BOOK REVIEWS

A Joseph de Maistre Revival

T. John Jamieson

Considerations on France, by Joseph de Maistre; translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun; introduction by Isaiah Berlin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. $49.95/ $16.95 paper. St. Petemburg Dialogues; Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, by Joseph d e Maistre; translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun, Monneal& Kingston: McCill-Queens University Press, 1993. =vi + 407 pp. $55.00. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, by Isaiah Berlin; edited by Henry Hardy, New York: Knopt 1991. 277 pp. $22.00/$12.00 paper.
Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant, by Richard A. Lebrun, Kingston and Montreal: McCillQueens University Press, 1988. xiu + 366 pp. $49.95.

Maistre Studies, translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun, Lanham MD, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1988. xvii + 299 pp. $42.75.
In 1809 John Quincy Adams was American ambassador to the Czars court at St. Petersburg. Among his fellow ambassa392

dors, the one from the provincial-sounding Kingdom of Sardinia stood out. He was, Adams noted, a man of sense and vivacity in conversation, as well as a devout Roman Catholic with all the f prejudices o his sect. As a child of the Enlightenment,Adams was shocked that this man held John Locke in horror and that he blamed Locke for instigating the materialist philosophy that had corrupted eighteenth-century France. This reactionary diplomat with abstruse opinions on innate ideas and on God as the place of souls (as space is the place of bodies) was the renowned Count Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), who continues to baffle commentators on the history of political thought. However anti-progressive Maistres opinions seemed to Adams, they were not sectarian prejudices but rationally based convictions. In fact, Maistre has never received the recognition he deserves as a philosophical and political hold-out against modern spiritual deformation, a lone bastion of classical wisdom and orthodox belief. Even Irving Babbitt depicted Maistre as a mere counter-philosophe with little sense of the inner life, one lacking awareness that Christian social subordination is to be achieved by humility and charity rather than rigid outer authority.2Babbitt echoed the standard opinions of highly-regarded liberal critics such as Morley and Sainte-Beuve. Indeed, rigid
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outer authority was all that Action Frangaise ideologists (such as the Cathe lic atheist Charles Maurras) could see in Maistres position when they invoked his authority, superficially marking out f their own position by listing names o antidemocratic thinkers. The literary modernist Edmund Wilson, who confessed that he was tired of having Maistre thrown at my head so often as an antidote to modern radicalism, suggested that when literary people, hard pressed by the times, first begin to feel the need -forbecoming reactionary, they are likely to go in for Joseph de M a i ~ t r e . ~ Maistres greatest problem for uninspired interpreters is his deliberate provocativeness. Within the authoritarian institutions that liberals hate, he finds revelatory paradoxes and defiantly flaunts them. So arises the caricature Count who venerates the Pope-as-temporal-monarch, the inquisition, and the public hangman as Western civilizations t h r e e essential pillars. I t was t h e philosophes of the eighteenth century, however, who were conducting a literary inquisition, Maistre charges-on whose account even t h e g r e a t Montesquieu pretended to believe in a mythical state of nature antecedent t o a mythical social contract. Maistre continues to suffer for having asked the forbidden questions. In a rambling eighty-three page essay called Joseph de Maistre and the Orif gins o Fascism (in The Crooked Timber of Humanity), Sir Isaiah Berlin embellishes the caricature: Maistre is an irrationalist in religion, a radical pessimist regarding mans nature, a radical nominalist in philosophy, a modern totalitarian in politics, a conspiracy theorist, even a hater of immigrants and refugees (an enemy of the circulation of humanity). He is Calvin, Kierkegaard, Sade, Nietzsche, Stalin, and B.F. Skinner-the f least attractive aspects o each, all rolled into one. He is Dostoevskys Grand InModem Age

