Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

The fate of Joseph de Maistre is an excellent example of the fickleness of intellectual fashion. Over the last two centuries, he has been the subject of many widely disparate characterizations, some of them fairly harsh: he was called an "apologist for hangmen and war," one who "failed to shine at even a superficial level in his works" and "wrote weird, obscurantistic things."¹ But, while minor historical figures usually lose much of their charm over time, de Maistre not only continues to interest the historian of ideas in Russia as well as the West but is actually undergoing something of a revival.

While research into de Maistre's thought has followed similar paths in Russia and the West, credit for the initial development of this subject belongs to Western scholars. This should come as no surprise, as he was much better known in the West. His complete works and letters were published in Lyons in the 1870s, which raised interest in his personality and political doctrines. If at first he was "co-opted" by the Right, which tried to turn him into a "living symbol" of reaction, over time scholarly objectivity came into its own. De Maistre, an unusual and extraordinary intellect, cannot be reduced to his own extreme conservatism. Everything about him was intriguing: his political passions and philosophical aloofness, his ultramontanism and Masonic past, his Christianity and reflections on the problem of violence. His biography itself fascinated, touching as it did both Europe and Russia, as well as the great writers, statesmen, and monarchs of the Napoleonic era. [End Page 349]

In Russia, de Maistre was less well known as a thinker and historical figure, despite the significant traces he left here, whether in our history (he helped bring about the dismissal of Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii, the greatest reformer of Alexander I's era) or our national symbols (at Alexander's behest, he selected the winning design for the magnificent monument to Minin and Pozharskii that graces Red Square). Yet we developed no tradition of translating his works—causing considerable problems for present-day translators—or of studying him historically. Spurts of episodic interest, however, did manifest themselves from time to time. The few (albeit often quite successful) works that did appear failed to build on one another. Each author decided arbitrarily which Western experts on de Maistre to use as sources of information, so alongside such well-known scholars as François Vermale one found serendipitous and obscure sources.

For its part, the West was similarly indifferent to Russian scholarship; of the works available (mostly essays and articles), only one appeared in Western bibliographies: the remarkable 1937 article on de Maistre from Literaturnoe nasledstvo. Thus, the Western and the Russian research trajectories hardly ever intersected. Only in the last few years have our Western colleagues become interested in the limited work that has been done in Russia, while Russian historians have only recently gained the freedom to study a conservative like de Maistre without worrying about state security, as well as the opportunity to familiarize themselves with Western scholarship. Unfortunately, the Western scholarship on Joseph de Maistre found in Russian libraries is limited to works published by the late 1960s. Unless one has direct connections with Western experts, it remains difficult to obtain current publications on this subject. The essay collections published by the research center in Chambéry and the books and articles of major specialists remain equally inaccessible. This makes all the more welcome the appearance of two scholarly works of a general nature that present the work of several well-known specialists and research centers.

It has been a while since any general scholarly compilation on this subject has appeared in the West. This has to do with the upheavals of the 1930s and the 1940s, which made research on de Maistre an act of political "revisionism": his image was darkened by the shadow of the Action française, even though Charles Maurras, the ideologue of the French Right, refused to acknowledge de Maistre as one of his intellectual antecedents. This did not preclude all research, but it took time before a sympathetic interest in de Maistre, who came under severe criticism after the war, once again seemed acceptable.

After the excesses of the 1930s and the 1940s, anything associated with political extremism became subject to ethical reexamination. Accordingly, the political doctrines de Maistre develops in Considérations sur la France, Du pape, and Lettres à un gentilhomme russe, sur l'inquisition espagnole raise questions: had the experience of revolutionary turmoil made him interested in the problem of violence, or was he just a misanthrope? Scholars have searched for the key to de Maistre's historical and philosophical ideas in his biography. [End Page 350]

A good example of such an approach is Robert Triomphe.² Triomphe connects de Maistre's religious, philosophical, and political doctrines to his life and produces a devastating critique of both his personal characteristics and his motives. Triomphe's book is not easy to assess, however, for his desire to shed light on the facts is often stymied by a rush to interpretation and blindness to alternate possibilities.

Triomphe shatters the idealized portrait of the philosopher left to posterity by his children, especially his younger daughter Constance.³ The legend of de Maistre as a veritable saint, the faithful servant of the king, prepared selflessly to suffer any hardships for his sovereign's sake, loses much of its heroic glow as Triomphe recreates the more prosaic details of de Maistre's career, revealing his protagonist's human frailties and weaknesses. Out of the debris of the older black-and-white portrait, Triomphe creates another: that of an "adventurer" in the service of various monarchs, an informer, ambitious careerist, hypocrite, and "voluntary exile," who was derelict in his family obligations and generally reminiscent of Tartuffe.⁴ A moral distaste for his subject, doubtless sincere, often sets the tone for Triomphe's book.

The sources and archival research all seem to confirm the unsavory personal aspects of Joseph de Maistre, automatically casting a shadow on his doctrine of philosophical historicism as well. Triomphe's book seemed so convincing that when it appeared, there was nothing more to be said. The final blow came from Isaiah Berlin,⁵ who declared de Maistre to have been one of the precursors of fascism. Yet does a similarity in their logic, however compelling, justify historical reductionism? Even Maurras, who led the Action française and echoed elements of de Maistre's doctrine, never crossed the line from the radical Right to fascism, held back from this final step in his political evolution by monarchism and Catholicism. How much more difficult it is to see the 18th-century legitimist and ultramontane de Maistre being taken in by a uniformed rabble and its leaders, when he would not even recognize Napoleon Bonaparte as a sovereign. Comparative approaches often make sense in political science, but in de Maistre's case, a real historical personality has become a "symbolic challenge" for discussions of complex problems of political philosophy, not an independent object of historical research.

