De Maistre was an anti-Enlightenment reactionary, who famously coined the phrase, “throne and altar” as a pledge of respect for both the monarchy and Church in his “Considerations on France,” shortly after the Revolution. This collection of fictional dialogues, probably based on real conversations de Maistre had while an ambassador to Russia, is equally conservative. He frames the discussions as between a Sardinian Count (himself), a French Chevalier (possibly Francois Gabriel de Bray), and a Russian Senator (probably Tamara). De Maistre was known as a man who bowed to tradition and authority. As such, it is no surprise that in his first dialogue he comes to the defense of the profession of state executioner, a job reviled even in his own day. He expounds, “And yet greatness, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner; he is both the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and in a moment order gives way to chaos, thrones fall, and society disappears.”
Many of the dialogues revolve around the role of religion in modernity, amidst the increasing secularization of Europe. De Maistre first speaks on theodicy and Original Sin, “The physical state of the world, which is the result of the fall and degradation of man, will not vary until some future epoch to come, which must be as general as that of which it is the result. The spiritual generation of the individual man has and can have no influence on these laws. The infant suffers even as he dies, because he belongs to a mass that must suffer and die, because he has been degraded in his principle, and in virtue of a sad law the proceeds from this, every man, because he is a man, is subject to all the evils that can afflict man. Everything leads us back to this great truth that every evil, or so to speak more clearly, all suffering, is a punishment imposed for some actual or original crime.” God’s ways may be unfathomable, but He is all powerful and worthy of all honors. “The more God seems terrible to us, the more we must redouble our religious fear of him, the more ardent and indefatigable our prayers must be, since nothing tells us that his goodness will make up for them…. There is no better course to take than that of resignation and respect, I will even say of love, for as we start from the supposition that the master exists and that it is absolutely necessary to serve him, is it not better (whatever he is) to serve him with love than without?” De Maistre also venerates the transformative role of prayer. “There is in prayer, considered only in itself, a purifying virtue whose effect is usually worth more to us than what we too often ask for in our ignorance. All legitimate prayer, even when it cannot be answered, nonetheless elevates us to higher regions.”
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a period of shifting notions of political representation and sovereign power. De Maistre was resolute. He was a defender of the concept of absolute monarchy as a rule, and was, in particular, repulsed by the execution of Louis XVI in France. De Maistre’s respect for the absolute sovereignty of the monarch was based on his reading of history as actual fact. “In theory, is anything more absurd than hereditary monarchy? We judge it by experience, but if government had never been heard of and we had to choose one, whoever would deliberate between hereditary and elective monarchy would be taken for a fool. Yet we know by experience the first is, all things considered, the best that can be imagined, while the second is the worst…. Sovereignty is always taken, never given…. The best constituted people is the one that has the fewest written constitutional laws, and every written constitution is WORTHLESS.”
De Maistre worshiped the past and the roles of custom and tradition to an extreme degree. He was also skeptical of modern science. “The ancients certainly surpassed us by the power of their minds; this point is proved by the superiority of their languages, to the extent that seems to impose silence on all the sophisms of our modern pride. By the same reason, they surpassed us in everything they had in common with us. On the other hand, their physics amounted to almost nothing, for not only did they not attach any value to physical experiments, they even distrusted them and even suspected them slightly of impiety.” He was also modest and humble in his epistemology. “I dare say that what we ought to be ignorant of is more important for us than what we ought to know…. I thank God for my ignorance even more than for my knowledge, for my knowledge is my own, as least in part, and in consequence I cannot be sure it is good, while my ignorance, on the contrary, at least that which I am speaking, is from him, and so I have all possible confidence in it.” Writing about the ancient customs of human sacrifice, De Maistre concludes with yet another defense of the concept of Original Sin, “There is nothing that demonstrates in a way more worthy of God what the human race has always confessed, even before it learned it: its radical degradation, the substitution of the merits of the innocent paying for the guilty and SALVATION BY BLOOD.”
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