quisitor, who would knowingly execute the returning Christ! Richard A. Lebrun presents a completely different Count: a scholarly magistrate, much in the tradition of Montesquieu, a man who had been open to the intellectual and social trends of his times, albeit profoundly shaken by the French revolution. Lebruns essays in Maistre Studies portray the Count as a natural law theorist and a classical realist. In Considerations on France we find a Maistre who defends the old f French constitution o the parlements, not despotism and autocracy. In Lebruns biography of the Count we find a jurist who infuriates his Sardinian masters by f preferring the rule o law to military government, and an ambitious international statesman motivated by family f piety and honor and love o the Catholic faith. And the St. Petersburg Dialogues reveal a deeply Augustinian Maistre who f understands man as the interplay o intellect, free will, and passions-a sublime creature capable o virtue through f inner constraint, perfectible by the knowledge of God even in this life. Lebruns excellent translations, essays, and highly objective biography of thecount arepartlythe result of aMaistre revival in France, which has produced scholarly texts of the Counts works and t h e multi-volume Reoue des ktudes maistriennes. The Counts descendants, who have jealously guarded his memory, are at last opening the family archives to scholars. Perhaps this revival indicates an emergence of orthodox Catholic conservatives in resistance t o French new right integralists. Lebrun, a history professor at the University of Manitoba, began his Maistre investigations in 1965 with a published dissertation entitled Throne and Altar. His biography o the Count, based on f original archival research and including long extracts from the Counts letters, provides a generous and easy introduc393