Although the prevailing atmosphere thus did not favor sympathetic treatments of de Maistre, Emile Cioran made him the subject of an essay that [End Page 351] was profound, rich, and unusual in its tone and inadvertently rehabilitated the philosopher.⁶ Cioran seeks to understand de Maistre without resorting to political analogies, by reconstructing his thought processes and the mental climate of his times. This method was followed cautiously, with an awareness of its limitations. In Cioran's interpretation, de Maistre appears as one of the first thinkers to understand the French Revolution not simply as an unfortunate episode, a mistake, or even a series of incidents, but rather as the beginning of a new age. While incapable of loving it, he did try to understand it; rather than a banal counterrevolutionary, he was a sociologically aware observer.

As for the interest in de Maistre in our own day, it seems linked to his philosophical views. His conservative emphasis on the qualitative peculiarity and uniqueness of historically evolved organisms did not go unnoticed once globalization came into conflict with the defenders of national tradition. Indeed, de Maistre was among the first to argue that pursuing universality must diminish a society's inner resources. His analysis of the political events of his day also has appeal—it is clear, profound, and, at times, surprisingly relevant to the present, and contrasts with the retrospective tone of his political doctrine. Viewed from the perspective of a century that attempted all manner of rationalist experiments, this admission is far more compelling than were the panegyrics of his 19th-century apologists, who valued him mainly for the firmness of his conservatism.

In Russia, there are other reasons, too, for the phenomenal popularity of de Maistre as a subject in the past few years. First, it reflects a desire to make up for what we have missed, since this was long a semi-forbidden research topic. Now it seems almost droll that a philosopher of the Napoleonic era should be a "secret enemy" of the monarchistic and the revolutionary camp and the Soviet regime as well. The monarchy had good reasons to dislike de Maistre: as a Catholic and friend of the Jesuits, he became persona non grata after the Congress of Vienna and was hurriedly, though with all due formality, escorted out of Russia. From then on, his name was conveniently forgotten in court circles, even though a confidant of the tsar, Aleksandr Skarlatovich Sturdza, characterized him as the most prominent personage in Petersburg during the reign of Alexander I.⁷ [End Page 352]

As for revolutionaries and supporters of the democratic camp, they had little time for the fine points of the conservative style of thinking; de Maistre's ideological position clearly made him a political enemy who deserved no mercy. It is difficult to say whether those who "unmasked" him felt at least a little uneasy about how they roasted him in the pages of Nekrasov's journal Sovremennik.⁸ In any case, the article's verbosity and shrill tone suggest that the accusations of mediocrity and amorality leveled at de Maistre were unfounded but may have sustained their authors' own revolutionary spirit at a time when the ground was slipping from beneath their feet. Yet there were exceptions. Among those Russian writers and thinkers who showed an interest in de Maistre was Petr Berngardovich Struve, a sometime representative of Legal Marxism. In a work written during his émigré years, "Prorochestva o russkoi revoliutsii" (Prophecies of the Russian Revolution),⁹ Struve quotes excerpts from Quatre chapitres inédits sur la Russie where de Maistre predicts the coming of a "university-educated Pugachev" and a "conflagration that may consume Russia," and gives de Maistre his due for his powers of observation. Struve's voice was, however, unlikely to change the Russian Left's generally negative attitude toward de Maistre, especially since these lines in de Maistre's defense appeared when Struve was already living abroad. One person who particularly shared Struve's attitude towards de Maistre was a fellow exile with a similar democratic past, the religious philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, who also wrote an article characterizing de Maistre as a profound thinker with a mystical religious inclination.¹⁰

Hardly any works were dedicated specifically to de Maistre in Russia before 1917. Usually, he simply appeared as the protagonist in episodes associated with the Catholic diaspora of St. Petersburg. He flits across the pages of Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovskii's book about Alexander I¹¹ and draws just slightly more interest from Mikhail Iakovlevich Moroshkin, an Orthodox priest who wrote a history of the Jesuit Order in Russia.¹² Moroshkin was interested in de Maistre's ties to the order, focusing on his Cinq lettres sur l'instruction publique en Russie to Count Aleksei Razumovskii, which defended the Jesuit boarding [End Page 353] schools against the threat of control by the universities under Speranskii's reform plans. This Orthodox priest's overall attitude of qualified reserve toward the Jesuits did not extend to such extraordinary individuals as Gabriel Gruber; while his feelings about de Maistre were cooler, Moroshkin nevertheless noted the Savoyard diplomat's extraordinary political talents.

Exceptions to the pattern are an article by Aleksandr Savvin and an essay by the well-known Russian legal scholar and liberal thinker Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin. Both give an overview of de Maistre's fundamental writings and main political ideas. The outstanding characteristic of Savvin's piece is his even-handedness; his aim—unlike that of Sovremennik—was to give his readers a general idea of this thinker, who by then was insufficiently known in Russia.¹³ Savvin drew attention to the complexity of de Maistre's philosophy and presented conflicting Western interpretations of his legacy. Chicherin went beyond summarizing de Maistre and tried to show the contradictions in the political doctrine he had developed in Du pape, but this did not affect his attentive and open-minded attitude toward the French philosopher.¹⁴

All in all, de Maistre remained a writer for the select few in Russia, although the inclusion among his readers of Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev, Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, and Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii did much to compensate for his relative lack of popularity among the educated reading public as a whole.

