is this so? In order that to the end of time there may be fulfilled
that law of the violent destruction of living beings which extends
throughout creation, from the lowest animal to man.
But although from time immemorial there has been no calling more
honourable than that which involves the shedding of innocent blood, a
remarkable prejudice has caused the calling of the executioner to be as
much disdained as the soldier's is respected.
De Maistre inquires if this man who, in preference to all profitable
and honourable callings, has chosen that of torturing and killing his
fellow-men, is not really a being of some peculiar and higher kind. And
in his dialogues the Count, who is his own mouthpiece, answers:--
"I myself have no doubt on the subject. Outwardly, he is formed like
ourselves; but he is an abnormal being, and it is only a special act
of creative power which can add such a member to the human family. He
is like a world in himself. All shun him; his house stands in a desert
place, every one withdrawing as far as possible from the spot where
he lives with his mate and his young ones, whose voices are the only
cheerful human sounds that fall upon his ear; but for them he would
hear nothing but shrieks of agony.... A sinister signal is given. One
of the lowest menials of justice knocks at his door and informs him
that his services are required; he sets off; he arrives at a public
place where human beings are crowding together in excited expectancy. A
prisoner--a parricide, a committer of sacrilege--is flung at his feet;
he seizes this man, binds him to a cross which is lying on the ground,
then raises his arm--the terrible silence that follows is only broken
by the sound of the crashing of bones under the blows of the iron mace
and the screams of the victim. He unbinds the man; he carries him to
the wheel; the broken limbs are twined round its spokes, the head hangs
down, the hair stands on end, and from the mouth, open like the opening
of a glowing furnace, there come at intervals a few broken syllables of
entreaty for death.--He has finished his task; his heart is beating,
but it is with pleasure; he is satisfied with his work; he says in his
heart: No man breaks on the wheel better than I. He comes down from the
scaffold and holds out his bloody hand, into which, from as great a
distance as possible, the official whose duty it is to pay him flings
a few gold pieces, with which he marches off between two rows of human
beings who shrink from him with horror. He sits down to table and eats;
he goes to bed and sleeps; and when he awakes next morning his thoughts
run on everything but his occupation of the day before. Is he a man?
Yes. God allows him to enter His temples and accepts his prayer. He is
no criminal, and yet in no human language is he called honourable or
estimable."
"Nevertheless all greatness, all power, all order depend upon the
executioner. He is the terror of human society and the tie that
holds it together. Take away this incomprehensible force, and that
very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, and states
disappear. God, who is the source of the power of the ruler, is also
the source of punishment; He has suspended our world upon these two
poles, for the Lord is the Lord of the poles, and round them He sets
the world revolving."
And in order that this reverence for the office of the executioner
which it is in keeping with his plan to inculcate, and which it
entertains him to astound with, may make a proper impression on the
reader, De Maistre takes up the subject again in one of the later
conversations. He asks what a reasoning being coming from another
world to investigate into the conditions prevailing in ours would
think of the executioner, and himself gives the answer: "He is an
august being, the corner-stone of society. Since crime has undoubtedly
taken up its abode upon earth, and since it can only be kept in check
by punishment, it is plain that, if the executioner disappeared, all
order would disappear with him. And what greatness of soul, what noble
disinterestedness must we presume that man to be possessed of who takes
upon himself the execution of a task which, though certainly a very
honourable one, is most painful and repugnant to human nature, &c."
In these utterances we have at one and the same time the delight in
consistency which is to be observed in the earliest nineteenth-century
devotees of the principle of authority, the delight in a disconcerting
idea which is one of De Maistre's own chief mental characteristics,
and the delight in describing suffering which he has in common with
Görres and so many of the other champions of the gloomy doctrine of the
necessary subjection of humanity to kings and priests.
De Maistre resents hearing men so often talk as if crime went
unpunished. What do they mean by this? "For whom are the gallows, the
knout, the wheel, and the stake and fagot provided? Surely for the
criminal." Justice may sometimes miscarry, but such exceptions do not
alter the rule. It is folly to believe in all the judicial murders one
hears talked about. Take the frequently quoted case of Calas. Nothing
is more doubtful than his innocence.