tion to Maistre the man, who was a true f f son of his family and o his country: o a family benefiting from social mobility under a prerevolutionary regime, and of a somewhat backward and culturally diverse country (Savoy-P i ed mo n tSardinia) precariously wedged between the European powers. Maistres great-grandfather was a prosperous cloth-merchant in Nice, his grandfather a lawyer, his father a distinguished judge who reformed the legal code of Savoy and became the first Count de Maistre. Faithful sons of the Church, the Maistre males belonged to a lay order, the penitents noirs, who ministered to condemned criminals and marched in procession through the Savoyard capital wearing black hoods and chanting psalms. Joseph utterly venerated his father; at 15 he wrote in his diary, When, by some great misfortune, my father is taken from me, I would hope with all my heart to be permitted like an Egyptian to embalm his body and keep it with me; the Egyptian custom was the last ref trenchment o filial love. Josephs brother Xavier, a novelist, became a Russian general, while another brother f was appointed Bishop o Aosta. They were a family distinguished enough for the poet Lamartine to lie about his associations with them. At the age of sixteen Joseph inherited his maternal grandfathers considerable library and became a voracious reader of European (especially English) literature. Culturally French, Maistre never visited Paris till the age of sixty-four; following his fathers footsteps as a juf rist and then advancing t o the offices o ambassador and minister o state, he f served Italian despots whose descendants Garibaldi would place on t h e f throne o united Italy. Spending fourteen years in Russia, he became an adviser t o Czar Alexander I; from afar, he was the greatest partisan o the House of Bourf bon. He could have claimed to be a true
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European, did he not believe that man compromises his humanity by seeking t o transcend national and regional identities. In any event, he was not a rootless, alienated Parisian literary proletarian. Until the age o thirty-nine Maistre f was a lawyer and a judge, following his f father t o a seat in the Senate o Savoy at an early age, and returning at later times f to his fathers work o reforming the kingdoms legal codes. Originally a provincial parlement, the Senate developed f into a council o supreme magistrates and prosecutors, a legislative as well as a judicial body; hence Maistre had no reason t o take separation of powers doctrine as the last word in political science. One may not immediately perceive, from Maistres writings, his reverence for law as an organic growth and the albeit imperfectible foundation of civilized life. What he opposed was the f Enlightenments utopian project o perfect laws and universal constitutions. He says in the Considerations that, because human laws are imperfect, multiplying laws only multiplies imperfection, and he notes with derision that the French National Assembly passed fifteen thousand laws in five years. What he appreciated in such eighteenth-century thinkers as Montesquieu and Vico, one may suppose, is their appreciation for human diversity (expressed in the diversity of regimes) and their resistance to Enlightenment reductivism. They were the ages exceptions. Maistre fled as the revolutionary juggernaut rolled through Savoy in 1792; the king then appointed him diplomatic correspondent to the French emigres at Lausanne. From there his career as a political sage began in 1797, when he published his analysis of the French revolution, Considerations on France, perhaps the most theological book on politics ever written. It begins, We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme
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Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us-a reply to Rousseaus man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Unlike BurkesReflections,which warn England against the revolution, Maistres Considerations explain how the revolution must exhaust itself, and how it follows its own cycle in defiance of its leaders intentions. Men d o not lead the revolution; it is the revolution that uses f men. Yet what is beyond the control o men lies firmly in the hands of God: hence the revolution is a divine scourge, punishing France for t h e sin o f philosophisme, punishing even its own leaders with the severity that they deserve and that a restored monarchy would lack the heartlessness to mete out. When Maistre meditates on history f and tentatively discerns the hand o Providence, he is practicing traditional Christian theodicy, unlike Hegel who f deforms theodicy into a science o causation. In the sixth chapter Maistre states thirteen maxims on constitutions (No mere assembly of men can form a nation; There has never been a free nation that did not have in its natural conf stitution seeds o liberty as old as itself; No constitution is the result o deliberaf tion, etc.). The curse of the twentieth century was that enlightened politicians such as Woodrow Wilson tried to found nation-states for peoples around the world by drawing lines on maps and constructing p a p e r governments. Maistre presents his thirteen points not as scientific principles but as signs by which God warns us of our weakness. Then he puts the political scientist in his place: Montesquieu (though Maistre highly regards him) is to Lycurgus only as a grammarian is to Homer. Isaiah Berlin strangely suggests that, in Maistres eyes, the American founding and the French revolution were alike caused by a satanic order. What
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Maistre says, however, is that the American case is no justification for artificially constructed republics. The democratic element of the American constitution, he says, already existed for centuries in the constitution of the mother country. Although he doubted the regimes stability, little could be learned from it as yet because it was but a babe in arms. Let it grow. While Maistre disbelieved that Americans would succeed in building a capital city ex nihilo (and insofar as Washington, D.C., fails to compare with London or Paris, he was right), he owed his final masterpiece to years spent in another such artificial capital, one also erected on a swamp, but decreed by an autocrat, not negotiated by a committee. This masterpiece is the St. Petersburg Dialogues (1821), which expand upon the f speculative concerns o the Considerations-the paradoxes of justice and power, the mysteries of providence, punishment, and sacrifice. The Dialogues contain many literary niceties. Maistre charmingly depicts the palatial city glowing on the river banks during its summer white nights. He evokes Peter the Greats godlike presence there: the equestrian statue of Peter extends its terrible arm over the descendants of the subjects whom Peter created, and the spread o the city f walls manifests a vast line originally traced by his bold finger. (The quasidivinity o founders is, of course, a f Maistrean theme. Theophobic philosophes, incapable of founding anything lasting, are their opposite.) The parties to the Dialogues are a count who resembles Maistre, a French soldier who resembles one Chevalier de Bray (the Bavarian ambassador), and a Russian senator who may be the Czars Privy Councillor Tamara. There is also a fourth partner, a fictitious editor who provides both footnotes and endnotes, commenting on the discussion and cor395

recting quotations and allusions made by the participants. This ruse is partly explained by the fact that, as an active statesman, Maistre published most of his works anonymously. But the multiplicity of voices or personae prevents one from simply attributing opinions in theDialogues to Maistre himself-if, that is, one is an honest scholar. When the count who is a character in the dialogue ironically eulogizes the executioner as both the horror and the bond of human association, Maistre is probing the moral paradox of sovereignty-the life-and-death power of the state, inherently absolute, even in spite of constitutional limitations. Maistre beheld executioners as uneasily as anyone; he did not invite them to dinner or endow a retirement home for them. And when the executioner is called the cornerstone of society, these are the supposed words of a space alien as imagined by the Russian senator. Told about executioners (who kill a few criminals) and soldiers (who kill as many fellows as innocent as themselves as they can), the space alien concludes that the executioner is honorable while soldiers ought to be reviled. Needless to say, only a space alien would draw this conclusion. And only an enlightenment liberal who believes that conservatives are political sadists would conclude that the space alien speaks directly for Maistre. The space alien introduces the Russian senators speculations on war-like revolution, another blind mass behavior used by divine providence to achieve ends that are obscure to man. Through the obscurity, the interlocutors perceive spiritual laws regarding the balance of evil and punishment against the compensation of atonement and substitutionary sacrifice, laws built into the cosmos and exhibited in all religions: for This world is a system of invisible things visibly manifested (Maistrestranslation of Hebrews 11:5). Calvary and the Eucha396

