Joseph de Maistre Revival

BOOK REVIEWS

A Joseph de Maistre Revival T. John Jamieson

Considerations on France, by Joseph de Maistre; translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun; introduction by Isaiah Berlin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. $49.95/ $16.95 paper.

St. Petemburg Dialogues; Or Conver- sations on the Temporal Govern- ment of Providence, by Joseph de Maistre; translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun, Monneal& Kingston: McCill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. =vi + 407 pp. $55.00.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, by Isaiah Berlin; edited by Henry Hardy, New York: Knopt 1991. 277 pp. $22.00/$12.00 paper.

Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant, by Richard A. Lebrun, Kingston and Montreal: McCill- Queen’s University Press, 1988. xiu + 366 pp. $49.95.

Maistre Studies, translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun, Lanham MD, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1988. xvii + 299 pp. $42.75.

In 1809 John Quincy Adams was Ameri- can ambassador to the Czar’s court at St. Petersburg. Among his fellow ambassa-

dors, the one from the provincial-sound- ing Kingdom of Sardinia stood out. He was, Adams noted, “a man of sense and vivacity in conversation,” as well as a devout Roman Catholic “with all the prejudices of his sect.” As a child of the Enlightenment, Adams was shocked that this man held John Locke “in horror” and that he blamed Locke for instigating the materialist philosophy that had cor- rupted eighteenth-century France.

This reactionary diplomat with ab- struse opinions on “innate ideas” and on God as the “place” of souls (as space is the place of bodies) was the renowned Count Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), who continues to baffle commentators on the history of political thought. How- ever anti-progressive Maistre’s opinions seemed to Adams, they were not sectar- ian prejudices but rationally based con- victions. In fact, Maistre has never re- ceived the recognition he deserves as a philosophical and political hold-out against modern spiritual deformation, a lone bastion of classical wisdom and orthodox belief.

Even Irving Babbitt depicted Maistre as a mere counter-philosophe with “little sense of the inner life,” one lacking aware- ness that Christian social subordination is to be achieved by humility and charity rather than “rigid outer authority.”2 Bab- bitt echoed the standard opinions of highly-regarded liberal critics such as Morley and Sainte-Beuve. Indeed, “rigid

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outer authority” was all that Action Frangaise ideologists (such as the “Cathe lic atheist” Charles Maurras) could see in Maistre’s position when they invoked his authority, superficially marking out their own position by listing names of antidemocratic thinkers. The literary modernist Edmund Wilson, who con- fessed that he was tired of having Maistre “thrown at my head so often as an anti- dote to modern radicalism,” suggested that “when literary people, hard pressed by the times, first begin to feel the need -for becoming reactionary, they are likely to go in for Joseph de Mai~t re .”~

Maistre’s greatest problem for unin- spired interpreters is his deliberate pro- vocativeness. Within the authoritarian institutions that liberals hate, he finds revelatory paradoxes and defiantly flaunts them. So arises the caricature Count who venerates the Pope-as-temporal-monarch, the inquisition, and the public hangman as Western civilization’s th ree essential pillars. I t was t h e philosophes of the eighteenth century, however, who were conducting a literary inquisition, Maistre charges-on whose account even t h e great Montesquieu pretended to believe in a mythical “state of nature” antecedent t o a mythical “social contract.” Maistre continues to suffer for having asked the forbidden questions.

In a rambling eighty-three page essay called “Joseph de Maistre and the Ori- gins of Fascism” (in The Crooked Timber of Humanity), Sir Isaiah Berlin embel- lishes the caricature: Maistre is an irrationalist in religion, a radical pessimist regarding man’s nature, a radical nomi- nalist in philosophy, a modern totalitar- ian in politics, a conspiracy theorist, even a hater of immigrants and refugees (an enemy of “the circulation of humanity”). He is Calvin, Kierkegaard, Sade, Nietzsche, Stalin, and B.F. Skinner-the least attractive aspects of each, all rolled into one. He is Dostoevsky‘s Grand In-

quisitor, who would knowingly execute the returning Christ!