The very fact that Voltaire defended him speaks against it.
But given the worst--that an innocent man is deprived of his life--why,
it is simply a misfortune like any other. When a guilty man escapes
we have another exception and misfortune of the same kind. The
events which lead to the discovery of a crime are, however, often so
unexpected and improbable that we cannot but believe that human justice
is supported by higher aid. And all the time that we are foolishly
blaming human justice for having punished an innocent man, nothing is
more probable than that he really is guilty, though of some other,
unknown crime. Many such cases are on record, the truth coming to
light through the confession of the criminals. De Maistre, we observe,
understands how to extricate himself from a difficulty.
Something of the same nature holds good in the matter of sickness. Its
injustice, too, is only apparent. If every kind of intemperance could
be prevented, most, nay, in reality all diseases would be done away
with. This inference may be arrived at by arguing as follows: If there
were no moral evil in the world there would be no physical evil, and
since an infinite number of diseases are direct consequences of certain
offences, it is permissible to generalise and say that this holds good
of them all.
Everything, then, is ordered upon moral principles. It is undeniable
that life is a terrible thing, but this does not prove that God is
unjust; he is offended, he is insulted, and to appease his anger blood
is required. Man early comprehended his own fall, early understood
that it is the innocent who must and alone can, by the transference of
merit, atone for the sins of the guilty, that there is no salvation
without the shedding of sacrificial blood.
Hence the idea of sacrifice is one of perpetual and keen interest to
De Maistre. Sacrifice is ideal slaughter, slaughter the one and only
aim of which is the accomplishment of what is right and meet. From the
earliest ages men have offered both animal and human sacrifices; and in
Christianity the practice is sanctified and acquires a deeper meaning.
Here it is not any chance and possibly guilty individual who is the
victim, but a being who is elected to die because of his innocence.
This, therefore, is ideal sacrifice.
All this is undoubtedly an offence to reason. But contrariety to
reason is the sign and seal of truth. The theory which is the most
obviously reasonable is the theory which never stands the test of
practice. Nothing could be more obviously reasonable than the whole
philosophy of the eighteenth century, with its faith in man and its
liberalism. But its very reasonableness bespeaks its superficiality.
It satisfies reason; but experience opens men's eyes to its futility.
Nothing seems more self-evident than that man is born free. Yet when
Rousseau writes: "Man is born free, nevertheless he is everywhere in
fetters," he does not notice that he is not only writing nonsense, but
distinctly affirming that he is doing so. It would be quite as sensible
to say; Sheep are born carnivorous, nevertheless they everywhere
live on vegetable food. In the same way, nothing is theoretically
more unreasonable than hereditary monarchy. If, without any previous
experience, men were called on to choose a government, that man
would be thought mad who hesitated to give an elective monarchy the
preference over a hereditary one. And yet we know from experience that
the latter is the best, the former the worst form of government. In
other words, the world, far from being a reasonable world, is full of
things that are profoundly at variance with reason.
Christianity, the Christian conception of life, is therefore no new,
hitherto unknown conception. It is connected by many links with the
whole succession of heathen religions, and is prepared for by them.
All the truths of Christianity are foreshadowed in the creeds of
heathendom. In heathen sacrificial practices, for instance, we already
have the essential idea of sacrifice. And De Maistre waxes wroth
over Voltaire's violent, irreligious tirades against the sacrificial
festivals of the old pagans. He is yet more exasperated when, at the
end of a description of a sacrifice of both adults and children, he
comes upon the words; "However, the sacrifices of the Inquisition, of
which we have so often spoken, are a hundred times more execrable."
It is apropos of this utterance that (in his essay _Éclaircissement
sur les sacrifices_) De Maistre first takes up the cudgels for the
Inquisition, to the defence of which institution he was ere long
to devote a special work. He writes: "The passage relating to the
Inquisition appears to have been written during an attack of delirium.
