The French Idea of History

Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854

Carolina Armenteros

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801449437
• eBook ISBN: 9780801462603
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

"A fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat... the champion of the hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism... part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." Thus did Émile Faguet describe Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753–1821) in his 1899 history of nineteenth-century thought. This view of the influential thinker as a reactionary has, with little variation, held sway ever since. In The French Idea of History, Carolina Armenteros recovers a very different figure, one with a far more subtle understanding of, and response to, the events of his day. Maistre emerges from this deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment and the historicized thought of the nineteenth century. Armenteros demonstrates that Maistre inaugurated a specifically French way of thinking about past, present, and future that held sway not only among conservative political theorists but also among intellectuals generally considered to belong to the left, particularly the Utopian Socialists.

The historical rupture represented by the French Revolution compelled contemporaries to reflect on the nature and meaning of history. Some who remained religious during those years felt history with particular intensity, awakening suddenly to the fear that God might have abandoned humankind. This profound spiritual anxiety emerged in Maistre's work: under his pen, everything—knowledge, society, religion, government, the human body—had to be historicized and temporalized in order to be known. The imperative was to end history by uncovering its essence. Socialists, positivists, and traditionalists drew on Maistre's historical ideas to construct the collective good and design the future. The dream that history held the key to human renewal and the obliteration of violence faded after the 1848 revolutions, but it permanently changed French social, political, moral, and religious thought.

Part One

Joseph de Maistre and the Idea of History, 1794–1820

Chapter 1

The Statistical Beginnings of Historical Thought

Joseph de Maistre against Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1794–96

At the height of the Terror, with the Jacobins clamoring in Paris that they ruled on behalf of the people, Maistre became intensely preoccupied with the problem of popular sovereignty. Composing, from his exile in Lausanne, the Lettres d’un royaliste savoisien à ses compatriotes, he devoted the fifth letter to contending that popular sovereignty is inviable, especially among nations that are not city-states; and that, generally speaking, monarchy is the form of government best suited to the happiness of peoples. This letter was never published. The bishop of Sisteron, reviewing it, was of the opinion that Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) shone by his absence from it;1 and Maistre, instantly embarrassed, expanded it into what would become his lengthy and never-finished treatise De la souveraineté du peuple (composed 1794–96), essentially a critique of Du contrat social. Sometime between early 1794 and late 1795 but probably not long after Thermidor, Maistre also read Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755). This reading inspired De l’état de nature, a second essay on Rousseau.

In De l’état de nature and De la souveraineté the favorable comments on Rousseau—on the general will, on the critique of the morality of modern science, on the origins of society—spread through Maistre’s prerevolutionary notes2 were replaced by a wholesale refutation of Rousseau’s philosophy that articulated most of Maistre’s mature thought in potentia. Maistre did not simply counter Rousseau point by point, as Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1718–90)3 and Jean-Louis Delolme (1740–1806)4 had done before him. He actually sketched the foundations of a philosophical system that was a rational negative of Rousseau’s own. The exercise was fruitful. Although not immediately published, the essays on Rousseau formed Maistre’s thought, providing the theoretical foundations of the Considérations sur la France (1797), which in turn contributed generously to the birth of moral statistics, to nineteenth-century constitutional theory, and to early conservative historical thought. Not that Maistre himself was aware of any intellectual innovation on his part: having abandoned the essays partly for financial reasons, he never returned to them or showed any interest in publishing them.5 Yet through his studies of Rousseau he came to owe much more to the Genevan philosopher than he would perhaps have liked to realize. “From Maistre’s opposition to Rousseau may be reckoned a kind of dependence.”6 It was in refuting Jean-Jacques that Maistre redefined nature as a mysterious divine agent and a source of reason; insisted that will and perfectibility are history’s main agents and society’s foundations; and developed the ideas on probability and moral conscience that were so important for his realist conservatism and his philosophy of history.

What I would like to explore in this chapter is not so much Maistre and Rousseau’s strange intellectual partnership, their sharing of a common, marginal space against many of the fundamental tenets of philosophie: that has been done before.7 Neither do I aim to study the psychological traits and philosophical attitudes and assumptions that united the two philosophers: that has also been explored.8 Nor, lastly, do I wish to describe the various Rousseauian personas that inhabited Maistre’s thought.9 Rather, I am interested in tracing the seminal role that refuting Rousseau played in crystallizing a Maistrian mode of historical thinking that combined constitutional theory with statistical reasoning. De l’état de nature and De la souveraineté du peuple reveal how Maistre began, in 1794–97, to work out a political philosophy of history in which the French erudite tradition became a means to knowledge of the human; Tacitus and the early modern skeptics served as inspirations for a principle of historical creation and political durability; and—crucially—Rousseau turned into the starting point for a sort of primitive social statistics—a new means of second-guessing and rationalizing God’s aims through time.

