High Priests of the Politics of Cruelty
America's Christian Nationalists want a country ruled by Bible-wielding autocrats. An 18th century French monarchist is their touchstone (my final essays on Islam resume next week)
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: ‘If you kill us, we shall enter Paradise’
ESTABLISHMENT DISGUST at Jacobin violence is a common reaction to the French Revolution (1789 -1799). Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish politician and father of the conservative movement, condemned the dispatch of the French king and aristocracy as the bloody convulsions of a rabid Parisian mob.
At the other extreme was the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who saw in the Paris uprising the seedlings of democracy and the liberation of the French people from tyrannical monarchy.
There was a third view of the Revolution, that of a mind many had supposed buried by the Enlightenment, and yet here it was, freshly exhumed, brushing off the soil and walking again.
This was the mind of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), a French monarchist, writer and devout Roman Catholic, who nursed throughout his life a burning hatred of the Sodom in which he found himself obliged to live. A distant yet growing echo of De Maistre’s beliefs may be heard in the words and actions of America’s Christian Nationalists who now hold the levers of power in Washington.
De Maistre’s ideology was that of the most punitive theocrat and glacial reactionary.
Even in his own day De Maistre was considered a relic of the Spanish Inquisition, a medieval Hobbesian for whom the Bible, the faggot and the hangman’s noose were the solutions to the moral rot he imagined he saw all around him.
Out of intellectual fashion for 200 years, De Maistre is enjoying something of a revival among the theocrats of our time, who share his fetish for the executioner, his love of violent retribution, his faith in miracles and superstition, and his hatred of science, liberty, equal opportunity, human rights and democracy – indeed, the entire legacy of the eighteenth century.
The ideals of the Enlightenment so revolted him, De Maistre wanted to destroy the very ‘thought of the 18th century’. His mind proudly inhabited the ‘pre-enlightenment’.
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Émile Faguet, a French author and reputedly ‘the most fair-minded critic’ of De Maistre, described him as ‘a furious theocrat’ and ‘a dark figure out of the Middle Ages . . . part inquisitor, part executioner’.
The author Victor Hugo, priest Félicité de La Mennais, critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and philosopher Isaiah Berlin agreed. For them, De Maistre was the last gasp of the feudal mind, a relic of the slave-owning era who lived by all that was miraculous, punitive and sulphurous.
De Maistre, writes Berlin, was ‘born out of his time, an unbending, self-blinded die-hard pouring curses upon the marvellous new age whose benefits he was too wilful to see, and too callous to feel’.
Characters like De Maistre, who shock the sensibilities of the establishment, tend to pop up at what seem the least likely moments in history, when fashionable intellectuals had thought them long dead and gone.
One thinks of Stefan Zweig and his circle’s astonishment at the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the mortifying spectacle of Donald Trump for American liberals.
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It fell to the diabolical zeal of De Maistre to call for the restoration of the French monarchy, the destruction of the seedlings of democracy and the silencing of the ridiculous notion of the ‘rights of man’ as championed by Thomas Paine.
‘Now what distinguishes the French Revolution,’ De Maistre wrote, ‘and makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically bad . . . What a horrible assemblage of baseness and cruelty! What profound immorality! What absence of all decency!’
He was just warming up: ‘There is a satanic quality to the French Revolution that distinguishes it from everything we have ever seen or anything we are ever likely to see in the future . . .’
De Maistre preached the primacy of instinct, superstition and prejudice.
He rushed to the aid of the miraculous, the ignorant and the irrational.
He applauded original sin as the only psychological truth about our vile species.
He denounced every form of lucidity and scientific insight, and the very possibility of progress.
Human beings, De Maistre observed, ‘unless clamped with iron rings and held down by means of the most rigid discipline, [were] likely to destroy themselves’.
De Maistre believed the king derived his authority from God, not from the people the king ruled.
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Man, De Maistre concluded, was a natural born killer who needed muzzling like a dog. His words sound more terrifying in French:
‘Il tue pour se nourrir, il tue pour se vetir, il tue pour se parer, il tue pour attaquer, il tue pour se défendre, il tue pour s’instruire, il tue pour s’amuser, il tue pour tuer: roi superbe et terrible, il a besoin de tout, et rien ne lui resiste.’
(‘He kills to feed himself, he kills to dress himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to learn, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill: superb king and terrible, he needs everything, and nothing can resist him.’)
The advent of the Reign of Terror (1792/73-1794), when Jacobin militants executed thousands of people they deemed to have opposed the Revolution, turned De Maistre into the ‘implacable enemy of everything that is liberal, democratic, high-minded, everything connected with intellectuals, critics, scientists’.
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Like most arch-enemies, however, De Maistre and the Jacobins had much in common.