rist have rendered these laws as explicit as they can be for us in this life. Maistres liberal critics faint not at the sight of blood but at the suggestion of God. Maistre seeks to vindicate Christianity, as well as the classical wisdom on human nature, through comparative religion. The Dialogues state that there is no religion, and no universal belief of mankind, that is not in a manner trueas were all the myths of paganism. The question for serious readers is whether Maistre founds this assertion on a logos theology or on a theory of primal revelation. Do men everywhere know the same God because mans reason participates universally in the reason of God? Or did God create man as an intellectuallyempty vessel, knowing nothing except what God revealed to him? One approach respects paganism as a product of natural revelation, the other treats paganism as the decayed and perverted remnant of one supernatural revelation, although the types and shadows still testify to the truth. Maistre tends to explain paganisms ritual forms by primal revelation, since sacrifice and substitution are universal beliefs but exceed reasons grasp. On the other hand, he finds most of Christianity and much of paganism eminently reasonable, which he could not do as an irrationalist.His Platonic innate ideas can only be manifestations of thelogos. Nevertheless critics unfairly lump Maistre with a school of radical nominalists (including Bonald and Lamennais) who strictly held the primal revelationtheory,and whose teaching was censured by the Catholic Church as traditionalism. Lebruns complete translation of the Dialogues may help to dissipate this confusion by enabling English speakers to see Maistres concepts in their whole context. How can a logos theologian serve as an authority for modern nationalist ideologues who regard religion as the essentially false but necessary (and perhaps
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aesthetically true) cultural and politif cal glue o civilization? He must be deliberately misinterpreted. Maistre is willing to justify some false or uncertain beliefs as morally benign: these include the superstitions of the pious (which are the advance fortifications of religion) and also the private speculations of the curious (amateur esotericists like the Russian senator) who try to read the f pattern o history and seek hidden meanings in Holy Scripture, even dabbling in theosophy. But Christianity effectively conserves the civil order only because it is fundamentally true, Maistre would claim; his ideal Christian state defends f dogmas because o their inherent truth. Some years ago, nouvelle droitiste Alain de Benoist published an anti-Christian manifesto which cynically endorsed paganism and ethnic purity and illustrated it with the Counts portrait-an ideological g e ~ t u r eBenoists fictitious .~ Maistre is apparently t h e same a s Berlins; thus Benoist embodies Berlins nightmare, not Maistre. In the end, Berlins essay is instructive because it shows theliberal to be a self-constructed f man trying t o leave behind the world o the given, involuntary relationships of family and society that make us human. Constructing an absolutely autonomous self is the work of pure reason and an infinitely energetic will; yet, he believes, the effort is justified, since the worst is true that Freud and Sade ever said about the desires motivatingour relationships. Here, then, arises t h e Manichaean struggle of the Enlightenments cosrnopolitan and rational lightwith the provincial and emotional d a r k of conservatism. Looking upon creative spontaneity, Berlins caricature conservative sees only chaos; his value o order is only f the static opposite o this chaos, and he f is willing to harness mans incestuous and masochistic tendencies to achieve this order. Just so, Benoist is the shadow
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personality that Berlin always drags behind him, and beyond which he cannot see to the actual Joseph de Maistre. Berlin concludes that totalitarianism works; it is here to stay; Maistre was its prophet-and this is Berlins backhanded compliment to t h e Count. Voltaire and Maistre have successfully discredited sentimental progressivism, but pretending to believe in it is Berlins only alternative. Maistres order is dynamic and multi-dimensional, self-correcting through conflict, self-renewing through the succession of generations, grounded in the depths of history, limited by Nature, uncontrollable except by God. Its subordination is based on a hierarchy of goods; it is driven by the love of persons f and the rational love o the good. Perhaps a spiritually open thinker would resist expounding upon this order systematically. As one who does not presume that the ultimate solution of a civilizational crisis rests on his shoulders (if it were possible), Maistre can afford the luxury of a literary presentation. The result is that, as with Burke (although Maistre is hardly a derivative o Burke), one must take pains to elicit f his principles. I hope that I will someday meet a f visionary professor o political science who teaches constitutionalism from the thirteen points of theconsiderations and juxtaposes the Federalist Papers with the Counts Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.As much as Leviathan, the Treatises of Civil Government, and IEsprit des Lois, the Dialogues belong on f the standard syllabus o political theory. If one desires a conservative politics truly grounded on patristic Christianity and not a mere rehash of neo-orthodox democratic fideism, Maistre can show how to blend Augustinian faith with a judicious skepticism (not a disillusioned despair) regarding constitutional regimes.
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1.TheCambridgeedition is arevised andcorrected version of Lebruns 1974translation, originallypublished by McCill-Queens.2. Democracy andleadership (Indianapolis, 1979), 79-80. 3 New Republic, . August 24, 1932, 35. 4. The original version of Berlins essay, a BBC radio lecture from 1952, a y pears as the introduction to the CambridgeConsiderutions, with the following modest caveat: It will be clear to anyone who consults Richard Lebruns own studies of Maistre ...that he is not entirely in agreement with the interpretations offered in the introduction. 5. See Fondements Norninalistes dune Attitude devant laVie,Nouuelle~cole, 33 No. (June 1979), 27. Curiously there is no citation of Maistre in the essay itself.