Richard A. Lebrun presents a com- pletely different Count: “a scholarly magistrate, much in the tradition of Montesquieu, a man who had been open to the intellectual and social trends of his times,” albeit “profoundly shaken” by the French revolution. Lebrun’s es- says in Maistre Studies portray the Count as a natural law theorist and a classical realist. In Considerations on France we find a Maistre who defends the “old French constitution” of the parlements, not despotism and autocracy. In Lebrun’s biography of the Count we find a jurist who infuriates his Sardinian masters by preferring the rule of law to military government, and an ambitious interna- tional statesman motivated by family piety and honor and love of the Catholic faith. And the St. Petersburg Dialogues reveal a deeply Augustinian Maistre who understands man as the interplay of in- tellect, free will, and passions-a sub- lime creature capable of virtue through inner constraint, perfectible by the knowledge of God even in this life.

Lebrun’s excellent translations, es- says, and highly objective biography of thecount arepartlythe result of aMaistre revival in France, which has produced scholarly texts of the Count’s works and the multi-volume Reoue des ktudes maistriennes. The Count’s descendants, who have jealously guarded his memory, are at last opening the family archives to scholars. Perhaps this revival indicates an emergence of orthodox Catholic conservatives in resistance to French new right integralists.

Lebrun, a history professor at the University of Manitoba, began his Maistre investigations in 1965 with a published dissertation entitled “Throne and Altar.” His biography of the Count, based on original archival research and including long extracts from the Count’s letters, provides a generous and easy introduc-

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tion to Maistre the man, who was a true son of his family and of his country: of a family benefiting from social mobility under a prerevolutionary regime, and of a somewhat backward and culturally diverse country (Savoy-P i ed mo n t- Sardinia) precariously wedged between the European powers.

Maistre’s great-grandfather was a prosperous cloth-merchant in Nice, his grandfather a lawyer, his father a distinguished judge who reformed the legal code of Savoy and became the first Count de Maistre. Faithful sons of the Church, the Maistre males belonged to a lay order, the pe‘nitents noirs, who ministered to condemned criminals and marched in procession through the Savoyard capital wearing black hoods and chanting psalms. Joseph utterly venerated his father; at 15 he wrote in his diary, “When, by some great misfortune, my father is taken from me, I would hope with all my heart to be permitted like an Egyptian to embalm his body and keep it with me”; the Egyptian custom was “the last re- trenchment of filial love.” Joseph’s brother Xavier, a novelist, became a Russian general, while another brother was appointed Bishop of Aosta. They were a family distinguished enough for the poet Lamartine to lie about his asso- ciations with them.

At the age of sixteen Joseph inherited his maternal grandfather’s considerable library and became a voracious reader of European (especially English) litera- ture. Culturally French, Maistre never visited Paris till the age of sixty-four; following his father’s footsteps as a jurist and then advancing to the offices of ambassador and minister of state, he served Italian despots whose descendants Garibaldi would place on the throne of united Italy. Spending fourteen years in Russia, he became an adviser to Czar Alexander I; from afar, he was the greatest partisan of the House of Bour- bon. He could have claimed to be a true

European, did he not believe that man compromises his humanity by seeking to transcend national and regional iden- tities. In any event, he was not a rootless, alienated Parisian literary proletarian.

Until the age of thirty-nine Maistre was a lawyer and a judge, following his father to a seat in the Senate of Savoy at an early age, and returning at later times to his father’s work of reforming the kingdom’s legal codes. Originally a provincial parlement, the Senate developed into a council of supreme magistrates and prosecutors, a legislative as well as a judicial body; hence Maistre had no reason to take “separation of powers” doctrine as the last word in political science.

One may not immediately perceive, from Maistre’s writings, his reverence for law as an organic growth and the albeit imperfectible foundation of civi- lized life. What he opposed was the Enlightenment’s utopian project of per- fect laws and universal constitutions. He says in the Considerations that, because human laws are imperfect, multiplying laws only multiplies imperfection, and he notes with derision that the French National Assembly passed fifteen thou- sand laws in five years. What he appreci- ated in such eighteenth-century thinkers as Montesquieu and Vico, one may suppose, is their appreciation for human diversity (expressed in the diversity of regimes) and their resistance to Enlightenment reductivism. They were the age’s exceptions.

