1 - Counter-revolutionary thought

Summary

‘The return to order’, wrote Joseph de Maistre in 1797, in his plea for Restoration, the Considérations sur la France, ‘will not be painful, because it will be natural and because it will be favoured by a secret force whose action is wholly creative…the restoration of monarchy, what they call the counter-revolution, will not be a counter-revolution, but the contrary of revolution’ (Maistre 1994, p. 105). Maistre was fond of paradoxes, but this was not one of them. After all the ‘perpetual and desperate oscillations’ of French politics since 1789, Maistre argued for the need for stability, not commotion, peace, not violence, tranquillity not anarchy. Achieving this, he argued, necessitated a total separation from the political and intellectual methods of those who had favoured the Revolution. In place of de-Christianisation, was needed belief; in place of insurrection, obedience; in place of insubordination, sovereignty; in place of republic, the monarchy. In other words, what was needed in place of revolution was the contrary of revolution. This meant ‘no shocks, no violence, no punishment even, except those which the true nation will approve’ (Maistre 1994, p. 105). Maistre has been called a ‘fanatical’, ‘monstruous’ and ‘disturbing’ writer (Faguet 1891, p. 1; Cioran 1987; Berlin 1990, p. 57). Stendhal dubbed him the ‘hangman's friend’ because of his famous assertion, in the Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg that the executioner was the secret ‘tie’ holding human society together (quoted in Berlin 1990, p. 57). Various nineteenth-century critics accused him of terrorism, while in the twentieth century he was tainted by a supposed association with fascism. Rather than accusing his political thought of violence, however, it would be more accurate to call him a theorist who refused to imagine any political order that did not have to grapple with and contain violence and terror. ‘[W]e are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything’, he wrote in the Considérations (quoted in Spektorowski 2002, p. 287).