MAISTRE, JOSEPH de. - Thinker, polemicist, and writer, b. at Chambéry on 1 Apr. 1753, d. at Turin on 26 Feb. 1821. Educated “in the ancient severity” of his family, he was nonetheless deeply influenced by contemporary thought. His curiosity, certainly, was Enlightenment-inspired, driving him toward the Masonic world, to which he was initiated as early as 1774. But moving beyond the childishness of the *loges bleues*, he formed ties with the group of “Illuminists” in Lyon, which, through Willermoz, looked to Martinez de Pasqually. Only later, in the final of his *Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg*, begun in Russia around 1809, would he come to declare that “the aversion to every authority and priestly hierarchy” was common to all “Illuminati” without exception. Yet in 1790 he had instead committed himself to defending the “illuminated” 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 of the “illuminated”: to achieve the unification of Christian Churches through a kind of secret Masonic diplomacy; he accepts the Gnostic-Martinist idea of a primitive revelation, to which are added “the new gifts of the great Restorer.” The pessimistic theses on the irreparable degeneration to which esotericism and the “secret tradition” (an idea tinged also with mystical-intellectualist aristocratism) are linked do not exclude his dream—partly philosophical (confirmed by Leibnizian echoes and his encounter with Abbé Raynal) and partly mystical—of an imminent renewal of Catholic unity, triumphant over the unbelief of the age but also over intolerance and “theological pride.”
When Savoy was invaded in 1792, de M., initially hesitant, ultimately chose the fate of the émigré, faithful to his king. Between 1803 and 1807 he was in Lausanne, serving as a diplomatic agent.