Anathemas and Admirations (12 page)

“There exists no great character that does not tend to some exaggeration,” de Maistre writes, doubtless thinking of himself. We may note that the decisive and often frenzied tone of his works is not to be discerned in his letters; these caused amazement when they were published: who could have suspected such amenity in the raging doctrinaire? The reaction of surprise, which was unanimous, strikes us as a trifle naive. After all, a thinker generally puts his madness into his works and keeps his common sense for his ordinary relations; he will always be more pitiless and unbridled when he attacks a theory than when he must address a friend or an acquaintance. Intimacy with an idea incites to delirium, obliterates judgment, and produces the illusion of omnipotence. In truth, the tête-à-tête with ideas generates madness, deprives the mind of its equilibrium and pride of its composure. Our excesses and our aberrations derive from our combat with unrealities, with abstractions, from our will to triumph over what does not exist — whence the impure, tyrannical, wandering aspect of philosophical works, moreover of any work at all The thinker blackening a page without recipient believes— feels! — himself to be the arbiter of the world. Yet in his letters he expresses, on the contrary, his hopes, his weaknesses, his defeats; he attenuates the audacities of his books and rests from his excesses. De Maistre’s correspondence was that of a moderate man. Some, delighted to find a different writer, quickly classified him among the liberals, forgetting that he was tolerant in his life only because he was anything but in his works, where the best pages are precisely those in which he magnifies the abuses of the Church and the rigors of the State.

Had it not been for the Revolution, which, wresting him from his habitual preoccupations — indeed, crushing him — awakened him to the great problems, he would have lived, in Chambéry, the life of a good paterfamilias and a good Freemason, continuing to dose his Catholicism, his royalism, and his Martinism with that tincture of Rousseauist phraseology which mars his early writings. The French army, invading Savoy, drove him out; he took the road of exile; thereby his mind profited, and his style as well, as we discover when we compare his
Considérations sur la France
with the declamatory and diffuse productions antedating the revolutionary period. Disaster, clarifying his prejudices and his tastes, saved him from vagueness while rendering him forever incapable of serenity and objectivity, virtues rare in the émigré. De Maistre was one of these, and precisely during those years (1803— 1817) when he served as the King of Sardinia’s ambassador to St. Petersburg. All his thoughts were to bear the mark of exile: “There is only violence in the universe; but we are deceived by modern philosophy, which asserts that all is for the best, whereas the worst has corrupted everything, and in a very real sense, all is for the worst, since nothing is where it belongs.”

“Nothing is where it belongs”: the refrain of all emigrations, and also the point of departure for all philosophical reflection. The mind wakens upon contact with disorder and injustice: whatever is “where it belongs,” whatever is normal, leaves the mind indifferent, benumbed, while frustration and dispossession enhance and animate it. A thinker is enriched by all that escapes him, all that is taken from him; if he should happen to lose his country, what a windfall! Thus the exile is a thinker in miniature or a circumstantial visionary, tossed between hope and fear, on the lookout for events he longs for or dreads. If he has genius, he rises above them, like de Maistre, and interprets them: “The first condition of a decreed revolution is that everything that might have forestalled it does not exist, and that those who seek to prevent it must fail entirely. But order is never more apparent. Providence is never more palpable, than when a higher action takes man’s place and operates in and of itself: this is what we are seeing at this moment.”

In periods when we become aware of the nullity of our initiatives, we identify destiny either with Providence — a reassuring disguise for fatality, a camouflage of failure, an admission of our impotence to organize the future, yet a desire to discern its essential contours and determine their meaning — or with a mechanical, impersonal play of forces, the automatism of which controls our actions and even our beliefs. Yet we invest this play of forces, however impersonal and mechanical, with a glamour that its very definition forbids, and we relate it — a conversion of concepts into universal agents — to a moral power responsible for events and the turn they must take. At the height of positivism, did we not invoke, in mystical terms, a Future to which we attributed an energy scarcely less effective than that of Providence? Inveterately there slips into our explanations a wisp of theology, inherent in, even indispensable to, our thought insofar as it undertakes to provide a coherent image of the world.