How the Soviet government formed its attitude toward de Maistre is even more curious. It was enough that the Marxist classics, which had a grudging respect for him, labeled him a "dyed-in-the-wool [makhrovyi ] conservative" in a fit of wrath tinged with admiration, to assure him a place on the list of authors hostile to the Soviet state and hence of no interest to scholars. From that point on, "dyed-in-the-wool" conservatism was associated in the USSR with his name, but only if one had a certain degree of education. Otherwise, de Maistre was totally unknown. Suddenly, the unexpected happened: in 1937, a scholarly article on the Russian period of de Maistre's life, by one "M. Stepanov," appeared in Literaturnoe nasledstvo. It was a solid piece, based on rich archival research. The juxtaposition of the article's topic and its date of publication can only elicit wonder from anyone who knows Russian history. Equally mysterious was the figure of "M. Stepanov," listed as author along with the French scholar François Vermale. The solution is fairly simple. The article fit the formal criteria for the scholarly series Russkaia kul´tura i Frantsiia (Russian Culture and France), and its high technical quality made it a scholarly edition in the spirit of Stalinist Neoclassicism; but the real author, the historian Andrei Nikolaevich Shebunin, [End Page 354] had been sent to a camp before the piece even came out. He had been charged with daring to write about de Maistre without prior permission from the Central Committee. While the people of the Central Committee, who were certainly no historians, were still trying to clarify how harmful this scholar was and how grave a threat de Maistre posed, Shebunin's fate was decided on the spot. Meanwhile, his colleagues took advantage of the leadership's hesitation and published the article under a pseudonym.¹⁵ There was no repeat performance of this sort of research until perestroika. To this day, Shebunin's article remains the most comprehensive investigation of de Maistre's time as an émigré in Russia, while its prose could serve as a model for the younger generation of Russian historians.

It should come as no surprise that a vacuum opened up once the opportunity to speak and write about this topic, and others like it, appeared in Russia. More time needed to pass before it became clear both what to say and how to say it. The mangled, politicized language of old-style Soviet academic writing was ill-suited for philosophical and theological studies. Scholars who dared to tackle de Maistre preferred to do so in the "smaller" genres of essay and article. One of the earliest works was an article by S. S. Khoruzhii, who compared de Maistre's historical and philosophical views to those of the Russian historian Lev Platonovich Karsavin.¹⁶ Khoruzhii was struck by the similarities in the two thinkers' understanding of revolutionary events. Providentialism and "the force of circumstances"—these elements could be found, in modified form, in the writings of the Russian historian and philosopher.

Research by political scientists on conservatism was, in the first instance, synoptic, but quite worthwhile nevertheless because beginnings are important. For example, an article by Mariia Mikhailovna Fedorova examined traditionalist thinkers through the prism of Karl Mannheim's methodology.¹⁷ Several years ago, to state in Russia the now almost universally accepted notion that French conservatism carried a strong anti-rationalist bias and was in many ways a reaction to the whole intellectual culture of the Enlightenment was no trivial matter. Among those whose views Fedorova analyzed was de Maistre.

Next came the period of translations. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Considérations sur la France, Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, and de Maistre's letters to Sardinia from St. Petersburg were all published in translation. Of course, de Maistre could not compete with Michel Foucault in this regard, but the fact that such wonderful translators as A. A. Vasil´ev and A. G. Terekhova have taken on the task is reason to hope that the translations will be worthy of the author. [End Page 355]

Recently, the de Maistre bibliography has been graced with several new additions. These include a book by the French scholar Bastien Miquel and a collection of articles on de Maistre written by Western specialists from the universities of Paris, Nebraska, Wales, Manitoba, Oxford, and elsewhere. The first is a biography that includes the Russian period of de Maistre's emigration. The second is the result of many years of hard work by the Institut d'études maistriennes at the University of Savoy in Chambéry, other major academic centers, and the Eighteenth-Century Congress. A pleasant surprise for everyone interested in de Maistre in Russia was the inclusion of Vera Arkad´evna Miltchyna, a well-known translator, editor, and author of articles on French culture. These two very different treatments of our topic turn out to have certain points in common.

What connects these books is not only their subject but their attitude. The tone of judicious calm keeps the reader from getting drawn into ideological polemics. Nothing distracts the reader from the substance, but this does not diminish their expressiveness. Bastien Miquel's book reads, for all practical purposes, like a novel, while the collection edited by Richard A. Lebrun is so rich in interesting material that I regret only being unable to review each and every one of its chapters.

What first strikes the reader of Bastien Miquel's book is how free it is from the burdens of recent ideological strife. While this can lead to a simplistic approach to the topic, it has the advantage of creating an immediacy and lively interest in the subject that carry over to the reader.

Miquel avoids certain topics that interested Triomphe, such as de Maistre's aristocratic origins or his true feelings for his wife; in general, he avoids making judgments about de Maistre's sincerity. Instead, Miquel dwells in much greater detail on his childhood and youth—in other words, the chapter of de Maistre's life that received only perfunctory treatment in Triomphe's book. The portrait of Françoise de Morand, and the whole history of their courtship, is treated in a much more interesting and lively fashion in Miquel's book. Miquel brings the reader into his protagonist's domestic circle, so that subsequent events are experienced not as a chronological schema but as the story of real people who were scattered all over the world and sought solace in a spiritual bond that meant much more to them than de Maistre's worldly success as a political advisor and author.