The essays on Rousseau also resolve, in the realm of political philosophy and for the first time since Vico, the conflict between will and reason inherent in Newtonian and Cartesian debates on natural history. Any understanding of Maistre’s historical thought must therefore be preceded by an overview of the philosophical problem of origins as it emerged in the early modern era. In Le monde (1664), Descartes had presented his cosmology as a fable, hypothesizing that a godless world could have come into being through the sole functioning of natural laws. Against him Newton maintained, in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), that the mechanical laws that explain the universe as it is could not be used to investigate how it had originated. In his view, the Bible told the proper facts of the world’s formation. Any attempt to explain those same facts mechanically would dissolve sacred narrative into theory to the detriment of Christianity, and leave the “wonderful uniformity in the Planetary System,” possible only as “the Effect of Choice,” unexplained.10 From then on, the battle lines were drawn between the pious voluntarists, heirs of Newton and Boyle, and those who advocated the atheistic mechanism of the Epicureans and Cartesians or the immanentism of Leibniz and Spinoza. Historical theory, in other words, was divided among “those who did not and those who did distinguish between the first origin of things and the successive course of nature.”11 The philosophical basis of the divergence was most carefully and memorably set forth in the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence of 1715–16.

With the early Enlightenment aspiration to apply Newtonian physics to all knowledge, the debate on origins spilled over into geology, theology, history, natural philosophy, and linguistics; straddled the boundaries of art, science, and religion; and metamorphosed into a plethora of different arguments. Discussions on the development of polities often mingled with speculations on the history of the earth and nature. Historical philosophy developed in the process. Vico’s Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazione (1725)—which Maistre was one of the first non-Neapolitans to read12—replicated the Newtonian separation of origins from succession by sealing off profane and sacred history hermetically from one another. According to Vico, profane nations, guided by human processes, developed rationally, while sacred peoples were moved on their way by God’s will. Considering holy history to be the only reliable source of information about the “obscure and fabulous ages” that had preceded the first histories of the Greeks and Romans,13 Vico enveloped origins, like Newton, in silence and sacredness. But philosophical history was born officially in an act of rebellion against Newton. The Sorbonniques (1750) of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81) announced the liberation of the human from the natural sciences, a new mentality that no longer saw human history submitted to Newtonian mechanics; and that simultaneously proposed, in individual genius, the new means of conveying the principle of origins to the human realm, of pushing history divinely along in Newtonian fashion. Rousseau afterward extended the principle of origins that Turgot had conferred on extraordinary beings to all of humanity by recurring to the old Christian principle of perfectibility. It was part of his attempt to explain the origins of human degeneration, and therefore of history, with strictly human logic, and without recourse to the doctrine of original sin.14

It was at this point that Maistre, bent on using metaphysics to annul Rousseau’s rebellious philosophy, stumbled, unsuspecting, into the debate on origins and succession.

Natural Law Dismissed, Justice Psychologized

De l’état de nature opens by observing that the question proposed by the Academy of Dijon, and which Rousseau answered in his second Discours—“What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?”—was badly formulated. This is because inequality is a social phenomenon, and has nothing to do with natural law. The proper question should rather have been: “What is the origin of society? And is man social by nature?”

Maistre set himself the task of replying to this second, better formulated query that the Academy never asked. The problem was that Rousseau had addressed both social origins and natural sociability in the second Discours and the “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard” in book 4 of Émile (1762). Furthermore, his discussion of these ideas had had everything to do with major themes in the philosophy of natural law. The vicar’s reflections on the simultaneously natural, sociable, moral, and sentimental character of conscience leave no doubt on this point:

If, as it is not possible to doubt, man is sociable by nature, or at least made to become so, he cannot be so except by other innate sentiments, relative to his species; since considering only physical need, it must certainly disperse men, instead of bringing them together. Thus it is of the moral system formed by that double rapport to oneself and to one’s fellows that the impulse of conscience is born. To know the good is not to love it, man does not have the innate conscience of it; but as soon as his reason makes him know it, his conscience brings him to love it: it is that sentiment that is innate.15

Rousseau’s vicar may have carefully avoided the language of natural law and its connotations of rational control in explaining the birth of society out of conscience. Yet Rousseau’s natural sentiment is uncannily reminiscent of notions of natural right and law,16 some of them dating back to the sixteenth century. Maistre’s sentiment is, first, innate—like the natural norm that Domingo de Soto claimed was impressed in man’s mind to govern him according to reas...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Editions, Translations, and References
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Conservatism and History
• A Brief Intellectual Biography
• Part One: Joseph de Maistre and the Idea of History, 1794–1820
• Part Two: Historical Thought in France, 1798–1854
• Conclusion: History and Paradox
• Bibliography