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Considerations on
France
By Joseph de Maistre
(1797)
Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) has long enjoyed the
reputation as réactionnaire par excellence. The historian Émile
Faguet, in the nineteenth century, called him "a fierce absolutist, a
furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous
trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the
champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a
dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part
inquisitor, part executioner" whose "Christianity is terror, passive
obedience and the religion of the State." M. Faguet was only trying
(by comparison with other contemporary critics, that is) to be fair to
Maistre, whose sole sin is that he not only accepted the doctrine of
original sin as the foundation for his understanding of human history
and human institutions, but embraced it with a kind of violent
enthusiasm. "There is nothing," Maistre writes in Considerations on
France, "but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a
modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has
tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil,
since nothing is in its place. The keynote of the system of our
creation has been lowered, and following the rules of harmony, all the
others have been lowered proportionately. All creation groans,
and tends with pain and effort towards another order of things." In
result, "Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense,
the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must
flow without interruption somewhere or other on the globe, and that
for every nation, peace is only a respite." Whatever man, by his
reason, builds up, man, by his much deeper irrationality, must
eventually destroy.
Maistre responded to the invasion of Savoy by the
French revolutionary armies with a series of fierce pamphlets against
the revolution itself. For his indelicacy, he was dispatched to St.
Petersburg as the King of Sardinia's minister, and lived abroad in the
Russian capital from 1803 to 1817, where he was summoned on occasion
to advise the Emperor, Alexander I. Following the restoration of the
Sardinian king, Maistre was recalled to Turin), where he died
four years later. Maistre, as he mentions in Considerations,
never set foot in France and knew nothing of French intrigues; like
Edmund Burke, he admits that the terrible events in that country are
none of his business, save for the malign influence they threaten
to extend throughout Europe. Maistre read and admired
Reflections on the Revolution in France. His Considerations,
published in 1797 (seven years after the Reflections, and
in the same year as Burke's death), is the Continental equivalent of
that work: Edmund Burke in a small space, with added ferocity and
minus the peculiar affection, even sweetness, of Burke's magnum
opus. In no respect was Maistre more influenced by his predecessor
than in his conviction that (in Isaiah Berlin's gloss) "anything which
goes back to the mists of antiquity was made by God and not by man."
Maistre considered revolution "the greatest
calamity that can befall a people" and the French Revolution an
example of what he called "ordained revolution." In result, "the more
one examines the apparently most active personages in the Revolution,
the more one finds in them something passive and mechanical. We cannot
repeat too often," he continues, "that men do not lead the Revolution;
it is the revolution that uses men. They are right when they say it
goes all alone. This phrase means that never has the Divinity
shown itself so clearly in any human event. If the vilest intruments
are employed, punishment is for the sake of regeneration." France had
abandoned the divine mission to Christianize Europe with which her
magistracy-in its religious aspect particularly-had entrusted her, and
in doing so she had demoralized all of Europe. Consequently, "It has
been a long time since we have seen such frightful punishment
inflicted on such a large number of guilty people"-among them the
French aristocracy (whom Maistre judges harshly), now either dead or
émigrés living abroad. Divine Will has decreed that France
should return to her mission once more--after paying the penalty for
having abandoned it in the first place.
Maistre was quick to discern the hand of Providence
where others saw God's indifference: in the delay of the
counter-revolution he firmly expected. "Here again we may admire order
in disorder, for it is evident.that the guiltiest revolutionaries
could be felled only by the blows of their accomplices. If force alone
had accomplished what they call the counter-revolution and
restored the king to his throne, there would have been no way of
rendering justice." That is to say: For justice to prevail, the
revolution must devour its own. "All the monsters born of the
Revolution have, apparently, laboured only for the monarchy." Maistre
was right-in the long run. In the short run, there was still the
Directorate, and after it Napoleon, for the Bourbons to wait through.
(A little over a century after he wrote, moreover, the Bourbons were
again gone, and France had become, constitutionally, a secular state.)
