Joseph de Maistre and the Reaction Against the Eighteenth Century

It is a commonplace observation of French politics of the past century that men who started out as radicals turned conservative as they grew older, and that party groups launched with radical names and programs, though they kept the names, swung to the Right with the passage of time. In both cases we explain the transformation, in part at least, as evidence of an increasing satisfaction with the status quo, as the political system made room for the newcomer. In Joseph de Maistre we have an example from a somewhat earlier age of a less common phenomenon, the conservative turned reactionary, and impelled, moreover, to develop a systematic justification of his new position. Evidently, no parallel explanation will serve to account for this change, for Maistre, though he found a place for himself in the public life of his time, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the trend of events around him. It will not do, either, to dismiss him—in the manner of the orthodox tradition in the history of political thought—as an authoritarian ogre, or an irrationalist, or simply as a confused man, a split personality with humanitarian impulses and reactionary ideas. There was no inconsistency in this combination. Rather the explanation must be sought in the political situation of his day as he saw it, and in his concern for the perennial problem of political obligation. The positions that concern led him to take, his rationalizations of them, and the difficulties they landed him in, are the subject of this article.