Maistre the Prophet

The Count who wrote “original sin…explains everything” and argued nothing else could be explained without it (126) seemed an odd ally for the Jacobins—a fact that is, perhaps, less mysterious to the Jacobins’ contemporary fans who adore their use of the guillotine, for that was precisely what fascinated the Count so much. There was, he thought, an honesty to it that transcended his despisal of their ideology. “The horror of the gallows,” he wrote, “destroyed the least internal resistance… this Leviathan, drunk with blood and success, the most appalling phenomenon ever seen and doubtless that ever will be seen, was both a frightful punishment of the French and the only means of saving France,” (56).

It seems likewise odd that we moderns should look back to an 18th-century aristocrat to understand the frothing hordes of Extremely Online reactionaries in our own time. But patterns recur and rhyme. Reaction, like most political currents, has a rhythm. In the Count's writings we can see its ur-shape: mesmerized by violence, rebelling against reason, a mad attempt to overturn modernity itself that is yet hopelessly modern.

Consider the guillotine. The Jacobins and their signature weapon “leave in the imagination a certain impression of grandeur resulting from the immensity of their successes,” (106). The “successes” were measured in oceans of blood, in the willingness to exercise raw power, and in proving to the world the superiority of the cross and throne that Count Joseph de Maistre devoted his life to preserving. In his view, which we can now laugh at from the comfort of historical certainty, “the monarchy could be saved only by Jacobinism,” (55). But it was the guillotine’s honesty he so admired, the way that the grasping of bloody power expressed something fundamental to the human spirit, as he saw it. The flaunting of the mark of Original Sin, that inexhaustible fuel for our free will and thus our ability to defy God.

But the guillotine was also of a piece with Maistre’s deepest love: The Executioner, and all he represented, like a faceless Tarot archetype, axe in hand ready to deliver a final judgment that severed the body of sin itself: “[A]ll grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears,” (192). The Executioner for Maistre is the keystone of civilisation, and in his extended encomium to the headsman he pornographically drips his eloquent praise over an idealised execution that is worth quoting in full (192).

A dismal signal is given; a minor judicial official comes to his house to warn him that he is needed; he leaves; he arrives at some public place packed with a dense and throbbing crowd. A poisoner, a parricide, or a blasphemer is thrown to him; he seizes him, he stretches him on the ground, he ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises it up: then a dreadful silence falls, and nothing can be heard except the crack of bones breaking under the crossbar and the howls of the victim. He unfastens him; he carries him to a wheel: the shattered limbs interweave with the spokes; the head falls; the hair stands on end, and the mouth, open like a furnace, gives out spasmodically only a few blood-spattered words calling for death to come. He is finished: his heart flutters, but it is with joy; he congratulates himself, he says sincerely, No one can break men on the wheel better than I.

Maistre loved nothing so much as the Executioner, save perhaps God Himself, whose perfected representative—the “sword of justice [that] has no scabbard”—is this bloody-handed man. To pretend otherwise was hypocrisy, and to protest for fear of the innocent falling beneath his axe or being broken upon his wheel was to miss a fundamental truth: all innocents die, it cannot be helped. And, in any case, “a man punished for a crime he has not committed has actually merited it by another completely unknown crime,” (193).

Two hundred years later, a gaggle of anonymous internet users would coin the word “moralfag,” defined by DayumNiggaDude on Urban Dictionary as someone who joined 4chan and “is typically this relatively new member that think [sic] he is part of the community but shit his pants when he gets out of his safe space.” Wiktionary defines it a little more soberly as a pejorative for “A person who expresses moral disapproval or moral opinions.” The term took off as 4chan turned on its famous Operation: Chanology protests against the Church of Scientology, which would forever associate the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask with a certain flavour of dipshit edgelord protester. But the original protesters, organizing on 4chan, at least had an ethos.

And that was a problem. Morality was a cloak, a mere signal of one’s pretense to virtue that masked the true will-to-power beneath.

