Joseph de Maistre, Prophet of the Past.

If I had to characterize in a single trait the genius of Joseph de Maistre, I would call it, above all, the genius of the Apperception. It is initially this, when one reads his works, which impresses; and, when one closes the book, it is this that one remains impressed with long after. Bonald and Lamennais, for example, reveal different qualities by the use of different procedures. They set out principles and connect them; they build edifices; they are the architects of truths. But, with Maistre, who can tell me what his system was and, in the human sense of the word, what his philosophy was? In the divine sense, in the sense of dominant principles common to all philosophies, he had one, I know; and it is not hard to distill it from the ensemble of his writings. But he never tried holding assizes with the help of all the faculties of science and reasoning. Possessing to an eminent degree that faculty of belief which is the first attribute of great thinkers—or, to say better by saying more, of "great men"—he lived too much by the light of his faith; he breathed too much the sublime a priori's to contend by means of hypothesis and to examine philosophically that grand and unique truth of tradition, which has become the catholic truth; and it is with this fact, undisputed and indisputable, the irrefragable generator of all others, that he addresses all the diverse questions upon which he displays the flexibility of his powers.

Raised to this height, or rather placed naturally at this height without having been raised, by the fact of his superior faculties, he saw well: he apperceived. But why did he see? Why did he have this power of visual projection which, within the hierarchy of intelligence belongs to that of the apperception and is the stamp of his genius? Because he looked out from a happy prospect. The eagle that the wind has hurled into an abyss has no longer need of his flashing eye; for it serves him only while he planes. The sagacity of Joseph de Maistre pertains more to his vantage point than to his vision itself. Now his vantage point is the historic revelation, the tradition. I recall a sentence he wrote, which is a key light upon his thinking. He speaks of Christianity, that point of departure from which he launches himself upon every idea. "After eighteen centuries," he says, "it reigns over the most enlightened portion of the globe, and [the time line of] this religion does not terminate even at that ancient period. Having gone back to its founder, it ties itself to another order of things, to a religion typical of that which preceded it. One could not be true without the other; the one boasts a promise which the other boasts to hold, in such a way that this one, by a link which is a visible fact, goes back to the origin of the world. IT WAS BORN ON THE DAY THAT DAYS WERE BORN." One sees philosophically that, for this genius of the State, the human mind begins with a fact outside of itself, outside its own judgments and its own abilities. According to the rules by which one raises a specious position against God, even for the great glory of deducing Him, Maistre always disdained to posit such a thing. He has too much manly spirit to play with those little mathematical problems. He does not attempt to prove the legitimacy of received truths by reasoning; he testifies to them, knowing at a certain depth that nothing prevails against history, and that philosophy, reduced to its psychological and ontological forces alone, is incapable of making anything out of those primary truths but a vague probability. [note 1]

Hence there is nothing truer, in a sense, than to apply the title Man of the Past to Joseph de Maistre. He is of the past in the sense that the notion of God, this primary notion, is given for him in its quickening fullness only by history, and that the law which follows from it and which governs the world, given once, cannot change anymore through time's evolutions and revolutions. As he moves from this base, which alone does not tremble underfoot, Maistre has a certain and absolute criterion (every criterion lacking these two qualities is nothing but an approximate measure, a blind-man's stick for sounding the potholes in the road) and he can speak, as he does speak, without the prophet being much more than a logician: such a fact contradicts the truth that is taught, and this is disorder, He must then pass through; and, in the trail of his passage, which leaves many ruins or only a little smoke, normal facts, for a moment contradicted or suspended, must re-establish themselves with the tranquil majesty of their eternal strength. It is this rule, this criterion, which de Maistre has applied with a justness of regard and a sure hold to all the facts of his age, be they historical or philosophical. As it is of the essence of Philosophy, that searcher of the mind and of disputes, to debate right up to the legitimacy itself of the debate, I would leave there the theoretical and metaphysical facts, upon which one may cavil right up to the hour when they fall amidst the realities of history and are fleshed out there; and I would prefer the historical facts, before which, manifest and palpable as physical facts, Philosophy may only lower her grey eyes, and her pride, even more blind than her eyes.