As for de Maistre's Russian odyssey, here Miquel probably adds nothing new to Shebunin's article, but the book's value for the non-Russian reader lies less in its novelty than in its exhaustive completeness. The list of all de Maistre's Russian acquaintances and the explanation of the Petersburg historical setting make this a good source for non-Russians. The author attempts to see the city through the eyes of his protagonist; and this glance, flitting from object to object, returns time and again to the figure of Peter I. The equestrian statue of the reforming tsar becomes the symbol of the city, its government, even Russia itself. The hand of the monarch, outstretched in a gesture that could be either protective [End Page 356] or threatening, embodies the autocracy's dual character, able to bring the most fantastic projects to fruition but also to crush any attempt at disobedience.

Miquel explores the rise of de Maistre's diplomatic star in St. Petersburg, from the house of Duke Antonio de Serra-Capriola to the royal study of Alexander I himself. While Miquel's predecessors also touched on these stages of his career, the present volume is valuable for its appraisal of de Maistre as a diplomat. The author stresses that he came to Petersburg with the practically impossible assignment of representing a king without a country, but not only did he successfully assert his diplomatic status; he managed, thanks to his influence at the Russian court, to obtain Russian financial and military aid for Sardinia. In Triomphe's depiction, by contrast, the difficulties de Maistre experienced were portrayed almost as excuses, meant to prop up his attempts to garner further aid.

Occasionally, Miquel turns from biography to de Maistre's philosophical system. He contextualizes it by linking de Maistre's biography with the formation of his religious and philosophical views. For example, the appearance of his major philosophical and religious tracts during his stay in St. Petersburg was not serendipitous, since this alien and unwelcoming city brought on thoughts of the "earthly haven" that he was ultimately to find in the Catholic Church. Miquel's book is characterized by a felicitous combination of scholarship and liveliness that make it accessible not only to specialists but to anyone interested in 18th- and early 19th-century history. His sympathy for his protagonist and his lack of shrillness will appeal to readers with no previous knowledge of the subject, while specialists may be pleasantly reminded of what interested them in the story of this unusual life in the first place.

Unlike Miquel's study, the collection of essays edited by Richard A. Lebrun is not written in a biographical format, although it is partly arranged in chronological order. Most of the articles focus on unsolved or under-researched aspects of de Maistre's life and thought, or else present new interpretations of already established facts, and they clearly take issue with Robert Triomphe. The collection is organized in four thematic blocks: (1) de Maistre's biography; (2) his philosophical and political thought; (3) the impact of his ideas in Great Britain, America, and Russia; and (4) a comparative section in which he is juxtaposed with such thinkers as Edmund Burke, Louis de Bonald, and Carl Schmitt.

The biographical section consists of articles by Jean-Louis Darcel, who focuses on the Russian period of de Maistre's emigration (1792-1817). The chronology of this period has been known for some time, but Darcel revisits some of the conclusions reached by Triomphe. These include Triomphe's claim that de Maistre joined the "conservative" camp after having been a quasi-Jacobin, and that "the brutality of his [anti-revolutionary] reaction, according to Robert Triomphe, ... had the violent character of an abjuration" motivated by "fear in the face of the Revolution's 'skid' " (34); that a series of setbacks in his career was due to the Sardinian kings' antipathy to him; and that he exaggerated his personal influence [End Page 357] and diplomatic successes in St. Petersburg in hopes of obtaining more generous compensation for his services to the House of Savoy.

A detailed analysis of the facts allows Darcel to conclude that these conclusions were premature. The myth that de Maistre migrated from the Left to the far Right, which is based on his membership in a Masonic lodge and his youthful musings about the inadequacies of the Sardinian government, "has seduced some by its romanticism, and others because it fits the grid of the Marxist reading of class antagonism" (34). Yet Freemasonry came in many political colors, and one could criticize the regime from perspectives that were not leftist. A careful study of de Maistre's Masonic milieu and a close reading of his recommendations in "L'Éloge de Victor-Amadée III" show that he did not change his political position during the Revolution. His well-known admission that Burke only "strengthened his anti-democratic and anti-Gallican notions," but did not "convert" him, confirms this. Darcel argues that de Maistre's critical attitude toward the Sardinian monarchy was prompted by its tendency to centralize power, thereby disrupting the traditional balance among nobility, clergy, and magistrates that undergirded the stability of the state as a whole, including the monarchy. Thus de Maistre acted more as a traditionalist than as an advocate of Enlightenment-inspired representative government. Darcel's conclusion is strengthened by the fact that de Maistre initially welcomed the convocation of the Estates-General on the eve of the Revolution because he thought it would restore France's traditional constitutional order.

Darcel emphasizes the weight de Maistre gave to Fénelon, the author of Télémaque: his ideal vision of social harmony, guaranteed by a virtuous monarch, became an integral part of the political project that de Maistre presented in his Considérations sur la France. In Darcel's view, the book was meant to convey de Maistre's thoughts on the reasons for the monarchy's fall. Besides the religious and philosophical component, his view of the Revolution also included a perfectly down-to-earth angle that stressed the monarchy's mistakes, chief among them the destruction of the balance of power between the nobility and the Third Estate that had given rise to absolutism and "created a gap between monarch and subjects, between government and governed, which translated itself, when faced with a crisis, into equally deadly alternatives: inaction or repression" (36-37). Darcel thus demonstrates the possibility of a qualitatively different interpretation of de Maistre's political views prior to the Revolution of 1789.