This is the red thread that connects a stalwart Catholic monarchist to a gaggle of miserable trolls who would move into the heart of government. A man who wanted to repeal the 18^th Century became the philosophical father of a discrete byproduct of the 21^st. Joseph de Maistre would hate his children, and that’s a fitting epitaph for him. 

Joseph de Maistre shocked every conscience he charmed; his dark charisma, honed in the salons of Madame de Staël, his native Savoyard court, and the remote beauty of St. Petersburg, flowed from his floridly French pen and his voice alike. His ability to convert stately Russian aristocratic ladies to Catholicism was a cause of such consternation to Czar Alexander I that he ended up dismissing this foreign ambassador whose advice he’d come to rely upon. Born in 1753 in Savoy and educated by Jesuits, he would be the first of a familiar archetype: the progressive who claimed that the left had left him behind, and with no choice but to turn to reaction. In this, he was a prototype of fascism yet to come.

The catalyst, as you might expect, was the French Revolution, whose excesses so shocked him that, in his mad panic at the age’s dislocations, turned to two institutions he regarded as the only figures of solidity in a vaporizing world: the crown and the Roman Catholic Church. Like many counterrevolutionaries of his day, Maistre clung to the royal purple in the shadows of the Church’s eternal, faded splendour, asseverating that it had all been so much better before people began to actually believe in this silly little thing called freedom.

It was a long journey for a man who had once said of the American Revolution, “Liberty, insulted in Europe, has winged its flight to another hemisphere.” When liberty returned to Mother Europa, he flinched into a crouching hiss he maintained for the rest of his days. But his conviction was of an especially frightening virulence, a conviction so deep and so absolute that the entire reason he became a Savoyard ambassador to Russia was so that his own king could keep his malign influence away from his own courtiers. A monarchist too absolute for monarchs, Maistre was someone who so scorned the 18^th Century that it is easy to overlook how he belonged to the 20^th—or even the 21^st. 

Maistre was a man ahead of, not behind, his time. The late British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote of him that “although Maistre may have spoken the language of the past, the content of what he had to say is the absolute substance of anti-democratic talk of our day…His doctrines and still more his attitude of mind, had to wait a century before they came—as come they did—into their own,” (Freedom and its Betrayal, 143-144).

In 1952, Berlin charted all of this in his BBC lecture on Maistre—one of six on various “enemies of freedom,” original recordings now unfortunately all lost—citing the man’s prose in both English and French wherein the old aristocrat proclaims that humanity, for all our divine endowments and sociality, is dominated by a fundamental evil. A lust for power.

Indeed, this is the major theological fulcrum upon which conservatism rests, its fundamental argument with liberalism (and with what would come to be known as leftism): humanity, contra the revolutionaries, could not be improved on Earth. Only, perhaps, in the hereafter. Original Sin is not mere theology, but the atomic and subatomic structure of the social world, and one could no more fight it than fight gravity.

But Maistre goes further (253).

In the vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom…There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals, man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives.
…The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.

Even Edmund Burke might have blushed. The mainspring of all of this murder, Maistre argues, is the same driving force behind all that impels us to love, to glory in the light of God, to build and sing: it is that we are fundamentally and inescapably irrational.

When Maistre wanted to burn down the 18^th Century, he most wanted to destroy the shared conviction across many philosophical and political schools that reason animated humanity, and that rationality was the path towards universal uplift, political participation, and the betterment of humankind. We are endowed only with unreason, and no honest reckoning of the human condition could escape this fact. 

Berlin explains this tendency in Maistre’s thought, and the horrifying conclusion he builds up to (Freedom and its Betrayal, 158).

So [Maistre] goes on, from institution to institution, paradoxically asserting that whatever is irrational lasts, and that whatever is rational collapses; it collapses because anything which is constructed by reason can be pulverized by reason; anything which was built by the self-critical faculties cannot stand up to attack by them. The only thing which can dominate men is impenetrable mystery.