What! The lawful execution of a small number of human beings,
condemned to death by a fully qualified court of justice according to
the strict letter of a penal law which had previously been solemnly
proclaimed, and which each one of the victims was perfectly free to
avoid transgressing--to call such an execution a hundred times more
abominable than the horrible act of the parents who cast their children
into the flaming arms of Moloch! What wild insanity! What forgetfulness
of all reason, all justice, all shame!" De Maistre storms thus because
he is here attacking the man who was his opposite, and who fought, like
himself, with the weapons of wit and paradox, but wielded them with far
greater power.
Founding his theory of the state upon the basis of religion, De Maistre
derived the power of the ruler from God. It is from God that kings
receive their rights, and to God that they owe duty. It is not the
king's power but his duty that is absolute, for it is duty to the
Absolute. The rights of the people may be called the duty of the king
to God. In the proverb: "The voice of the people is the voice of God,"
there is this truth, that the rights of the people are the rights of
God in His relation to the king. And "the voice of God" is not a mere
figure of speech; the living voice of God speaks through the church.
The king is responsible to God, and the church is the depositary of
divine truth. But the church, as well as the state, is under the rule
of an autocrat. As the state means the king, advised and guided by
the great men of his country, so the church means the Pope, advised
and guided by cardinals and bishops. The very idea of sovereignty
implies that the king is absolute, the Pope infallible. People are not
surprised that the captain of a ship should be, as such, an infallible
sovereign, should permit no criticism of his orders, should issue
unqualified commands and require them to be obeyed blindly; yet they
are surprised that in all church matters the Pope should be infallible.
They are accustomed to the idea that all the other courts of justice,
low and high, are submitted to the jurisdiction of a highest court, the
judgments of which are irreversible and may not be criticised; yet they
are astonished that the Pope, as head of the church, is infallible. If
they had any conception of what sovereignty means, they would not be
astonished. A skilful attempt, this of De Maistre's, to prove to laymen
the reasonableness of ecclesiastical dogma.
In his book _Du Pape_, which Catholics consider a work of the first
importance, he carries his reasoning on ecclesiastical matters to its
logical conclusion.
This book was the outcome of the remorse he felt for having, at a
trying moment, forgotten the reverence due to the head of the church.
When, three years after the conclusion of the Concordat, the Pope went
to Paris, at Napoleon's request, to anoint and crown him Emperor,
Joseph de Maistre, the ardent royalist, was so incensed that in various
letters to his court he used such language in writing of the Holy
Father that his _Mémoires et correspondance diplomatique_ of these
years were published by Cavour in 1858 with the view of depriving the
papal power of a spiritual ally. In the course of a few years Napoleon
and the Pope quarrelled, and when De Maistre saw the Pope insulted and
ill-used by the Emperor, he repented his hasty words, and resolved to
make ample reparation.
The fundamental idea of _Du Pape_ is that there is no human society
without government, no government without sovereignty, and no
sovereignty without infallibility. This attribute of infallibility is
so indispensable that men are obliged to assume its existence even in
secular societies (where it does not exist) on pain of seeing these
societies dissolved. The church lays claim to no more than do the other
authorities, although it has this immeasurable advantage over them,
that its infallibility is not only taken for granted by man, but also
guaranteed by God.
De Maistre writes: "A great and powerful nation has lately, before our
own eyes, made the most strenuous efforts in the direction of liberty
which the world has ever beheld. What has it gained by these? It has
covered itself with ridicule and shame, and has ended by setting a
Corsican gendarme on the throne of the kings of France." He shows
how the Catholic religion necessarily forbids every kind of revolt,
whereas Protestantism, which is a result of the sovereignty of the
people, leaves the decision of everything to private feeling--a
supposed species of moral instinct. "There is such accordance, such a
strong family likeness, such interdependence between the papal and the
kingly power that the former has never been shaken without the latter
suffering too." As a proof of this he quotes the following utterance
of Luther: "Princes are as a rule the greatest fools and the most
arrant rogues on the face of the earth; nothing good can be expected
from them; they are God's executioners, whom He employs to chastise
us." He avers that Protestantism, which has no reverence for royalty,
has no respect for marriage: "Had not Luther the audacity to write in
his exposition of the book of Genesis (1525) that the example of the
patriarchs leaves it an open question whether or not a man may have
more than one wife, that the thing is neither sanctioned nor forbidden,
and that he, for his part, will not take it upon him to decide one way
or other?--edifying doctrine, of which practical application was soon
made in the family of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel." (Luther gave his
consent to this prince having two wives at the same time.)