Another important topic is de Maistre's relationship with the Sardinian monarchy. Darcel focuses on the view that the representatives of the House of Savoy deliberately impeded de Maistre's career because they disliked or distrusted him; instead, Darcel notes that there were many objective reasons for de Maistre's slow career start. "The states of the House of Savoy," he writes, "were an artificial and disparate construction in the history of monarchical Europe that would necessarily be stressed by the revolutionary upheaval" (48); [End Page 358] this complex political situation formed the background for the different stages of de Maistre's career.

By comparing the personal qualifications of the cohort of his fellow officials with their rate of advancement to the position of senator, Darcel determines why de Maistre had to wait longer than others for his senatorial seat—he was significantly younger than many others in the corps of magistrates. "If the royal authority wanted to impose a long trial period on a brilliant and gifted, but young and impulsive subject," Darcel argues, "this is after all the mark of a wise and prudent government." The king wished to avoid an atmosphere of discontent and intrigue that might undermine the institution itself. De Maistre's impatience, though "natural," did not mean that he was "the particular object of disfavor.... Let us not forget that he was among the youngest senators ever named" (52).

Investigating de Maistre's career during his Russian exile, Darcel points out what, specifically, impeded his progress: his involvement in factional struggles at the Sardinian court. In a period of revolutionary crisis, the supporters of authoritarian rule won the day over the supporters of legalism, who included de Maistre; and while King Victor Emmanuel I personally sympathized with him, he felt that in these difficult times, the army rather than the magistrates would save the day. Even so, the Sardinian monarch continued to support his protégé. Darcel and Triomphe also offer fundamentally different interpretations of de Maistre's posting as ambassador to Russia. Triomphe assumes that the court preferred him to be as far away as possible and to rid themselves of him at the first opportunity. Darcel, by contrast, argues that the assignment to St. Petersburg carried responsibility and prestige despite the inconvenience: in terms of diplomatic priority for Sardinia, St. Petersburg was second only to London.

He also sees the results of de Maistre's stay in St. Petersburg differently from Triomphe. He underscores that not only did de Maistre fulfill his obligations as ambassador, but "his high moral qualities and the rectitude of his life, the friendships that linked him to several families, and finally the homages rendered to his talents as scholar, orator, writer, and controversionalist, all made his stay as happy as it could be" (23). On this point, Darcel's view coincides with that of Bastien Miquel. Darcel's argument is compelling, for it would be difficult to accuse a man of amorality who was prepared, in the interest of reestablishing the order in which he believed, to serve the institution of monarchy wherever he found himself, and yet refused to enter Russian service even at the pinnacle of his career in Russia. This was a risky decision, but apparently one a person of his caliber could not forgo. As for the requests for more pay, they seem fully justified considering that St. Petersburg had Europe's highest cost of living.

Darcel discusses de Maistre's ideas in the section of the book on religious and political philosophy. He frees his subject from a whole train of colorful and conflicting interpretations, instead foregrounding his uniquely synthetic style, which makes it impossible to identify him unequivocally with any one ideological current. Surveying de Maistre's works from different periods, Darcel shows that [End Page 359] he combined providentialism with Masonic mysticism. Traces of Masonic metaphors appear not only with the allegorical figure of the "Eternal Architect" in Considérations sur la France and the Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines but also in his later and profoundly ultramontane work Du pape, with its image of the "Celestial City."

As he discusses this most difficult, controversial, and provocative book by Joseph de Maistre, Darcel protests against the anachronistic tendency to modernize it by reading it as legitimizing unrestricted or totalitarian rule. De Maistre presented a conservative utopia in Du pape whose nucleus, far from being absolutism, was "a Europe of regenerated monarchies, absolute in law, but in fact limited by the delegated powers of constituted bodies, under the spiritual magistracy of the pope as guarantor of 'the divine character of sovereignty' and of 'the legitimate liberty of men' " (129). Darcel thus argues that de Maistre's political ideals reflected the specific early 19th-century European conditions that made a conservative utopia a source of comfort for a supporter of the ancien régime.

As Darcel sees it, de Maistre "was neither an ideologue of absolutism" nor a " 'mystical materialist' (Robert Triomphe)," neither " 'a prophet of the past' ([Pierre-Simon] Ballanche)" nor " 'a terrifying prophet of our time' (Isaiah Berlin)." Instead, he was a "cosmopolitan in search of a unity that was impossible to find," who "escaped to the frontiers at the moment when these were in ferment and when the nation was becoming the supreme social, political, and moral value." Like Emile Cioran, Darcel allows de Maistre the privilege of being more complex than a simplistic label: "Escaping to the frontiers, he partially escapes classifications" (31).

The section of the book on de Maistre's theoretical views is quite unusual in that it examines not only his religious, philosophical, and political thought but also his economic and sociological ideas. Jean Denizet's analysis of de Maistre's views on economics in some ways contradicts Darcel's central thesis that de Maistre never underwent a transformation from liberal to conservative. Or perhaps it provides a corrective by explaining that de Maistre's economic theories were a niche for liberal ideas. Denizet argues that de Maistre, at least in the first half of his life, was a proponent of integral economic liberalism and a foe of government intervention in the market. Denizet sees this manifested in one of de Maistre's most famous aphorisms, that "the best government for each nation is that one which, in the area of land occupied by that nation, is capable of procuring the greatest possible sum of happiness and power, to the greatest number of men, during the longest possible time" (31).