That mystery, of course, is the fundamental nonsensical irrationality of the divine right of kings, and a Church that is accountable to no one but an absent god. Only this can inspire the kind of awe and reverence that will enchain the irrational masses to something like order. Anything more rational, more banal, more technocratic and sensible, will simply be overwhelmed by the mob’s next fit of pique.

“What we need, therefore,” says Berlin, glossing Maistre’s view, “is something dark and unintelligible,” (Freedom and its Betrayal, 158). The more irrational the better. And nothing could make more rational sense than democracy, than the order of a constitution whose ideas and rules can be expressed so succinctly as to fit in one’s pocket. 

In his essay Considerations on France, Maistre makes his case against the idea of a French Republic. His sense of natural law, imposed by God, bears down on us with oceanic weight (65).

If it was said to us that a die, thrown a hundred million times, always showed only the five numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, could we believe that there was a 6 on one of its faces? The answer is undoubtedly no; and it would be as obvious to us as if we had actually seen it that one of the six faces was blank or that one of the numbers had been duplicated. Very well, if we look at history, we shall see what is called Fortune throwing dice endlessly for four thousand years: has it ever brought a GREAT REPUBLIC? No. Therefore this number was not on the dice.

Dismissing the 1795 French constitution as a “schoolboy’s exercise,” he lays out a series of reasons that this constitution does not, in the parlance of our time, have the mandate of heaven. He does so in a conveniently numbered list. For instance, point 6 (78).

The more that is written, the weaker is the institution, the reason being clear. Laws are only declarations of rights, and rights are not declared except when they are attacked, so that the multiplicity of written constitutional laws shows only the multiplicity of conflicts and the danger of destruction. This is why the most vigorous political system in the ancient world was that of Sparta, in which nothing was written.

These arguments seem to reach back to the antiquity he fetishizes, but the call to RETVRN here is as contemporary as that very reference. Save for a few rhetorical flourishes, his essay could easily be the script to a YouTube video. In the breezily worshipful sophistry of his never-happened history, we see the fundamental elements of a deeply contemporary obsession: the hatred of democracy. For a man who so despised the 18^th Century, he was deeply embedded in the logics of the future it sired.

In the centuries since, Fortune has rolled her dice and found GREAT REPUBLIC on her d6 loot table many times. Would that this were enough to dispose of the likes of Maistre; but his progeny have a vote too, for they dearly wish to ensure no one else will, ever again. Even their list of enemies comes, more or less, direct from Maistre and this, too, is strikingly current.

Maistre saw himself as the enemy of an eclectic cast of characters he called ‘la secte’ in his native French; la secte was devoted to the destruction of his beloved world order, dominated by the beautifully irrational mystery of the Church and Crown, which could keep the great unwashed in their place. Who was la secte? See if you find a familiar thread in the litany I recite from Berlin’s lecture: “Jansenists and Calvinists, and all Protestants in general; lawyers, metaphysicians, journalists, writers, Jews, American revolutionaries, intellectuals, scientists critics; in short, the intelligentsia, and everything which belongs to it.” Berlin goes on to state what should be obvious, by now: “This list—of liberals, of all kinds of critics…of people who do not accept the dogmatic premises of society—was compiled almost for the first time by Maistre…it has been the stock-in-trade of every violently reactionary, Fascist movement of our day.”

I hate [Jews] because of the horrible shit they do. It’s not just a meme. Every single time someone is advocating for the things I hate, bringing trannies into my kids changing rooms, or dismantling the family, or bringing millions of hostile savages to the country my ancestors built, it’s literally always Jews. They can have Israel, they can murder Palestinian kids for all I care, I’ll even send them aide [sic], just keep them out of my business.

So goes a post from 4chan about the horrors in the Levant.

Have another:

Israel only exists because of international jews. Without the heebs spying and stealing nuclear secrets and assassinating and racketeering and drug trafficking and slave trading all over the world there is no israel. Epstein wasn’t doing his bit for the hell of it he was an Israeli agent as were the jews who coordinated 9/11. Almost all of the tranny drugs come from Israel….