Maistre fled as the revolutionary jug- gernaut rolled through Savoy in 1792; the king then appointed him diplomatic correspondent to the French emigres at Lausanne. From there his career as a political sage began in 1797, when he published his analysis of the French revolution, Considerations on France, perhaps the most theological book on politics ever written. It begins, “We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme

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Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us”-a reply to Rousseau’s “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Unlike Burke’s Reflections, which warn England against the revolution, Maistre’s Considerations explain how the revolution must exhaust itself, and how it fol- lows its own cycle in defiance of its leaders’ intentions. “Men do not lead the revolution; it is the revolution that uses men.” Yet what is beyond the control of men lies firmly in the hands of God: hence the revolution is a divine scourge, punishing France for t h e sin of philosophisme, punishing even its own leaders with the severity that they de- serve and that a restored monarchy would lack the heartlessness to mete out. When Maistre meditates on history and tentatively discerns the hand of Providence, he is practicing traditional Christian theodicy, unlike Hegel who deforms theodicy into a science of cau- sation.

In the sixth chapter Maistre states thirteen maxims on constitutions (“No mere assembly of men can form a nation”; “There has never been a free nation that did not have in its natural constitution seeds of liberty as old as itself”; “No constitution is the result of delibera- tion,” etc.). The curse of the twentieth century was that “enlightened” politi- cians such as Woodrow Wilson tried to found nation-states for peoples around the world by drawing lines on maps and constructing paper governments. Maistre presents his thirteen points not as scientific principles but as “signs by which God warns us of our weakness.” Then he puts the political scientist in his place: Montesquieu (though Maistre highly regards him) is to Lycurgus only as a grammarian is to Homer.

Isaiah Berlin strangely suggests that, in Maistre’s eyes, the American founding and the French revolution were alike caused by a “satanic order.” What

~

Maistre says, however, is that the Ameri- can case is no justification for artificially constructed republics. The “democratic element” of the American constitution, he says, already existed for centuries in the constitution of the mother country. Although he doubted the regime’s sta- bility, little could be learned from it as yet because it was but “a babe in arms. Let it grow.”

While Maistre disbelieved that Ameri- cans would succeed in building a capital city ex nihilo (and insofar as Washing- ton, D.C., fails to compare with London or Paris, he was right), he owed his final masterpiece to years spent in another such artificial capital, one also erected on a swamp, but decreed by an autocrat, not negotiated by a committee. This masterpiece is the St. Petersburg Dia- logues (1821), which expand upon the speculative concerns of the Consider- ations-the paradoxes of justice and power, the mysteries of providence, punishment, and sacrifice.

The Dialogues contain many literary niceties. Maistre charmingly depicts the palatial city glowing on the river banks during its summer “white nights.” He evokes Peter the Great’s godlike pres- ence there: the equestrian statue of Pe- ter extends its “terrible arm” over the descendants of the subjects whom Peter “created,” and the spread of the city walls manifests a vast line originally traced by his “bold finger.” (The quasi- divinity of founders is, of course, a Maistrean theme. Theophobic philosophes, incapable of founding anything lasting, are their opposite.)

The parties to the Dialogues are a count who resembles Maistre, a French soldier who resembles one Chevalier de Bray (the Bavarian ambassador), and a Russian senator who may be the Czar’s Privy Councillor Tamara. There is also a fourth partner, a fictitious “editor” who provides both footnotes and endnotes, commenting on the discussion and cor-

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recting quotations and allusions made by the participants. This ruse is partly explained by the fact that, as an active statesman, Maistre published most of his works anonymously. But the multi- plicity of voices or personae prevents one from simply attributing opinions in theDialogues to Maistre himself-if, that is, one is an honest scholar.

When the “count” who is a character in the dialogue ironically eulogizes the executioner as “both the horror and the bond of human association,” Maistre is probing the moral paradox of sover- eignty-the life-and-death power of the state, inherently absolute, even in spite of constitutional limitations. Maistre beheld executioners as uneasily as anyone; he did not invite them to dinner or endow a retirement home for them. And when the executioner is called “the cor- nerstone of society,” these are the sup- posed words of a space alien as imag- ined by the Russian senator. Told about executioners (who kill a few criminals) and soldiers (who kill as many fellows as innocent as themselves as they can), the space alien concludes that the executioner is honorable while soldiers ought to be reviled. Needless to say, only a space alien would draw this conclusion. And only an enlightenment liberal who believes that conservatives are political sadists would conclude that the space alien speaks directly for Maistre.