Denizet assumes that his liberal economic tastes caused de Maistre to praise the traditional French monarchy as "this happy mixture of enlightenment, freedom, and sensibility." But what was he to think of the absolutism of Louis XVI, in which there was no longer an independent nobility, no more representation for public opinion, and none of the relative freedom of provinces, cities, and trades? De Maistre never approved of centralized power. Darcel and [End Page 360] Denizet agree that de Maistre was no defender of absolutism, but for different reasons: Darcel sees de Maistre's critical attitude toward centralization as traditional in its origins, whereas Denizet links it to a liberalism that looks to tradition for support and legitimacy. In any case, Denizet argues that de Maistre's economic views were just as liberal in 1785, if not more so, as earlier in "L'Éloge de Victor-Amadée III": by this time, he took the view that "to reproach a man for relating everything to himself, is to reproach him for being a man" (88). According to Denizet, an interest in the nature of man and his unique qualities made him sympathetic to Necker, who was hated by most royalists. Necker had many things in common with de Maistre: both instinctively abhorred any theory arising out of ideology instead of the real world; and both were practical pragmatists and champions of the concrete individual, who often falls victim to reforms driven by abstract principles.

Like Jean-Louis Darcel, Jean Denizet notes the complexity of de Maistre's ideas. In Denizet's view, the contradictions in his subject's economic ideas are apparent in de Maistre's "principle of natural development" that rejects dirigisme in favor of a spontaneously generated order and is difficult to reconcile with his traditionally Christian view of man as a divided creature who, wavering between good and evil and predisposed to the latter, requires supervision and control. Denizet thus reveals de Maistre's characteristic inconsistency as an advocate of economic liberalism who nevertheless denied the notion, fundamental to liberalism, of the sovereignty of individuals and their ability and right to be free.

The sections on de Maistre's theory of sacrifice and language theory are also very successful and show him to have been a precursor of modern sociology. Owen Bradley argues that, clichés notwithstanding, de Maistre was not a thinker who extolled violence. Instead, he was among the first philosophers to propose a theory of ritual sacrifice that drew on a comparative study of world religious practices. In Bradley's opinion, he was more sociologist than theologian, as he tended to discuss ritual sacrifice as social practice rather than as a religious deed: "His essential concern is everywhere with how sacrifical rituals are performed, with how they address, frame, and handle the sacred, and with the human causes and effects of sacrifice. His essay must therefore be seen as a very early example of what was to become the sociology of religion" (69). Bradley shows that de Maistre disagreed with the notion that human sacrifice had originated in the legal practice of executing criminals; a transformation of that sort had occurred later, but originally the sacrificial victim was chosen from among the innocent, since his function was to replace them; this was precisely the victim's value. Decoding the symbolic meaning of ritual sacrifice allowed de Maistre to understand better the meaning of so complex a construct as the Christian concept of sacrifice, which is also based on the principle of substituting the innocent for the guilty. Of course, in Christian practice the sacrifice is transformed into something symbolic and nonviolent; ritual killing is replaced by personal asceticism as a means of purification; and the act of sacrificing becomes voluntary self-restraint. [End Page 361]

Bradley effectively links de Maistre's theory of sacrifice with his views on war, thereby providing an explanation for one of his strangest and most provocative maxims: "War is divine." De Maistre sees war as resulting from a nation's unredeemed crimes. In Bradley's view, he calls war "divine" not to sing its praises but because "he is referring to the sacrificial economy that places disorder and transgression within a higher ritualized order" (78). He shows that although de Maistre always wavered between the roles of theologian and sociologist, the theoretical significance of his conception lies in the link between the practice of ritual sacrifice and the forms, significance, and limits of violence in society.

A chapter by Benjamin Thurston links de Maistre's theory of language with the popularity in the 18th century of the idea of inventing a universal language of mathematical simplicity and with the overwhelming dominance of French, which many of his contemporaries associated with Republicanism. De Maistre was one of the first to offer a sociological evaluation of the French language, which had become a "living agent of change." He observed that revolutionary ideas spread precisely because they were promoted in the language of culture and international communication. At the same time, like Antoine de Rivarol, de Maistre established a link between a language's development and its political context, including the "projective" qualities of speech that enable it to integrate neologisms and meaningless ideological formulae and thus contribute to their legitimization. As a kind of marker of social phenomena, language reflected fairly precisely the meaning of what went on in a society; the language of political rationalism was therefore a mechanistic, dry, algorithmic jargon whose underlying abstraction made it intolerant of the irregularities and singularities of the real world. Thurston, like Bradley, thus builds on Emile Cioran's ideas about the sociological character of de Maistre's thought.

The section's concluding article, "Joseph de Maistre's Catholic Philosophy of Authority" by Jean-Yves Pranchère, examines the function of religion in de Maistre's political thought. Pranchère seeks to reconstruct the logic that led de Maistre to link religious and secular authority together so tightly that the two types of power are conceptualized in Du pape as identical or parallel; therefore, the concept of sovereignty becomes the focus of the analysis. Pranchère shows the similarities between the conceptions of sovereignty of de Maistre and his intellectual forefather Jean Bodin: both defined sovereign power as absolute because, by definition, it knows no restrictions or boundaries, has the exclusive right to make decisions, and is sufficient unto itself.