What is remarkable is that these posts are five years old; they could’ve been written yesterday, or some variant might’ve been pronounced at CPAC, bleated from the likes of Nick Fuentes.

But the antisemitism on display here, from people who hate Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims as much as they hate Jews, is the kind of gestalt bigotry pioneered by Maistre, who concocted a mad conspiracy that was somehow made up of the most definitionally argumentative and disputatious people in Europe at the time who could barely get along with each other, never mind as one massive blob that could roll over antiquity with a singular will. And yet here are his children, ranting about “globohomo.”

In his Considerations on France, Maistre makes plain his views on internationalism and humanism (80). 

The 1795 constitution, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. During my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian; but I must say, as for man, I have never come across him anywhere; if he exists, he is completely unknown to me.

We see here an early paving stone in the ‘anti-globalist’ ideology, something one could only care about if there was, ineluctably, a rising sense of human beings as human beings taking hold all over the world.

Such bigotry is only part of the philosophical equation here, however. As Berlin wrote, Maistre believed there were only two unalloyed goods in the world: “one is antiquity, the other is irrationality,” (Freedom and its Betrayal, 159). I would add that, therefore, Greek Statue Twitter is, in all of its idiocy, Maistre’s ideal subject. It is easy (and necessary) to mock the ahistorical onanism of this crowd. But they understand Maistre’s philosophy deeply, despite almost certainly never having heard of him. 

For them, history is not an assembly of facts and inconvenient truths; there are no orderly methods for understanding or vetting primary sources, no understanding of provenance, no weighing of evidence. There is no truth. Just vibes. Immaculate, mysterious vibes whose sole purpose is to enforce a brutal order in the present. One can bludgeon these people with basic truths such as “the Roman Empire did not collapse because of immigration” or “people we would today consider Black and Arab were very common at every level of Roman society,” but that’s not the point. The point is to take those marble statues and turn them into fetishistic objects of awe and reverence that stun the masses into quiescence before a white nationalist program that keeps la secte at bay. 

The scorn for actualized intellect, for scholarly critique, for debate and free expression, are at the root of everything from the destruction of the National Science Foundation to the persecution of Palestinian activists to the spirited attempt to humiliate trans people and drive them from public life.

To look at the blood-splattered crayon scrawls that now define American foreign policy is to see a particularly stupid “war of all against all” that refracts Hobbes through Maistre’s lust for the executioner’s blade: “All greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner; he is the terror of human society and the tie that holds it together. Take away this incomprehensible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears,” (192). It’s a rather eloquent way of expressing what has now become reduced to the usual daily proclamations of Trumpian posts. “Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!” The natural endstate of this philosophy is that everyone wants to become the executioner, for only his bloody power is of any consequence. There is no worker more essential.

American foreign policy, red in tooth and claw, defined by posting through it as readily as one bombs through it, treats human rights and laws of warfare as irredeemably gay, uniquely ineffective and, above all, dishonest. To the 4chan poster who ranted endlessly about “moralfags”—people who had the audacity to claim to believe in something—the ultimate sin was dishonesty to one’s bestial nature. To be a bitter, cruel troll who delighted in the suffering of others was a state of grace. It approached holiness because of its fidelity to the truth of what it meant to be human. It was a philosophy that adopted Original Sin without ever daring to call it that, or endorse organized religion.

Maistre would despise his children, who’ve turned his ideas into big titted anime girl memes, even as they have, at last, seized real levers of power to try and force the rest of the world to operate on their “might makes right” anti-principles; to complete the hyperreal gesture, they turn the war of all against all into memes.  

The more strait-laced “empathy is a sin” crowd are also another desiccated branch on this family tree. The ones who lament the ‘emotional manipulation’ of activists talking about the tragedies imposed by Trump’s violent anti-immigrant policies or his brutal anti-trans agenda all echo Maistre and 4chan in their insistence that there’s something less dangerous in a child dying in ICE custody or a trans teenager contemplating suicide than there is in the masses having empathy for them.