They shared a totalitarian impulse to erase the past – or the bits of the past they detested.
De Maistre himself advocated mass terror – by the church and the state – making him a Robespierre of the theocracy he cherished.
De Maistre shared the extremism of the Jacobins’ methods. Both despised the weakness of the king and loathed the liberals who fluttered about the court.
‘[W]hen there is a vacuum, somebody must enter it,’ De Maistre wrote. ‘The King failed dismally. King Louis XVI and his miserable liberal advisers . . . were simply human dust, weak, optimistic, reformist . . . the Jacobins did at least do something. At least they killed somebody. They set up guillotines . . .’
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De Maistre raged against the intellectuals Voltaire and Rousseau, whom he regarded as the devils incarnate of the ‘Enlightened’.
The political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon observed that, while opposite in belief, both Voltaire and De Maistre moved in the ‘hard, cold, dry, lucid, toughminded tradition of French thought’.
De Maistre condemned as ‘the opposite of the truth’ Rousseau’s ‘mad’ pronouncement that ‘man was born free and everywhere he is in chains’.
On the contrary, De Maistre wrote, men were born in chains – chained to sin, misery, guilt, a lifetime of penance and their despicable nature.
Only the church, the monarchy and slavery would save us from ourselves, De Maistre believed. They were the only durable institutions.
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True to his word, this consummate diplomat advised the Russian tsar not to liberate the serfs:
‘[W]hy, then your country will be plunged into the most vicious revolution,’ he wrote. ‘It will go from barbarism into anarchy.’
Only unrelenting punishment – torture, terror and death – would save post-revolutionary France, De Maistre believed.
For him, the French were a people lost to God, their king and their Christian consciences:
‘The only way to get people to live in societies at all is to stop them from questioning,’ he wrote, ‘and the only way in which you can stop them from questioning is by terror.’
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The irony of this was not lost on De Maistre.
He wrote of hangmen with leery admiration, and applauded the executioner who crushed a man’s body on the wheel as having done his job well:
‘[A]ll greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner . . . Take away this incomprehensible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears.’
We’re left contemplating a mind that revelled in cruelty, the breaking of bones, the gurgling of the garrotted, the sadistic meditation on the torture of his enemies.
The priest and scholar La Mennais despaired of De Maistre: ‘It is as if all his works were written from the scaffold.’
Next Thursday, 12th June 2025: ‘If you kill us, we shall enter Paradise’
Selected sources and further reading:
Bell, D.A. (2001) The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Berlin, I. (11 October 1990) ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, The New York Review of Books.
Berlin, I. (1965) ‘Two Enemies of the Enlightenment: The Second Onslaught – Joseph de Maistre and Open Obscurantism’, The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.
Bernstein, S. (Spring 1945) ‘English Reactions to the French Revolution’, Science & Society, 9(2), pp. 147–71.
Burke, E. (2009) Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Burke, E. (2015) The Collected Works of Edmund Burke, Oxford: PergamonMedia.
Carlyle, T. (2002) The French Revolution: A History, New York: Modern Library.
Cone, C. (June 1945) ‘Pamphlet Replies to Burke’s “Reflections”, The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 22–34.
Danton, G.J. (1928) Voices of Revolt: Speeches of Georges Jacques Danton, New York: International Publishers.
Foster, N. (2008) ‘“Free of Formulas”: Innovation, Prophecy, and Truth in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution’, Carlyle Studies Annual, 24, pp. 101–16.
Furet, F. (Spring 1981) ‘The French Revolution Revisited’, Government and Opposition, 16(2), pp. 200–18.
Hunt, L. (1992) The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Maistre, J. de and Lebrun, R.A. (ed. and transl.) (2006) Considerations on France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maistre, J. de and Lively, J. (transl.) (1971) The Works of Joseph de Maistre, New York: Shocken Books.
Paine, T. (1945) The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine – Vol. 2 (1779–1792): The Rights of Man, New York: The Citadel Press.
Paine, T. (2009) The Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reddy, W.M. (March 2000) ‘Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution’, The Journal of Modern History, 72(1), A Special Issue in Honor of François Furet, pp. 109–52.
Robespierre, M. (1794) ‘The Political Philosophy of Terror’, Speech to the French Convention, 5 February, World Future Fund.
Rousseau, J-J. (2015) The Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oxford: PergamonMedia.
Schama, S. (1989) Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Steinberg, R. (December 2015) ‘Trauma and the Effects of Mass Violence in Revolutionary France: A Critical Inquiry’, Historical Reflections, 41(3), pp. 28–46.
Voltaire (2015) Collected Works of Voltaire, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.
Voltaire, (2016) Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, CreateSpace Independent Publishing.