The reader is thus embroiled in the problem of defining the concept of sovereignty. Philosophical dictionaries define Bodin's use of the term to mean not only the supreme, inalienable, and perpetual authority of the state but also a power that cannot be reduced to those who hold it. A careful reading of Bodin's texts, however, suggests otherwise—he does not conceive of sovereignty independently of its embodiment, and more generally does not distinguish between sovereignty and the power of the sovereign. He has a different concern: [End Page 362] to clarify the difference between a truly sovereign ruler and one who merely usesdelegated authority. The difference is defined precisely by the prerogative of making life-and-death decisions. Pranchère demonstrates that de Maistre follows in the logical tradition of Bodin; even though Du pape contains the claim that two forces, the monarchy and the people, participate in the exercise of sovereignty, its internal logic nevertheless presumes the identity of sovereign and sovereignty, and the singularity of the latter. Consequently, only monarchy can be sovereign. This also explains de Maistre's assertion that no supreme authority can be deemed unjust, since in practice there is no difference between being wrong and being right if one is immune from prosecution.

Hence the idea of the infallibility of the papacy, which is a sovereign power—otherwise, church unity would be impossible—and defined as immune from prosecution and therefore from mistakes. Pranchère shows Du pape to be logically consistent: in both the secular and spiritual realms, power is conceivable only in monarchical form and in the singular, and giving up any of its power results in the destruction of authority as such and threatens political order itself. The article also elegantly analyzes de Maistre's attitude toward Rousseau. Pranchère notes that in his polemics against the author of The Social Contract, de Maistre misses no opportunity to attack Rousseau with his own arguments and carries Rousseau's notion that a sovereign power cannot be limited in its actions to its logical conclusion. At the same time, Pranchère demonstrates that de Maistre's systematic defense of the monarchical principle did not mean that monarchy should be despotic: "the absolute monarch himself is subject to the law, since he holds his absolute right from the constitutional laws of the realm ... ; the absolute right of the sovereign cannot abolish the laws that found him as an absolute right" (136-37). His concept of the relationship between secular and spiritual power, however, extends beyond establishing their similarities and kinship. If the rights of the sovereign flow from a state's historical constitution, then the political order and the choice of dynasty are prerogatives of the divine; this is what allows Pranchère to characterize de Maistre's political conception as "radical historicism" (150).

De Maistre's idea of the infallibility of sovereigntyappears more than once in this book, particularly in excellent comparative studies by several authors. Thus Greame Garrard writes on de Maistre and Carl Schmitt, who "credited Maistre with realizing that the moment of 'decision' lies at the heart of 'the political' " (223); Lebrun, in his article on Edmund Burke and de Maistre, also notes that "both stressed the absolute, unitary nature of sovereignty, believed that sovereign power, by definition, was unaccountable to any higher body" (164); and Jay Reedy, in "De Maistre's Twin? Louis de Bonald and the Enlightenment," analyzes specific devices used to create a traditionalist discourse.

Unfortunately, space does not permit a substantive overview of each of these wonderful essays, but a few general remarks are in order. Lebrun and Reedy agree in their obvious preference for de Maistre over his contemporaries [End Page 363] Burke and Bonald. The reason for this preference lies in the originality of de Maistre's thought and in its synthetic character, which allows it to combine Enlightenment culture with a critique of political rationalism, Catholic doctrine with mysticism, respect for British tradition with horror at Jacobin policy and love for France. The central element in this view of events, according to both historians, is providentialism; by comparison, Burke's and Bonald's arguments seem more "empirical" or "utilitarian," or, in Leibniz's terms, "'scientistic" (165, 179). Their arguments leave no room for the mysterious, the unknowable, the inexplicable, whereas de Maistre willingly acknowledges limits to human understanding. Far from being a sign of weakness or coquetry, this is what gives his thinking its greater plasticity, its more sociological quality emphasizing the "knowing" subject, and ultimately its greater relevance to the present day. Reedy's metaphor is apt when he suggests that Bonald is closer to structuralism, while de Maistre is more of a post-structuralist (179).

Garrard's comparison of de Maistre with Carl Schmitt is interesting because his conclusion is so unexpected. Considering that Schmitt's views evolved from monarchism toward democracy as embodying the unity of the rulers and the ruled, while de Maistre uncompromisingly opposed it as a form of anarchy, one might have expected Garrard to treat de Maistre's political views more harshly than Schmitt's. Garrard notes, however, that Schmitt's alleged democratic principles were inspired by a quite Hobbesian "decisionism." Following the internal logic of "voluntarism," Schmitt frees the political will from morality, whereas de Maistre's inclusion of the spiritual realm in the idea of the infallibility of sovereignty results in a strict subordination of political decisions to Christian morality. From this flows the difference in levels of political tolerance in the two thinkers. For example, Schmitt justifies antisemitism, while Garrard shows that de Maistre was no antisemite. Schmitt valued de Maistre for his "realism," meaning his ability to analyze the political sociologically, but de Maistre's providentialism and ultramontanism made him much less of a realist than Schmitt imagined (237-38).