In opposition to Rousseau's doctrine De Maistre maintains that man is
by nature a slave, but that Christianity has, in a supernatural manner,
emancipated him. For this reason he calls the Christian woman a truly
supernatural being. Voltaire he without more ado calls the man "into
whose hands hell has given all its power." And he puts the crowning
touch to his work by propounding the following theory: "Monarchy is a
_miracle_, and instead of reverencing it as such, we rail against it as
tyranny. The soldier who does not kill a man when commanded to do so
by his lawful sovereign is not less guilty than he who kills without
having received orders to do so." Those states which have introduced
Protestantism have been punished by the loss of their monarchs. De
Maistre has discovered that the average length of reigns is shorter in
Protestant than in Catholic countries. The one inexplicable exception
to this rule is provided by Denmark, which is the only Protestant
country whose sovereigns live as long after the Reformation as before
it. "Denmark appears, from some unknown reason, but doubtless one
honourable to the nation, to have been exempted from this law of the
shortening of reigns."[1]
The fifth book of the earliest edition of _Du Pape_ was afterwards
published as a separate work. It is the well-known _De l'Église
Gallicane_, a treatise in which De Maistre draws from the doctrine of
papal authority conclusions utterly subversive of the claim of the
French church to relative independence. On this occasion he assumes
an antagonistic and supercilious attitude towards Bossuet, a man for
whom he generally has nothing but praise. The special object of his
attack and invective is the Church Council held in France in 1682
for the purpose of strictly defining the limits of the Pope's power.
He is almost as much incensed against that of 1700, which pronounced
Jesuits and Jansenists to be equally blameworthy. It is to a life-long
enthusiasm that De Maistre here gives expression. From his youth he had
been the devoted friend, admirer, and supporter of the Jesuits. His
diplomatic letters from Russia tell of his constant endeavours to be of
assistance to them in their difficult position as Roman Catholics in a
Greek Catholic country, of his anxiety to shield them when the court
is exasperated by their efforts to convert members of the aristocracy,
&c, &c. He now, as their champion, attacks Pascal. His attack is not
made from the standpoint of philosophy, as it easily might have been,
in so far as their sensible apprehension of the fact that there can
be no other morality except morality of intention gives the Jesuits
in certain ways the advantage over the man of genius who impeached
them. Nor is his defence of the Jesuits conducted altogether from
the standpoint of the man of the world, as it might well have been,
in so far as the Jesuits, with their modification of principles and
their practical indulgence, have followed the prudent rule that it is
unwise to alarm and better to have some of the moral law fulfilled by
demanding little than none by demanding all. He contents himself with
maintaining that the Jesuit treatises on morality attacked by Pascal
are obsolete, unread books, which Pascal dragged from their mouldy
obscurity with the sole aim of insulting and injuring an order, the
strict morality and stern self-discipline of which even its enemies had
been forced to admit. Then, by way of variety taking up for a moment
the standpoint of the worldling, he remarks humorously: "It is, when we
come to think of it, very comical that we worldlings should take upon
us to inveigh against the _lax morality_ of the Jesuits. This much is
certain, that the whole aspect of society would be changed if every
member of it acted up even to Escobar's moral standard, and were guilty
of no shortcomings other than those excused by him."
