MAISTRE, JOSEPH de. - Thinker, polemicist and writer, b. at Chambéry on 1 April 1753, d. at Turin on 26 February 1821. Educated "in the ancient severity" of his family, he was nonetheless deeply affected by the influence of contemporary thought. Enlightenment curiosity, certainly, is also what drives him toward the Masonic world, into which he is initiated as early as 1774. But beyond the enfantillage of the loges bleues, he comes to form ties with the group of the "enlightened" of Lyon, which, through Willermoz, looks to Martinez de Pasqually. Only later, in the last of his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, begun in Russia around 1809, would he come to declare that "aversion to every authority and priestly hierarchy" is common to all the "Illuminati," without exception. But in 1790 he had instead committed himself to defending the "enlightened" Claude de Saint-Martin against any suspicion of heresy (IX, 9).
In the Mémoire au duc de Brunswick, of 1782, de M. declares his ideal as an "enlightened" man: to arrive at the unification of the Christian Churches, through a sort of secret Masonic diplomacy; he accepts the Gnostic-Martinist idea of a primitive revelation, to which are added "the new gifts of the great Repairer." The pessimistic theses on irreparable degeneration, to which is linked the necessity of esotericism, of the "secret tradition" (an idea tinged also with mystical-intellectual aristocraticism) do not exclude the partly philosophical dream (the Leibnizian echoes, the encounter with the abbé Raynal confirm it), partly mystical, of an imminent renewal of Catholic unity, victorious over the unbelief of the century, but also over intolerance and "theological pride."
When Savoy was invaded in 1792, de M., at first uncertain, ends by choosing the fate of the émigré, faithful to his King. Between '93 and '97 he is at Lausanne, a Savoyard diplomatic agent: he then reveals himself as a great publicist, and finally as a "philosopher of Providence," with the Considérations sur la France (1796), which had a European echo.
It was, all at once, the program of a non-violent monarchical restoration, and the deepening of his eschatological, historico-religious reflections: the revolution is not an "event," it is an "epoch," and it is a negative but visible sign of God's work in the world. As long as God wills, "it guides men" (I, 4). But here there emerges, alongside Burke's historicist doctrine and Mallet du Pan's thesis on the "force of things," a first germ of the historical pantheism of the Romantics, which issues in the worship of historical necessity, divinized. There is moreover more than a germ of counter-revolutionary "nationalism," but a nationalism that is a child of the revolution. As early as 1795 de M. had addressed the essential themes of this revolution, and of all his works, in the unfinished Etude sur la souveraineté, and in the Fragments sur la France: there appears the first eulogy of the Jesuits, and the exaltation of the "mission" of nations, of the "souls of peoples."
In the troubled years between 1797 and 1802 de M. is first at Turin, then a fugitive at Venice, finally in Sardinia, the last refuge of the Savoys, as regent of the Grand Chancery. But from 1803 to 1817 he serves his King at St. Petersburg, and maintains with its court a celebrated correspondence, which would be published between 1858 and 1860 by A. Blanc, to show that the Catholic de M. had divined and explained the necessity of a national policy for the House of Savoy. Important, but almost vain, was de M.'s politico-religious action with Tsar Alexander I, especially in favor of the Jesuits: more effective was his religious apostolate in aristocratic circles, which provoked significant conversions, among them that of Mme Swetchine. In 1809 he writes an Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques, and then passes from the problem of temporal sovereignty to that of spiritual sovereignty, sketching the Du Pape, whose drafting is then stimulated by the affirmation of the vague interconfessional and anti-papal universalism of the Holy Alliance in 1815 (Latreille).
Returned to Piedmont, disappointed by the French restoration, and by the errors of all the monarchies, incapable of assuming a truly political influence, he completes the last works he had sketched, the Du Pape and the beloved Soirées.
A modest ecclesiologist, he avails himself, for the Du Pape, of the help of a learned man of Lyon, G. M. de Place, and detaches from it a chapter on l'Eglise gallicane; the Soirées, unfinished, come out posthumously, and with them closes the cycle of his reflections as a "lay theologian of Providence." As such, he prepares the Catholic awakening, from the early Lamennais to Newman: the latter develops, enriching it, his concept of the dynamic-organic development of dogma. He concedes much to his adversaries, especially to the Saint-Simonians and to Comte.
Works: Oeuvres complètes (14 vols., Lyon 1884-87 [to which reference is made above]); Lettres et opuscules inédits, edited by R. de Maistre (2 vols., Paris 1851); Mémoires politiques et correspondance diplomatique (edited by A. Blanc, ibid. 1858); Correspondence diplomatique, 1811-1817 (ibid. 1860); De M. et Blacas. Leur correspondance inédite, etc., 1804-1820, edited by E. Daudet (ibid. 1908); Les carnets de J. de M. (Lyons 1923); La franc-maçonnerie. Mémoire au duc de Brunswick, edited by E. Dermenghem (Paris 1925), etc.
Bibliography15 works
Ettore Passerin