The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794–1854, by Carolina Armenteros

Abstract

In his 1797 Considérations sur la France, Joseph de Maistre declared the French Revolution to be a ‘unique event in history’. It was ‘radically bad’, the ‘highest degree of corruption ever known’, ‘pure impurity’. Maistre’s tirade against the Revolution rested on the premiss that, as he affirmed in Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (1809), all human action divorced from God ‘is negative and will result only in destruction’. Such a view might well be taken as the expression of, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, an ‘irrationalist and dogmatic’ characterisation of the world, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. But this would be a mistake. Carolina Armenteros endeavours to retrieve the work of this remarkable individual from misunderstanding and prejudice, and, in undertaking this task, she sets out to overturn the very thesis put forth by Berlin himself: that Maistre was a reactionary and that his ideas were ‘intellectually severed from the Enlightenment in all its possible definitions’.