It was very natural that the energetic champion of the ideas of the
past should, towards the close of his career, make a special effort
to clear the reputation of the great, misunderstood, misjudged
Inquisition. This he did in his _Letters to a Russian Nobleman on
the Subject of the Spanish Inquisition_. In these letters De Maistre
says everything that can be said in vindication and in honour of the
Inquisition; yet in reading them we are irresistibly reminded of the
remark of the old tiger in the _Hitopadesa_: "Nevertheless," says
the tiger, "nevertheless, it is difficult to prove the falsehood
of the report that tigers eat men." De Maistre shows that many of
the assertions made of the Inquisition are incorrect; he proves,
for instance, that it was a secular, not an ecclesiastical court of
justice. But the only part of the book that has any attraction for us
is that in which he defends its proceedings. He says: "In Spain and
Portugal, as elsewhere, every man who lives quietly is unmolested;
as to the rash person who attempts to teach others what to believe,
or who disturbs public order, he has only himself to blame.... The
modern propagator of heretical doctrine, haranguing at his ease in his
own room, is quite untroubled by the knowledge that Luther's line of
argument produced the Thirty Years' War; but the old legislators, who
knew the price men might have to pay for these fatal doctrines, most
justly punished with death a crime which was capable of shaking society
to its foundations and bathing it in blood.... It is thanks to the
Inquisition that for the last three hundred years there has been more
happiness and peace in Spain than anywhere else in Europe."
To the _Letters_ De Maistre has prefixed a quotation, which is to the
effect that all great men have been intolerant, and that it is right to
be so. "Let him who comes across a well-intentioned sovereign," says
Grimm, the Encyclopedist, "preach tolerance in matters of faith to
him, so that he may fall into the snare, and, by his toleration, give
the persecuted party time to recover and prepare itself, when its turn
of power comes, to crush its opponent. Voltaire's discourse, with its
babble of tolerance, is a discourse only for simpletons and those who
allow themselves to be fooled, or for people who have no interest in
the matter."
A gross fallacy conceals itself in this argument. Every genuine,
overpowering enthusiasm naturally makes tolerance impossible. Yet
Voltaire's doctrine is none the less valid because of this. The
difficulty is easy of solution. The principle of intolerance is the
theoretical, that of tolerance the practical, principle. In theory no
consideration, no toleration, no mercy! For error must be crushed and
torn asunder, follies must be blown from the cannon's mouth, and lies
flayed alive. But what about the liar, and the fool, and the erring
one? Are they also to be hewn asunder, or flayed alive, or blown from
the cannon's mouth? They are to go their way. The domain of real life
is the domain of tolerance.
De Maistre's _Examen de la philosophie de Bacon_ was not published
until after its author's death. It is the most disputatious and
tedious of his works, and one in which the combative champion of
Christianity is plainly grappling with a subject that is beyond his
powers. He desired to confute Bacon because he believed that the
ungodliness of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century was
entirely to be ascribed to his influence; and he falls upon him with
positive theological fury, attacking all his theories--his theory of
consciousness, of nature, of light, of the weather, of the soul, of
religion; attacking him where he is right, and where, for once in a
way, he is wrong; finding him out in immaterial and merely superficial
inconsistencies; pointing out defects in his Latin and in his taste;
fighting in a noisy, violent, dogmatic manner, with weapons drawn from
the arsenals of supernaturalism and tradition. In single chapters, such
as that on _Causes Finales_, he displays a certain futile acuteness; in
others, such as that entitled _Union de la Religion et de la Science_,
cold-blooded fanaticism. In this latter chapter we read: "Science
undoubtedly has its value, but it is necessary that it should be kept
within bounds.... It has been very aptly said that science resembles
fire: confined to the hearths which are destined to receive it, it is
man's most useful and powerful servant; left to the hazard of chance,
it is a terrible scourge."
Faithful to his rule of allowing no stain to cling to the shield
or sword of the church, he vehemently maintains (contradicting an
assertion of Bacon's French translator) that the church has never
opposed the progress of natural science. The translator had plainly
affirmed that nothing had injured the church more than the clear
demonstration of the truth of certain facts which it had long denied,
and the proclaimers of which it had actually persecuted; and he had
named Galileo as an example. After lauding the church as the patron
of science in other cases, and trying as far as possible to explain
away the case of Galileo, De Maistre is forced to make an admission.