If this is irrational, if it is madness, it is the kind of “mystery” Maistre so loved. The Escheresque palace of contradictions that, in his worldview, is all that can hold up a society. We need a God to worship and a monarch to kneel before. Any monarch. If they are unworthy and stupid, then that is merely so much more mystery to awe us. And what better king than a spray-tanned pretender to a nonexistent throne? 

There are monarchists everywhere for those with eyes to see. But unlike the self-serious Maistre who, for all his love of mystery, still believed in things and thought integrity mattered, these latter-day monarchists are committed trolls. Take Gladden Pappin, a former J.D. Vance advisor, whispering in the ear of embattled Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán before his downfall, who suggested once that Trump would dissolve Congress and the Pope could appoint Melania Trump Queen of America, according to Isaac Stanley-Becker at The Atlantic:

In response to questions about the prophecy, Pappin told me in an email that he meant it ironically, writing, “Satire is dead and Trump Derangement Syndrome killed it.”

Maistre might not like it, but these are his progeny.

It is fitting that Maistre’s ghost should haunt us still, but in the personages of the most profane people imaginable. There could be no greater disproof of his philosophy than for his strongest soldiers to be the sneering, degenerate keyboard warriors who convert to Catholicism because it looks good on Instagram, before going home to generate softcore AI porn to own the libs with. Whatever else may be said of these people—and there is so much to say—they are thoroughly modern, for Maistre’s philosophy could only ever impel one forward, however much it seems to prostrate before the past. 

For one can only march forward to the confrontation with modernity that Maistre devoted his whole being to. It is in the future one finds la secte, the hated liberals and democrats and leftists.

In being so determined a foe of the philosophes, of earthly constitutions and democracy, Maistre invariably moulded his entire worldview around that of his enemies. La secte calls the tune of his thought. So it goes with his progeny, whose lust for the past is directed at an empty series of all-too-contemporary images and framings, and are as trapped in the modern world as Maistre knew he himself would be.

But it is these spirited enemies of freedom who are our foes. If everything feels profoundly stupid, it is because they drank deep of a nugatory philosophy that could only define itself against how the world was inexorably changing. It is the philosophy of illiberal contradictions, nourished by the free inquiry and free expression they seek to suppress. A life support system of cheap sushi, online porn, libraries, and telecommunications that they cannot live without. At least Maistre, with one foot reluctantly in the Savoy of his birth, could more credibly pretend that he and his mind existed somewhere prior to the world that gave us Madam de Stael’s salons.

So, does knowing any of this help us? I believe it does. To know the cheat codes provided by Maistre’s lifelong encomia against liberty is to allow us to sharpen our responses in kind. If Maistre admired those who seized power from a vacuum—even the Jacobins earned his grudging praise—then it is incumbent on us to prove that we are able to do the same. Like his contemporaries, he has no true vision of the future, only a ruined present; thus, we must make a positive doctrine of our beliefs. If Maistre believed there was no such thing as humanity, then we must link together, hand in hand across borders, to prove him wrong. If his progeny are committed to sophistry and unseriousness, even as they light the world on fire, then we must commit to punishing them with such unsmiling sincerity as to make them long for Maistre’s beloved executioner. 

As Isaiah Berlin concluded in his own essay on Maistre, “let us remember that liberty needs its critics as well as its supporters. After all, as in Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles, who criticized the ways of God, is not left altogether without an answer,” (Freedom and its Betrayal, 168).

What will our answer be?

Featured image is "French writer Joseph de Maistre," Félix Vallotton 1895.

Works Cited

Berlin, Isaiah. 2014. Freedom and Its Betrayal. Princeton University Press.

De Maistre, Joseph. 1965. The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions: Studies on Sovereignty, Religion, and Enlightenment. Trans: Jack Lively. Macmillan.