The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854 by Carolina Armenteros (review)

Joseph de Maistre has long presented unusual difficulties to the intellectual history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much of his career lay outside Europe’s ordinary cultural circuits, along an arc that joined the Savoyard and imperial Russian courts. The sources of much of his thought were equally unconventional; they included the Joachimite theology of the economy of salvation, the cosmogony of Scottish rite freemasonry, the illuminism of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the palingenesis of the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, varieties of Roman Catholic dévot piety, and theological and ecclesiological controversies within the Russian Orthodox church. Compounding these contextual difficulties was a stylistically brilliant rhetoric of apocalyptic violence that frequently obscured the inner logic of the Maistrian universe. With impressive energy and erudition, Armenteros has overcome these difficulties to recover Maistre’s formative role in the articulation of a distinctively French idea of history. Maistre made sense of his experience of the trauma of the French Revolution with a law of alternativity. He believed—here not all that far from many Enlightenment philosophes—that providence would ultimately lead humanity to angelize itself in an intramundane “heavenly city.” Unlike these philosophes, Maistre could not, in the wake of 1789, have providence work itself out in the mode of continuous linear improvement. Rather, providence worked itself out through a historical imitatio Christi and a necessary cycle of destructive periods of normless individualism and remedial suffering, and of creative and curative periods of social integration. For Maistre, the foundation of social integration—indeed the fundamental social fact—was religion, and only with the re-Christianization of Europe might the “Satanic” revolution come to an end.

After 1815, Maistre’s theory of history clearly had its conservative uses, whether internationally, in the creation of the Holy Alliance, or within France, in debates over the religious character of the Restoration. But his theory of history also had uses on the Left, which he did not anticipate, in the development of moral statistics among the prefects of the Directory, in Felicité de Lamennais’s dramatic evolution from Roman Catholic conservative to democratic radical and secular socialist, and, most importantly, in the various Saint-Simonian designs for a new Christianity or a new spiritual power. Armenteros would moreover like to find a place for Maistre in early nineteenth-century liberalism. To be sure, Maistre’s ultramontane conception of the papacy as an institutional check on royal absolutism shared with liberalism a distrust of politics. But Maistre did not share the liberal confidence that the free market of ideas might generate sufficient resources of moral renewal to moderate the self-interest and instrumental rationality of the free market of commodities. Maistre’s popes were, in Armenteros’s words, so many cultural “Robespierres of the future.” Auguste Comte was not wrong to have taken from Maistre the argument that “dogmatism is the normal state of the human mind.” It is odd, therefore, that Armenteros so emphatically insists that the year 1854 marks the end of the Maistrian moment. This insistence not only tends to remarginalize Maistre. It also deflects attention from one of the more important inferences that her history makes possible: the significance of a modern Pelagianism for the spiritual despotisms that continue to haunt our times.