The section on the dissemination and reception of de Maistre's ideas includes further essays by Lebrun and Pranchère. Lebrun surveys the studies on de Maistre and the reception of his ideas in the Anglophone world, reviewing a spectrum of opinions that range from the extremely critical (depicting him as a defender of the Spanish Inquisition and an apologist for archaic institutions) to the more contemporary views discussed in the present volume. The final article by Pranchère is distinguished by his innovative argument that comparing de Maistre with modern-day thinkers, though appealing, is ultimately fruitless, because historical truth often suffers in the rush to sensationalism and de Maistre ends up being held responsible for the appearance of an improbable variety of thinkers, from Charles Maurras and Nietzsche to Friedrich Hayek and the postmodernists (299).

A milestone for de Maistre studies in Russia is the chapter by Vera Miltchyna on the reception of his work in Russia, which should interest his biographers, [End Page 364] specialists in the history of Franco-Russian relations, and the general reader. Miltchyna's format is highly unusual by the standards of Russian historical scholarship: there is no lengthy introduction on de Maistre's biography, his contemporaries, or the peculiar circumstances of his Russian sojourn. Instead, the essay investigates more concretely de Maistre's influence in Russia and finds traces of his presence in the works of well-known Russian writers, poets, and political theorists.

From the beginning, Miltchyna attempts to highlight the most often cited opinions, maxims, and images in Russian cultural discourse that can be traced back to de Maistre. The most common ones carry the imprint of fatalism. The most likely explanation for this is that in Russia, where politics was the privilege of the few, submission to fate and the established order trained one's eye to seek out anything that might justify or ameliorate everyday reality. For his Russian admirers, de Maistre's famous notion that "every nation has the government it deserves" came to be embodied in the figure of the executioner, that symbol of an unchangeable political order.

Miltchyna rounds out her discussion of de Maistre's Petersburg friends and professional acquaintances by examining who his Russian readers were. The Russians he touched include quite disparate personalities: the future Decembrist General Mikhail Orlov; Nikolai Karamzin, the official historian, monarchist, and advocate of a strong state; and the Turgenev brothers, Aleksandr, Sergei, and Nikolai, of whom the eldest headed the government's Department of Religious Affairs of Foreign Faiths, the second was a well-known proponent of Orthodoxy, and the youngest was a liberal who advocated freeing the serfs. They all found food for thought in de Maistre, and not only in the negative sense. Even those who opposed his religious or political views respected his intelligence and incisiveness and emulated his style, mode of reasoning, and zest for promoting his own ideas and projects.

In addition to those who read him virtually before the ink was dry, Miltchyna presents a diffuse portrait gallery of writers and journalists whom de Maistre influenced after his death. Most of these names had already appeared in Shebunin's article, but his piece's historical nature prevented him from paying proper attention to this topic. Shebunin only marked it as a subject for further investigation, while Miltchyna has carried out a thorough, comparative analysis of the texts.

Among those who felt de Maistre's influence most strongly were Chaadaev (whom Miltchyna calls the "Russian de Maistre No. 1"), Tiutchev, and Dos to evskii. De Maistre made such a strong impression on Chaadaev that some of his dictums about Russia became themes for Chaadaev's Philosophical Letters: Russia's loneliness in the world, its estrangement from Europe after the Schism and the Mongol invasion, the mystery of Divine Providence, the superficiality of the Russian gaze, which flits from one object to another without understanding their value—all these ideas found their way into Chaadaev's works from de Maistre's Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, letters, and Quatres chapitres inédits sur la Russie. [End Page 365]

De Maistre's influence on Tiutchev comes across mainly in his religious beliefs and his views on national destiny. In advocating the reunification of the churches, Tiutchev simply substituted Orthodoxy for Catholicism (since he assumed that the Russian Church should head the future brotherhood of Christians), and his idea that nations are instruments of Providence is taken almost word for word from de Maistre.

A shared pessimism about "progress" is what links de Maistre with Dostoevskii. An awareness of human frailty informed their instinctive distrust of the transformative power of science; it also led them to seek the key to a secure existence in the past, in a somewhat idealized vision of medieval Christendom. The main difference between them was that de Maistre saw the Church as the cement of the political edifice, while Dostoevskii placed his hopes in the "Religion of Love."

What makes Vera Miltchyna's perspective unusual is that she identifies the Slavophiles and the Russian nationalists as de Maistre's followers in Russia. Shebunin wrote that the Aksakovs, the Kireevskiis, and Mikhail Katkov read his books; Miltchyna follows his lead when she includes them in her research. If one did not know the context, one might think that the passages from the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg where de Maistre urges Russians to be loyal to their own traditions had been written by a Slavophile. Finally, one figure who cannot be ignored is Lev Tolstoi. De Maistre was not only the model for two characters in War and Peace (the abbé in Anna Pavlovna Scherer's salon, and the foreign diplomat whose opinion of Kutuzov Tolstoi quotes), but he also seems to have had a deep influence on Tolstoi's philosophy of history. The last part of the novel, dominated by religious notions of fate and the idea that the wisdom of generals and politicians lies in intuitively understanding the moment, echoes themes from Considérations sur la France. Other names also come up in this chapter, including the 20th-century historians Karsavin and Shebunin. The reference to the author of the classic Literaturnoe nasledstvo essay closes the circle and ties past to present. In my view, Vera Miltchyna's elegant piece is the first significant work on de Maistre to appear in Russia since Shebunin's time.

The appearance, within a short period of time, of two books on Joseph de Maistre and the interest shown in him by both Russian and Western scholars proves that today we can acknowledge the importance of a thinker even if his own contemporaries sometimes could not.