The French Republic, Maistre insists, will not
last, and for two reasons. The first is, that a large and free nation
cannot exist under republican government. (This was classical politial
doctrine; contradicted, apparently, by the phenomenon of the United
States, which Maistre brusquely dismissed. "I know of nothing so
provoking as the praises bestowed on this babe-in-arms. Let it grow.")
The second is that the Revolution is "radically bad," "pure
impurity," and that evil, having nothing in common with life and being
out of harmony with the Creator, can destroy but not create:
"rottenness leads to nothing." "Look at history," Maistre urges, "and
you will not see any institution of any strength or duration that does
not rest on a divine idea." That idea, for France, is "liberty
through the monarchy." Republican institutions have no roots; the
monarchy is a planted and rooted thing. The suffering caused by the
Revolution is the result of its having violated every custom,
prejudice, and propriety. "This is what made the Revolution so
painful, because it tramples underfoot all nobility of opinion..[T]here
is no dignity in France at the moment for the same reason that there
is no sovereignty"-sovereignty, which is not tangible in a
republic as it is in a monarchy: "the form of government that gives
the most distinction to the greatest number of persons." This
attribute had not prevented the rise of a "fraudulent nobility"
anterior to the Revolution. Once, however, the French nobility
recognizes its responsibility for the disasters that befell it, it
will have done much to rennovate itself and regenerate the country.
When these things have been accomplished, and Frenchmen have learned
to suspect abstract reason and "believe history, which is experimental
politics," the way will have been made straight for Restoration. "The
king will bind up the wounds of the state with a gentle and paternal
hand. In conclusion, this is the great truth with which the French
cannot be too greatly impressed: the restoration of the monarchy, what
they call the counter-revolution, will not be a contrary
revolution, but the contrary of revolution."
Maistre believed that no nation has ever
been free whose "natural constitution" did not contain "seeds of
liberty as old as itself;" it follows that, "No nation can give itself
liberty if it is not already free." If this insight was relevant to
Maistre's time, it is equally--or even more--so to our own age, when
"global democracy" has been set up as an idol and made the object of a
vast secular crusade. "The Constitution of 1795," Maistre writes,
"like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing
as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians,
Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be
Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my
life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.." And so, "[A]
constitution that is made for all nations is made for none; it is a
pure abstraction, an academic exercise made according to some
hypothetical ideal, which should be addressed to man in his imaginary
dwelling place. What is a constitution? Is it not merely the solution
of the following problem? Given the population, the mores, the
religion, the geographic situation, the political circumstances, the
wealth, the good and the bad qualities of a particular nation, to find
the laws that suit it." As for the vaunted Constitution of 1795,
it does not even attempt to find those laws; it is only "a school
composition."
Government, then, is what we today would call
"culturally specific." What goes in the United States does not
necessarily go in China, the Sudan-or Iraq. Maistre's skepticism,
however, is more radical still: He denies that any nation or
government can be created anywhere as a conscious and
deliberate act of will, whether indiviudal or collective. "No mere
assembly of men can form a nation, and the very attempt exceeds in
folly the most absurd and extravagant things that all the Bedlams of
the world might put forth." Thus, he likens the revolutionaries'
attempt to "reinvent government" (as the modern cant phrase has it) to
"mere children killing each other to build a house of cards." The
French Republic is dead on the published page; it does not live!
"What a multiplicity of springs and clockwork! What a fracas of
pieces clanging away!" Great human institutions are not formed by
committees; nor is constitution-making on the order of ship-building
or erecting a factory. "Modern philosophy is at the same time too
materialistic and too presumptuous to perceive the real mainsprings of
the political world."
But ancient and medieval philosophy were never up
to the task, either; government being one of those massive mysterious
forms darkly emergent from the mists of history whose origin is God,
not man. For man to seek to recreate government out of a theory is as
ignorant, impious, and disastrous an act as is his attempt to recreate
man in a test tube. Joseph de Maistre would scarcely have been
astonished to learn that, within less than two centuries, the one
experiment led directly to the other. Maistre, we might say, was
determined to refute and to discredit the intellectual and moral
legacy of the Enlightenment; and in this way to destroy the benighted
eighteenth century before it could engender the monstrous twentieth,
and the twenty-first. |
