The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre (review)

“Bonald and de Maistre,” exclaimed Balzac, “those two eagles of thought.” It was a high compliment, but by the time Balzac turned thirty, royalism in France was already a doomed cause. The part of le people, temporarily set back by the Restoration, was massively reestablishing its ægis. The fate of de Maistre was worse: he became, and remained for well over a century, the prototype of the twisted, hate-wrinkled, sanguinary rightist.

Cara Camcastle’s splendid book seeks and finds the real de Maistre who has disappeared into the caricature created and preserved by the European left. The lifelike figure that emerges is that of a man who studied the welter of events and ideologies of his day to determine what they augured not for himself or his class or party but for the civilization of the West.

Camcastle has found neglected texts of the Master: brilliant letters, reports, and suggestions dealing with matters as diverse as the advantages of paper money over metal, grain exports, and a man perhaps unjustly condemned to execution. Scholarship is indebted to her for recovering these papers and presenting them in beautiful translations. They clinch the case for de Maistre as an astute, innovative, receptive, generous, clement human being fully in touch with the practical as well as the intellectual affairs of his time.

At every point, Camcastle reads de Maistre with rare comprehension, countering the sloppy thought and sheer ignorance of many earlier commentators. Her most original and most impressive contribution is a thorough, highly detailed study of the man’s views on commerce. She rightly aligns de Maistre with other thinkers who were political conservatives but economic liberals – Burke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, et al. Like them, he believed in the civilizational as well as the economic beneficence of expansionist manufacture and free trade.

De Maistre’s openness and flexibility on certain issues may not, however, warrant presenting him as a “moderate conservative.” De Maistre the humanitarian and the economic moderate still carries a powerful royalist charge. His aristocratism and his particular views on governance were essentially those of the Chevaliers de la Foi, who constituted the rank and file of the parti ultraroyaliste. This misnomer, properly understood, fits de Maistre well. He remains a modern Theognis of Megara: an archetypal patrician and the sworn enemy of Demos. This diplomat was, as Camcastle proves beyond doubt, mild-mannered, gentle, tolerant, warm-hearted, amiable.

The old “throne and altar” tag for the ultras simply doesn’t fit. There were ultras who had more faith in aristocracy than in the Deity, to say nothing of the Monarchy. The horrors of Demos rampant – of the disgustingly envious and power-greedy people in their “days of glory” – had stunned and awakened not just the noblesse in France, but noble-mindedness and religious devotion everywhere. Berthe de Sauvigny and Claire Duras were haunted for the rest of their lives by the sight of their innocent fathers hanging from the democratic rope; Chateaubriand became fully human when he saw, in 1792, on the roads of the Revolution, wagon after wagon full of bodies with no heads.

De Maistre had not seen those ropes or those roads, but none of the nightmare was lost on him. He had already witnessed the decapitation of faith, and of sanity itself, by a horde of cold, fantasizing, self-absorbed philosophes. A lover of truth, goodness and innocent beauty wants to serve and protect them. Learning to detest the self-important Holbachs, Voltaires, and Condorcets was de Maistre’s preparatory training for perceiving with perfect clarity of vision “the famous masses ready for the kill” (Eric Vogelin).

De Maistre’s immoderate side turns out to be as real as his moderate one: it’s the immoderateness of all passionate devotion, of love building the ramparts or planning the rescue of the hostages. Consider the prose style as well as the position taken: the style is the man. Our diving eagle has arrows for...