Of all Joseph de Maistre's books, the most remarked, the most brilliant with its prophetic gleam that would have been extinguished by the breath of a single lying word,— is his Considerations on France. Written in 1797 and published in the moment that France forgot herself, blinded with blood and dazed with blows in the revolutionary slaughterhouse, this book produced a vivid and profound impression among the portion of this country that lived still by thought, and especially among Europe's aristocracy. Yet it was much later that one recognized the consequences; for one measured these consequences with an infallible measure—the completed events. It was found that at a distance of seventeen years, Maistre had perceived them. He alone, at that time as much as ever since, was stronger than the hope that was beginning to be reborn out of such despair, and judged—with that cool-headedness which, since Machiavelli, owns the world but owns the realm of thought even more—the impotent structures of a society left in anarchy, seeking to organize itself. Listen to what he said in 1797 of the constitution of 1795: "Is there a single country in the universe where one is not able to find a Council of Five Hundred, a Council of Ancients and five Directors? This constitution could be presented to all human associations from China to Geneva. But a constitution made for all nations is no good for any. It is a pure abstraction, a scholastic problem made to exercise the mind in an ideal hypothesis... All imaginable reasons then unite to establish that there is no divine seal upon this work, which is nothing but an essay and is already marked with all the characters of destruction." A little while later the facts gathered up this judgment, fallen from on high, and turned it into truth. Maistre saw clearly, yet very close to where he was. But wait; three pages down he will see far yet not less clearly. Already preoccupied with the eventuality of a restoration, which leaves behind the blinding turbidity of the reign of Napoleon, Count Joseph de Maistre, who instigated it along with all the intellects in Europe on the side of order, wrote these words, oraculous though without an oracle's obscurity; "All the united factions of the French Revolution have wanted the degradation, the destruction of universal Christianity and of monarchy alike: whence it follows that all their efforts will result only in the exaltation of Christianity and monarchy." Indeed! it was sufficiently clear, and yet from the point of view of order, understood in what was most apparent, the Revolution was at its endpoint. It had recovered itself by its institutions. But to Maistre, the artificial order which imposed itself upon so many minds was not the true order. Likewise he said, a few lines down from those I am going to quote, "Everything declares that the order of affairs set up in France cannot last, and that INVINCIBLE NATURE MUST BRING BACK THE MONARCHY."

A little later, in effect, invincible nature did bring it back in concert with another Invincible; and, as was worthy of this intellect which saw beneath events that were the most profound, the most unexpected, and the most precipitous to vulgar eyes, likewise the prodigies of this other Invincible did not impede the foreseen Restoration from manifesting itself in the terms which the illustrious publicist had fixed and decreed in advance almost down to its slightest details. Everyone who knows how to read cannot forget the admirable Chapter IX, that train of brilliances from the Considerations, entitled, "How a Counter-Revolution Will End." The grandeurs and follies of the man who, in reviving the monarchy, had written as though with his own sword under dictation from the political prophet who proclaimed it necessary and inevitable would hardly modify the history of the future Restoration which he had traced from so far away. One understands that. What did this man add thereto, who still represented the Revolution, although he would, turn against it? His own faults and his own griefs. The prediction of Joseph de Maistre wasn't in the least weakened. Rather it could only shine brighter, and the words expressing it would remain whole without a single event erasing even one letter. True before Bonaparte, even truer after Bonaparte, these words seem a stay of Providence, which, when one refers back to the date, astonishes minds well inured to political conjectures: "It is then truly in vain," these words said, "that so many writers insist upon the inconveniences of re-establishing the monarchy; it is in vain that they frighten the French with the consequences of the Counter-Revolution; and inasmuch as they conclude that these inconveniences, feared by the French, would never permit the re-establishment of the monarchy, they conclude very badly; for the French would not hesitate at all, and it could be from the hand of a silly, weak woman that they will receive a king," The disdainful expression was not an injury, and intuition here went as far as nuance. The French did not hesitate at all. They cried out for someone to deliver them, and their deliverers hesitated. Nothing was missing from this prodigious prophecy, not even the "silly, weak woman": for Madame de Krüdner, who played at mysticism without a heart or a head big enough for it, who imposed the littlenesses of her soul upon the decisions of Alexander—was she not this the "silly, weak woman"?...

