In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854
  • Graeme Garrard
The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854. By Carolina armenteros. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. xiv + 362 pp.

Joseph de Maistre has a serious image problem. He is typically viewed as an arch-reactionary, apologist for throne and altar, Counter-Enlightenment bigot, and dark defender of political absolutism, religious intolerance, and counter-revolution, who was 'plus royaliste que le roi' and 'plus catholique que le pape'. Carolina Armenteros's mission is to replace this misleading image of him with a more contextually sensitive and textually accurate account of Maistre's thought and place in the history of ideas. He emerges, in her radically revisionist portrait, as a rationalist, progressivist, and political moderate who zealously defended freedom and gave us a bold, new, 'distinctively Francophone way of thinking about history' (p. 18) that connected him to the political left in nineteenth-century Europe. After Richard Lebrun, Armenteros is now the leading Maistre scholar in the English-speaking world, with an impressively deep and extensive knowledge of her subject. She writes in a refreshingly clear and lucid style and her book contains original, thought-provoking interpretations of many of Maistre's most important and controversial works, such as Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg and Du pape. Armenteros has also situated these texts in their historical contexts in ways that are both revealing and often highly insightful. Again, Maistre emerges as a much more nuanced, less extreme thinker and writer than conventionally assumed. However, I found it hard to resist the impression that Armenteros has greatly overcompensated for the deficiencies and misrepresentations of Maistre's more hostile interpreters. For example, her claims that Maistre 'reigned for nearly sixty years over French historical thought' (p. 315) and that he was a relativist, empiricist, champion of liberty, and proponent of a moderate form of Enlightenment who wished to 'help liberalize Russia' (p. 130) while an ambassador to the Court of Tsar Alexander I are misleading mirror images of the kinds of exaggerated claims made about Maistre by less sympathetic writers such as Robert Triomphe, Émile Faguet, and Isaiah Berlin. Armenteros has replaced Maistre the fuming, reactionary 'lion of antiliberalism' and [End Page 561] proto-fascist with Maistre the rational Enlightenment whig who 'placed enormous faith in the power of human beings to craft their own destiny' (p. 10). Both images of Maistre are misleading by themselves. He was a writer whose insights into the paradoxes and challenges of the modern age are still worth reading and considering precisely because they are deep and complex in ways that neither his detractors nor his defenders seem fully to appreciate.

Graeme Garrard
Cardiff University
...

pdf

Share