Joseph de Maistre

Who was Joseph de Maistre?

Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre was a Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat. He defended hierarchical societies and a monarchical State in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Maistre was a subject of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, whom he served as member of the Savoy Senate, ambassador to Russia, and minister of state to the court in Turin.

Maistre, a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, saw monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the only stable form of government. He called for the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the throne of France and argued that the Pope should have ultimate authority in temporal matters. Maistre also claimed that it was the rationalist rejection of Christianity which was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution of 1789.

Famous Quotes:

• In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.
• Every country has the government it deserves.
• Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
• To know how to wait. It is the great secret of success.
• In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.
• Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.
• Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure.
• Nothing is necessary except God, and nothing is less necessary than pain.
• I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make one's flesh creep.
• Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.