Moreover a vision so correct and so piercing, which augmented its force and increased it tenfold, by placing the pure medium of principles between itself and far-off events—just as science puts the marvelous crystal between itself and objects which elude the weakness of human organs, the better to see them—this vision, clarified, established, elevated to its highest power by the habit of superior contemplation, never confused itself, even when facing what so often confuses the vision of mankind, success. So far above the parties and their passing fortunes, Joseph de Maistre, as one had believed, amidst the ardencies of his language, while partaking of their passionateness, espoused none of the illusions of victory when the Restoration was achieved. He saw that, instead of breaking with a revolution which had in itself been a rupture with truth and history, the Restoration tied itself to this revolution by a philosophical constitution; and he foresaw what would come of this latest one, as had already come of its predecessors. He was not evasive on the fault of Louis XVIII and on the fate of this monarchy, momentarily resurrected only to fall again. Two years after the House of Bourbon returned, the inspiration came, born of many embarrassments already, to offer him the ministry; but he refused, saying that it was too late. He sensed that the conception of the true order for France, sacrificed to an egotistical and false politics, could no longer be realized, at least by the simple fiat of one man. Some years later, in 1821, he died; and with his vision ever lucid and firm he said, "I die with Europe." A cruel and dismal saying, but frankly, what has happened since 1821 to show that this saying was not just?

Thus—as one sees now by both his works and his life—this Prophet of the Past, or as the insolent called him, the Nostradamus of our age, always foresaw and announced the veiled future which then came to pass. In his Considerations on France and his Generative Principle, he had proclaimed the nothingness of constitutions made by the hand of man, and, blow by blow, the successive facts of contemporary history gave him reason for smashing, one after another, these constitutions! What can I say? The future which he saw is not at all circumscribed within a historical period. Time, that Court of the Marble Table which rejudges human judgments, has hardly annulled the death-sentence which he levied against constitutions. It has banged the gavel equally upon the work of 1795, of 1815, of 1830, as it will upon all similar works of human fabrication, stamped with the same name. Much later, when I speak of Chateaubriand, whose eye was often dazzled by the ambient illusions of his epoch, I will show that the impossibility of living,— the small hindrance of existing, as Fontenelle said—under these futile works derived not only from the common principle on which they rested, but also from the system of government which these constitutions created. Only for Maistre, this original thinker, who explained everything by its origin, original sin sufficed. When an institution is vain in its foundation, it is only a ruin suspended above those whom it covers with its apparent solidity. The near-sighted alone believed, for example, that King Charles X was chased from the throne by ancient rancors against his noble race; but for those who raise their vision towards more substantial causes, he was, above all, chased out by the very principles authorized in the Charter, which will be judged by our sons (if they are not as feeble-minded as their fathers) a vile concession to the enemy. Louis-Philippe had none of the memories of his race to fear. Son of regicide, fostered in the lap of clubs, liberal of that false liberalism, of that Tartuffery of liberty to which France's spirit has long played Madame Pernelle and does so again; Louis-Philippe, that king of the bean market was chased to his tower by urchins, sons of the urchins who had handed him the crown. But, as with Charles X, it was once again, fundamentally, the constitution that chased him out, or at least the spirit brooded in its bosom. The monarchy of 1830 perished just as the monarchy of 1815 did, because neither the one nor the other, in the final reckoning, was the monarchy. Both died by their constitutions. Maistre presaged these disasters just as he foresaw many others which France has not yet lived to see, but which she shall... And can't one say that she has begun to see them?... We own that it is not so bad for a man always to have his eyes fixed on the past, for which his adversaries reproach him. At last he has merited this glory, that—at more than forty years' distance—a minister with an almost epochal experience, an experience as vast in practice and in action as he, Maistre, possessed in theory and in meditation, infers the course of events, just the way the illustrious writer had foreseen them, before they had broken out. The words reported lately of Prince Metternich at London [note 2] are an experimental corollary to the a priori of the author of Considerations on France. When the political Bohemians of our epoch, hatched all at once by the government of the Estates, like mushrooms on manure, in the night of 24 February 1848; when all the poetical fortune-tellers in France will have for a guarantee of their predictions an ensemble of facts such as that which I could only point out in this chapter, and the adherence to their prophecies of a man who has after forty years a grasp—and so powerful a grasp—upon the affairs of this world, then... oh! then... I would not believe these men any longer, yet I would regard myself as obliged at least to deduce reasons for my incredulousness.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

