DE MAISTRE
In a manner he felt himself to be a Frenchman. All his life long he proclaims, and by his actions proves, himself to be the loyal subject and servant of the King of Sardinia; but, when he is more than usually ill rewarded for his services, the thought strikes him that it was really by a kind of mistake of nature that he was not born a Frenchman. We read in one of his letters (Correspondance diplomatique, i. 197): "I cannot get rid of the feeling that, let me do what I will, I am not the man to suit His Majesty. Sometimes in my poetic day-dreams I imagine that nature, carrying me in her apron from Nice to France, tripped on the Alps (a very excusable thing in an old lady) and let me fall into Chambéry. She ought by rights to have gone straight to Paris, or at any rate to have stopped at Turin, where I could have developed properly; but on the 1st of April 1754 the irreparable mistake was made. I discover in myself a certain Gallican element, for which, be it observed, I have all due respect." Thus it is not merely permissible but obligatory to set De Maistre's name first on the list of the men who brought about the powerful reaction in France against the fundamental ideas of the eighteenth century.
His first book, written in 1796, already shows the character of the reaction to which he gives expression, and which he endows with stubborn consistency. While the Revolution is still proceeding, but at the moment when the counter-revolution is beginning to make its influence felt, he eagerly vindicates the two powers which the century had repudiated—belief in the supernatural and fidelity to political tradition.
Maintaining that every nation, like every individual, has its mission to fulfil, he declares that France has guiltily abused the position of authority given to her in Europe. She stood at the head of the religious system, and not without reason were her kings called "the most Christian." As she has used her power to act in direct contradiction to her mission, it can surprise no one that she is being brought back to the right path by terrible chastisements. The French Revolution is marked by Satanic traits, which distinguish it from anything ever seen before and possibly from anything that will ever be seen again. Its so-called legislators have issued such a proclamation as this: "The nation supports no religion," words which would almost seem to indicate hatred of the Divine Being.
Even Rousseau, though he was "the most mistaken of men," perceived that it was only a narrow-minded and arrogant philosophy which could suppose the founders of such religions as the Jewish and the Mahometan to be nothing but lucky impostors. Philosophy is a disintegrating, religion alone an organising power. But no religion in the world can be compared with Christianity. It alone, although it is founded upon supernatural facts and is a revelation of incomprehensible dogmas, has been believed for eighteen centuries and been defended by the greatest men of all ages, from Origen to Pascal. Now it has been dethroned and its altars have been overturned. Philosophy reigns triumphant. But if Christianity issues from this ordeal purer and stronger than ever—then, Frenchmen, make way for the most Christian king, place him on his ancient throne, lift high his flaming banner (oriflamme), and proclaim that Christ commands, guides, and conquers!
There is no government but theocracy (priestly rule), and every constitution comes from God. A constitution is never the result of a contract, and the laws which rule the nations are never written laws, for those constitutions which are written are never anything but proclamations of older laws, of which all that can be said is that they exist because they exist. The constitution of 1795 is, like earlier revolutionary constitutions, made for man. But there is not such a thing as man: "In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, & I know, too, thanks to Montesquieu, that there are Persians; but man I have never met; if he exists, it is contrary to my knowledge." No; when the population, the customs, the religion, the geographical position, the existing political conditions, the good and bad qualities of a nation are known, then a constitution is the solution to the problem of finding the laws suitable for that particular nation.
De Maistre traces the probable course of the counter-revolution. He sagaciously demonstrates the unreasonableness of the supposition that it can only be the outcome of the will of the people. Very possibly a minority of four or five persons, he says, will give France a king. Letters from Paris will announce to the provinces that the country has a king, and the provinces will shout: Vive le roi! With his obstinate faith in providence he foretells the restoration (even in its details) at a time when all hopes of such an event seemed indeed to be built upon sand, and in process of so doing exhibits a fascinating combination of excessive enthusiasm for the pre-revolutionary conditions with a practical political sagacity which avoids any overstraining of principle that would make the restoration of these conditions impossible. On the delicate question, whether or not the restoration of the monarchy will entail the return of the national property to its original owners, he expresses himself with a caution which is strikingly at variance with the generally confident, defiant tone of the book. He explains that a revolutionary government is, by its very nature, an unsteady government. Under it nothing is certain. As the ownership of national property is not yet, in the opinion of the general public, free from the reproach originally attaching to it, a government which considered itself in no way debarred from undoing what it had done would in all probability lay hands on this property as soon as it could. "But under a steady, permanent government everything is permanent, so that even for the acquirers of national property it is important that the monarchy should be restored; they will then know what they have to rely upon." In other words, he has at least so much regard for actual circumstances as to acknowledge that it will not be possible to reign after the Revolution in exactly the same manner as before it.
His fundamental political doctrine is that the state is an organism, that as an organism it possesses real unity, and lives its life by virtue of a far-off past, from which it refreshes itself as from a perennial source, and by virtue of an inward, secret fountain of life. It is not the outcome of discussion and arrangement, but of an unfathomable mystery. Hence a written constitution signifies nothing. It is the soul of the nation which gives the nation unity and permanence, and this soul is the love of the nation for itself and its national memories. France is not thirty millions of human beings living between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, but a thousand millions who have lived there. Our country is nought else but the unity of those who live, those who have lived, and those who will live in the days to come on the same fragment of the earth's surface. The fact that one family is the symbol of the continued existence of this nation leads De Maistre to monarchy.