Fathoming the Soviet Mind JOSEPH CANFELLI M.

The Solzhenitsyn Files: Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Mans Fight Against the Monolith, edited with an Introduction by Michael Scammell, Chicago: Editions q, 1995. xxxix + 472 p p . $29.95.
Published documents from the world of bureaucracy are usually worse than boring. The secret Soviet documents collected and translated by Michael Scarnmel and published as The Solzhenitsyn Files are different. The documents, arranged in a chronological sequence, and interspersed with letters from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the Soviet authorities, cover the period from 1963 to 1980. In his letters we see Solzhenitsynfightingagainst the Soviet monolith. The letters and documents reveal the Soviet mind. We also see the extent of their concern about just one man. It is amazing that men who controlled an empire stretching from the Berlin Wall (or should we more properly say, f Helmstedt) to the Bering Strait, one o the largest land masses ever under one rule, should be so concerned, perturbed, f obsessed with the life and work o just
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one man. It suggests that for all their vaunted claims of power, they were desf perately afraid that the ideas o freedom, even when they were the thoughts o one man, might endanger what Ronald f Reagan called The Evil Empire. Truly they show themselves as The Sacred Men in The Kremlin. But one should remember Richard Weavers aphorism, ldeas have consequences. The ideas o Solzhenitsyn could not live in easy f accommodation with those that motivated the Kremlin. The Socialist-Marxist mindset is clearly shown by the way in which Soviet leaders tried to deal with t h e Solzhenitsyn menace. Almost up to the time of his expulsion, the documents reveal a state of indecision, an inability f to take action. This lack o purpose measures the moral characteristics of Socialism. The party-line mentality asserts itself as the officials try to make their f first moves through the agency o The Writers Union. They could neither understand nor grasp the possibility that writers could or should be allowed t o flourish as independent individuals. Creative writing to them was as much a f function o the socialist state as, say, running a sewage disposal plant or a concentration camp. The letters of Solzhenitsyn show us the mind o one who is keenly aware o f f his ability, and who is equally concerned about Soviet repression. He saw the necessity of having his writing published and his plays performed for the edification of people both in the Soviet Russia and in the rest of the world. In the immediate post-Stalin thaw, Solzhenitsyn did f manage to get some o his works published. He for a time held some hope o f getting others published in his homeland. But as time went on, it became apparent that his only hope was t o smuggle his manuscripts out of Russia to be published in the West, whether in f Russian or in languages o the free world.
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