Joseph de Maistre - Repute and Influence

Repute and Influence

Maistre, together with the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, is commonly regarded as one of the founders of European conservatism, but since the 19th century, Maistre's authoritarian, "throne-and-altar" conception of conservatism has declined in influence in comparison with the more liberal conservatism of Burke. Maistre's skills as a writer and polemicist however ensure that he continues to be read. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 describes his writing style as "strong, lively, picturesque," and that his "animation and good humour temper his dogmatic tone. He possesses a wonderful facility in exposition, precision of doctrine, breadth of learning, and dialectical power." Alphonse de Lamartine, though a political opponent, admired the splendour of his prose:

That brief, nervous, lucid style, stripped of phrases, robust of limb, did not at all recall the softness of the eighteenth century, nor the declamations of the latest French books: it was born and steeped in the breath of the Alps; it was virgin, it was young, it was harsh and savage; it had no human respect, it felt its solitude; it improvised depth and form all at once… That man was new among the enfants du siècle . —Alphonse de Lamartine, Souvenirs et portraits

Émile Faguet described Maistre as "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."

Isaiah Berlin in his Freedom and Its Betrayal notes that many view his writings as "the last despairing effort of feudalism...to resist the march of progress." but he claims that Maistre imposes "an official legitimist Catholic framework upon what is really a deeply violent, deeply revolutionary, ultimately Fascist inner passion" which rejects what it sees as the shallow optimism of the Enlightenment. His fundamental doctrine according to Berlin is that nature is red in tooth and claw and what really fascinates him is power.

Amongst those who admired him was the poet Charles Baudelaire, who described himself a disciple of the Savoyard counter-revolutionary, claiming that he had taught him "how to think." Maistre also exerted a powerful influence on the Spanish political thinker Juan Donoso Cortés and, later, on the French monarchist Charles Maurras and his counter-revolutionary political movement Action Française.

According to Carolina Armenteros, Maistre's writings influenced not only conservative political thinkers, but also the Utopian socialists. Early sociologists such as Saint-Simon and Comte explicitly acknowledged the influence of Maistre on their own thinking about the sources of social cohesion and political authority.