[Note 1] To cite only one example of the proudly abridged method of Joseph de Maistre, one recalls the opening pages of his great book, The Pope. There he sovereignly posits theological infallibility, and therefrom he deduces immediately political infallibility through experience and through history, granting leave for every resource to those who have been stung by the tarantula of discussion, for the opening of minds to the facts, if they think fit. And since I have cited The Pope, permit me to add in passing that it is this book alone, under its historic form, whose every prophecy the times are charged with vindicating, and sooner than one thinks. The Christian peoples [nations, classes], though not actually such except in name and by baptism, must return at a given time to this theory of the Pope, which is the theory of unity through power and which has squeezed from Error the cry one vents when one is struck. When we are weary—and this fatigue commences already—of powers which are imaginary and conventional and which are brought in question every morning, we will return to the true power: religious, absolute, divine; to the abhorred Theocracy, but necessary and salutary—or else we are destined to turn to the bestialities of unrestrained materialism, there to die. The notion of right would then have to be extinguished in the spirit of man; for whoever speaks of right means absolute right, since there is none outside Catholicism. Outside there are only conventions: for the large conventions bend the small ones, as certain existences which, killing in order to live, devour inferior existences. The public right would then be nothing but a question of Anthropology. The rights of the peoples with respect to one another would then be their faculties [powers], and one knows what this notion of faculties consists of! Thus at the end of all philosophies, either the system of the Pope of Joseph de Maistre and of the whole Church, or else the Leviathan of Hobbes! Either the absolute right with its infallible Interpreter who judges, condemns and absolves, or struggle without end, without the last word, without appeasement: the blood-pool of force (for intelligence is only a force) and the poor human Spirit, shaken off by its passions as a tree pruned of its branches and riven, and the force for every measure of right and of human need! There is the alternative. We will see how the world comes out of this, but it is necessary to choose.

[Note 2] Here are Prince Metternich's exact words: "Political progress follows a circle. The more it moves the more it approaches its point of departure." This is entirely the catholic theory which perceives man not otherwise than as he is; which never dreams, but observes always. A great mind who, like Prince Metternich, struggles with the facts for forty years, and concludes in the name of the facts—just as the most redoubtable Utopians would in the name of ideas—shows indeed that Utopia is nothing more than an advance of the Truth. Infallibility is for M. de Metternich as necessary as for Joseph de Maistre. And that is not the only analogy which exists between the great Thinker standing and the great Thinker seated. Both have the same providential theory. Both believe that the Revolution of 1789 was nothing but the chastisement of the Upper Classes and that the Bourgeoisie and the People ought also to have their 1789. After the stroke of the guillotine upon the neck of the too-revolutionary Louis XVI, there must be a massacre and a famine for the revolutionary people. The Expiation, the Expiation for all, for those below as well as those on high... In this the people will lose the spirit of revolt; the Aristocrats and the Kings [will lose] the spirit of weakness and of illusion [which is] more dangerous and more shameful still.—Such is the opinion of a man whose long ministry was a reign, and who, at the end of his all-powerful life, found the revolution armed against him, because he had put all his patient and calm genius to sleep rather than to death. He should have killed it.