Joseph de Maistre
Savoyard political philosopher, writer and diplomat (1753–1821), born in Chambéry, in what was then the Duchy of Savoy, a trained magistrate before the French revolutionary invasion forced him into a long exile that eventually led him to serve as ambassador of the King of Sardinia to the tsar's court in Saint Petersburg for over a decade, where he produced most of his mature intellectual work. A direct, horrified witness of the excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars that followed, Maistre became the most radical, brilliant and simultaneously provocative counter-revolutionary critic of all European political theory, opposing head-on both Enlightenment abstract rationalism and the entire modern natural-law contractarian tradition. His work Considerations on France (1797), written in the heat of the moment shortly after the events, interpreted the Revolution not as a technical or political failure that could be fixed but as a providential divine punishment for the collective sins of the French nation, and formulated his famous, provocative thesis that 'the constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in this world. I have seen, in my life, Frenchmen, Italians, Russians [...] but as for man, I declare I have never in my life met him' — a devastating critique of the Enlightenment claim to universal, abstract human rights isolated from all tradition, religion and concrete historical and cultural context. In his treatise On the Pope (1819), Maistre ardently defended the absolute, infallible sovereignty of the Roman pontiff as the only principle capable of guaranteeing European social and spiritual order, while in his controversial The St Petersburg Dialogues he developed a provocative theodicy attributing to suffering, war and even the executioner a necessary providential role in maintaining cosmic order. Generally regarded as one of the founding fathers of continental counter-revolutionary conservatism, in sharp contrast to Burke's more moderate liberalism, Maistre remains today a deeply controversial figure, admired for his brilliant prose and feared for the boldness of his anti-Enlightenment, theocratic positions.