The space alien introduces the Rus- sian senator’s speculations on war-like revolution, another blind mass behavior used by divine providence to achieve ends that are obscure to man. Through the obscurity, the interlocutors perceive spiritual laws regarding the balance of evil and punishment against the com- pensation of atonement and substitu- tionary sacrifice, laws built into the cos- mos and exhibited in all religions: for “This world is a system of invisible things visibly manifested” (Maistre’s translation of Hebrews 11:5). Calvary and the Eucha-

rist have rendered these laws as explicit as they can be for us in this life. Maistre’s liberal critics faint not at the sight of blood but at the suggestion of God.

Maistre seeks to vindicate Christian- ity, as well as the classical wisdom on human nature, through comparative religion. The Dialogues state that there is no religion, and no universal belief of mankind, that is not in a manner true- as were all the myths of paganism. The question for serious readers is whether Maistre founds this assertion on a logos theology or on a theory of primal revelation. Do men everywhere know the same God because man’s reason participates universally in the reason of God? Or did God create man as an intellectually empty vessel, knowing nothing except what God revealed to him?

One approach respects paganism as a product of natural revelation, the other treats paganism as the decayed and per- verted remnant of one supernatural revelation, although the types and shadows still testify to the truth. Maistre tends to explain paganism’s ritual forms by primal revelation, since sacrifice and sub- stitution are universal beliefs but ex- ceed reason’s grasp. On the other hand, he finds most of Christianity and much of paganism eminently reasonable, which he could not do as an “irrationalist.” His Platonic “innate ideas” can only be mani- festations of thelogos. Nevertheless critics unfairly lump Maistre with a school of radical nominalists (including Bonald and Lamennais) who strictly held the primal revelation theory, and whose teach- ing was censured by the Catholic Church as “traditionalism.” Lebrun’s complete translation of the Dialogues may help to dissipate this confusion by enabling En- glish speakers to see Maistre’s concepts in their whole context.

How can a logos theologian serve as an authority for modern nationalist ideo- logues who regard religion as the essen- tially false but necessary (and perhaps

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“aesthetically true”) cultural and political glue of civilization? He must be delib- erately misinterpreted. Maistre is willing to justify some false or uncertain beliefs as morally benign: these include the superstitions of the pious (which are the “advance fortifications of religion”) and also the private speculations of the curious (amateur esotericists like the Russian senator) who try to read the pattern of history and seek hidden mean- ings in Holy Scripture, even dabbling in theosophy. But Christianity effectively conserves the civil order only because it is fundamentally true, Maistre would claim; his ideal Christian state defends dogmas because of their inherent truth.

Some years ago, nouvelle droitiste Alain de Benoist published an anti-Chris- tian manifesto which cynically endorsed paganism and ethnic purity and illus- trated it with the Count’s portrait-an ideological g e ~ t u r e . ~ Benoist’s fictitious Maistre is apparently the same as Berlin’s; thus Benoist embodies Berlin’s nightmare, not Maistre. In the end, Berlin’s essay is instructive because it shows theliberal to be a self-constructed man trying to leave behind the world of the given, involuntary relationships of family and society that make us human. Constructing an absolutely autonomous self is the work of pure reason and an infinitely energetic will; yet, he believes, the effort is justified, since the worst is true that Freud and Sade ever said about the desires motivatingour relationships. Here, then, arises the Manichaean struggle of the Enlightenment’s cosrno- politan and rational “light” with the provincial and emotional “dark of conser- vatism.

Looking upon creative spontaneity, Berlin’s caricature conservative sees only chaos; his value of “order” is only the static opposite of this chaos, and he is willing to harness man’s incestuous and masochistic tendencies to achieve this order. Just so, Benoist is the shadow

personality that Berlin always drags behind him, and beyond which he cannot see to the actual Joseph de Maistre. Berlin concludes that totalitarianism works; it is here to stay; Maistre was its prophet-and this is Berlin’s back- handed compliment to the Count. Voltaire and Maistre have successfully discredited sentimental progressivism, but pretending to believe in it is Berlin’s only alternative.