And this is how he does it: "Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition,
that is to say, by a court liable to err like any other, and which in
this case actually was mistaken regarding the main point at issue;
but Galileo in numberless ways damaged his own cause, and by his own
repeated indiscretions brought upon himself a humiliation which he
might easily, and without dishonour, have avoided.... If he had kept
his promise not to write, if he had not been determined to find proof
in Holy Scripture of the truth of the Copernican theory, if he had even
written in Latin instead of unsettling the public mind by employing the
vulgar tongue, nothing would have happened to him."
To the end De Maistre was true to his character; he would not yield a
foot of the ground that had been lost centuries before.[2]
He is a great and fascinating personality, this successful advocate of
a lost cause, which unmistakably gained ground during his lifetime. As
the upholder of authority, of monarchy, and of the gloomy view of life,
as the disputant, as the knight of Christianity, and as the scorner of
science, he has a faint resemblance to Kierkegaard. But his system is
an edifice of ideas relating to the outer, Kierkegaard's one of ideas
relating to the inner, world.
De Maistre is the thoroughly convinced and vehement, yet cold-hearted
champion of the principle of authority. There is heart in his letters,
but there is none in his books. In them there is nothing but heated
argument, propounded with much subtlety of logic and pungency of
wit. In his sarcasm he often reminds us of Voltaire, and his grim
delight in horrors at times recalls Swift. It gives him pleasure to
astonish and to irritate. He loves paradox, because it makes him feel
his superiority, because it perplexes the reader, and because it
makes attack difficult, paradox being a redoubt which one can without
dishonour evacuate before the assault.
His Christianity is an entirely external thing. He is a Christian
as a man is a Protectionist or a Free-trader, on grounds of general
theoretical conviction. His Christianity is a Christianity without
brotherly love--nay, it is a Christianity without Christ as saviour and
reconciler. In it Christ is only the sanguinary sacrifice demanded by
the offended Deity--like Iphigenia or Jephthah's daughter. Faguet has
aptly said that De Maistre's Christianity is "fear, passive obedience,
and state religion." It is a Christianity which does not originate in
Jerusalem, but in Rome; and he himself "is something in the nature of
an officer of the Pope's bodyguard."
The most ardent assailant of the spirit and philosophy of the
eighteenth century, the century in which he was born, has this in
common with it, that he is destitute of the proper apprehension of
history. He would fain ignore the eighteenth century, just as it was
fain to ignore the Middle Ages. He is the counterpart of the woman
who represented the goddess of reason--he is the man who represents
the principle of authority pure and simple, without any historical
qualification. And at heart he is as devoid of religious feeling as the
century which he attacks in the name of revealed religion.
Hard and cold, with a sarcastic and at times a cruel expression on his
countenance, but noble in character and strong of will, he stands at
the threshold of the new century like--if not the good, at least the
best spirit of the great, universal reaction. There is no possibility
of confusing him with the dwarfish figures who during the course of
the century have diluted his ideas, taken the sap and strength out of
his thoughts, and torn and twisted his doctrines in order to oppress
and dissemble under cover of them. Joseph de Maistre was a mind, these
others have only been bodies. He was a man without baseness and without
hypocrisy, a colonel of the Papal Zouaves as _litterateur_, the most
soldierlike and the most attractive figure which the reactionary camp
of the century has to show.
[1] _Du Pape_, pp. 160, 174, 383.
[2] Joseph de Maistre, _Considérations sur la France; Lettres et
opuscules_, i., ii; _Correspondance diplomatique_, i., ii.; _Soirées de
St. Pétersbourg_, i., ii; _Du Pape; De l'Église Gallicane; Examen de la
philosophie de Bacon,_ i., ii.; Margerée, _Le Comte J. de Maistre_; E.
Faguet, _Politiques et moralistes du 19me siècle_.