Maistre’s “order” is dynamic and multi-dimensional, self-correcting through conflict, self-renewing through the succession of generations, grounded in the depths of history, limited by Na- ture, uncontrollable except by God. Its subordination is based on a hierarchy of goods; it is driven by the love of persons and the rational love of the good. Per- haps a spiritually open thinker would resist expounding upon this order sys- tematically. As one who does not pre- sume that the ultimate solution of a civilizational crisis rests on his shoul- ders (if it were possible), Maistre can afford the luxury of a literary presenta- tion. The result is that, as with Burke (although Maistre is hardly a derivative of Burke), one must take pains to elicit his principles.

I hope that I will someday meet a visionary professor of political science who teaches constitutionalism from the thirteen points of theconsiderations and juxtaposes the Federalist Papers with the Count’s Generative Principle of Politi- cal Constitutions. As much as Leviathan, the Treatises of Civil Government, and I’Esprit des Lois, the Dialogues belong on the standard syllabus of political theory. If one desires a conservative politics truly grounded on patristic Christianity and not a mere rehash of “neo-orthodox” democratic fideism, Maistre can show how to blend Augustinian faith with a judicious skepticism (not a disillusioned despair) regarding constitutional regimes.

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1.TheCambridgeedition is arevised andcorrected version of Lebrun’s 1974 translation, originally published by McCill-Queens. 2. Democracy andleader- ship (Indianapolis, 1979), 79-80. 3. New Republic, August 24, 1932, 35. 4. The original version of Berlin’s essay, a BBC radio lecture from 1952, a y pears as the introduction to the CambridgeConsid- erutions, with the following modest caveat: ”It will be clear to anyone who consults Richard Lebrun’s own studies of Maistre ... that he is not entirely in agreement with the interpretations offered in the introduction.” 5. See “Fondements Norninalistes d’une Attitude devant laVie,”Nouuelle~cole, No. 33 (June 1979), 27. Curiously there is no citation of Maistre in the essay itself.

Fathoming the Soviet Mind JOSEPH M. CANFELLI

The Solzhenitsyn Files: Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Man’s Fight Against the Monolith, edited with an Introduction by Michael Scammell, Chicago: Editions q, 1995. xxxix + 472 pp . $29.95.

Published documents from the world of bureaucracy are usually worse than bor- ing. The secret Soviet documents col- lected and translated by Michael Scarnmel and published as The Solzhenitsyn Files are different. The documents, arranged in a chronological sequence, and inter- spersed with letters from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the Soviet authorities, cover the period from 1963 to 1980. In his letters we see Solzhenitsyn fighting against the Soviet monolith. The letters and documents reveal the Soviet mind. We also see the extent of their concern about just one man.

It is amazing that men who controlled an empire stretching from the Berlin Wall (or should we more properly say, Helmstedt) to the Bering Strait, one of the largest land masses ever under one rule, should be so concerned, perturbed, obsessed with the life and work of just

one man. It suggests that for all their vaunted claims of power, they were des- perately afraid that the ideas of free- dom, even when they were the thoughts of one man, might endanger what Ronald Reagan called “The Evil Empire.” Truly they show themselves as “The Sacred Men in The Kremlin.” But one should remember Richard Weaver’s aphorism, “ldeas have consequences.” The ideas of Solzhenitsyn could not live in easy accommodation with those that motivated the Kremlin.

The Socialist-Marxist mindset is clearly shown by the way in which So- viet leaders tried to deal with the “Solzhenitsyn menace.” Almost up to the time of his expulsion, the documents reveal a state of indecision, an inability to take action. This lack of purpose mea- sures the moral characteristics of So- cialism. The party-line mentality asserts itself as the officials try to make their first moves through the agency of “The Writers’ Union.” They could neither un- derstand nor grasp the possibility that writers could or should be allowed to flourish as independent individuals. Cre- ative writing to them was as much a function of the socialist state as, say, running a sewage disposal plant or a concentration camp.

The letters of Solzhenitsyn show us the mind of one who is keenly aware of his ability, and who is equally concerned about Soviet repression. He saw the ne- cessity of having his writing published and his plays performed for the edifica- tion of people both in the Soviet Russia and in the rest of the world. In the imme- diate post-Stalin thaw, Solzhenitsyn did manage to get some of his works published. He for a time held some hope of getting others published in his home- land. But as time went on, it became apparent that his only hope was to smuggle his manuscripts out of Russia to be published in the West, whether in Russian or in languages of the free world.

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Joseph de Maistre Revival

Documents

Transcript of Joseph de Maistre Revival