To attribute a meaning to the historical process, even one derived from a logic immanent to the future, is to subscribe, more or less explicitly, to a form of Providence. Bossuet, Hegel, and Marx, by the very fact that they assign a meaning to events, belong to the same family or at least do not essentially differ from each other, the important thing being not to define or determine this meaning but to resort to it, to postulate it; and they resort to it, they postulate it. To turn from a theological or metaphysical conception to historical materialism is simply to change providentialisms. Were we in the habit of looking beyond the specific content of ideologies and doctrines, we should see that to claim kinship with one of them rather than some other does not at all imply much expenditure of sagacity. Those following one party imagine they differ from those following another, whereas all, once they choose, join each other
underneath
, participate in one and the same nature, and vary only in appearance, by the mask they assume. It is folly to imagine that truth resides in choice, when any adoption of a position is equivalent to a contempt for truth. To our misfortune, choice, position-taking, is a fatality no one escapes; each of us must opt for a nonreality, an error, obligatory fanatics that we are, sick men, fever victims: our assents, our adherences, are so many alarming symptoms. Whoever identifies himself with anything gives evidence of morbid dispositions: no salvation and no health outside of pure being — as pure as the Void. But let us return to Providence, a subject scarcely less vague. To discover how seriously a historical period was stricken, the dimensions of the disaster it was obliged to suffer, simply measure the desperation with which believers justified the designs, the program, and the behavior of the divinity. Not at all surprising that de Maistre’s crucial work,
Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg
, should be a variation on the theme of the temporal government of Providence:
did
he not live in a time when making his contemporaries discern the effects of divine goodness required the combined resources of sophistry, faith, and illusion? In the fifth century, in a Gaul ravaged by barbarian invasions, Salvianus, writing
De Gubernatione Dei
, had faced a similar task: desperate combat against the evidence, mission without an object intellectual effort based on hallucination. . . . Justification by Providence is the quixotism of theology.

Dependent though it is on various historical moments, a sensibility to fate is nonetheless conditioned by the nature of the individual. Whoever engages in important enterprises knows himself to be at the mercy of a reality that is beyond him. Only frivolous minds, only the “irresponsible.” believe they act freely; the rest, at the heart of an essential experience, are rarely free from the obsession of necessity or of their “star,” Rulers are administrators of Providence, observes Saint-Martin; elsewhere, Friedrich Meinecke remarks that in Hegel’s system, heroes figure as no more than functionaries of Absolute Spirit. An analogous sentiment led de Maistre to call the leaders of the Revolution merely “automata,” “instruments,” “villains,” who, far from governing events, on the contrary submitted to their course.

As for these automata, these instruments, how were they more culpable than the “higher” power that had provoked them and whose decrees they were so faithfully executing? Would that power not be equally “villanous”? Since it represented for de Maistre the only fixed point in the midst of the revolutionary “whirlwind,” he does not indict it, or at least he behaves as if he accepted its sovereignty without argument. In his mind, it would in fact intervene only at moments of disturbance and would vanish during periods of calm, so that he implicitly identifies it with a temporal phenomenon, with a circumstantial Providence, useful in explaining catastrophes, superfluous in the intervals between them and when passions die down. For us it is fully justified only if manifest everywhere and always, only if it keeps permanent vigil. What was such a power doing before 1789? Was it sleeping? Was it not at its post throughout the eighteenth century, and did it not want anything to do with that century which de Maistre, despite his theory of divine intervention, makes chiefly responsible for the advent of the guillotine?

For him such a power assumes a content, becomes truly Providence, starting from a miracle, from the Revolution; “. . . that in the dead of winter a man should command a tree, in the presence of a thousand witnesses, suddenly to cover itself with leaves and fruit, and that the tree should obey, everyone will acclaim as a miracle and hail the thaumaturge. But the French Revolution and all that is happening at this moment is quite as wondrous, in its way, as the instantaneous fructification of a tree in the month of January.”

Facing a force that performs such marvels, the believer will wonder how to safeguard his freedom, how to avoid the temptation of quietism and the more serious one of fatalism. Such difficulties, raised early in the
Considérations
, the author attempts to evade by subtleties or by equivocation: “We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that binds but does not enslave us. What is admirable in the universal order of things is the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely enslaved, they function at once by will and by necessity: they really do as they wish, but without being able to upset the general plan.”

“A supple chain,” slaves who act “freely”: these are incompatibilities that betray the thinker’s embarrassment over the impossibility of reconciling divine omnipotence and human freedom. And it is doubtless in order to save that freedom, to leave it a wider field of action that he postulates the withdrawal of divine intervention in moments of equilibrium — brief intervals indeed, for Providence, reluctant to remain long in eclipse, emerges from its repose only to strike, to manifest its severity. War will be its “department,” in which it permits man to act “only in a virtually mechanical fashion, since successes in this realm depend almost entirely upon what depends least upon him,” War will therefore be “divine.” “a law of the world” — divine above all in the way it breaks out: “At the very moment occasioned by men and prescribed by justice, God advances to avenge the iniquity that the inhabitants of the world have committed against Him.”

Divine
: there is no adjective de Maistre uses more readily. Constitution sovereignty, hereditary monarchy, and papacy are all, according to him, “divine” institutions, as is any authority consolidated by tradition, any order whose origins data back to a remote period; the rest is all “wretched usurpation,” hence “human” work. In short,
divine
relates to the body of institutions and phenomena execrated by liberal thought. Applied to war, the adjective seems, at first glance, unfortunate; replace it with
irrational
and it is no longer so. This kind of substitution, if made in many of de Maistre’s observations, would attenuate their scandalous character; but by resorting to it, do we not ultimately dilute a thought whose virulence constitutes its charm? The fact remains that to name and invoke God at every moment, to associate Him with the horrible, has something about it that sends chills down the spine of any balanced, reticent, and reasonable believer, contrary to the fanatic — the real believer — who relishes the divinity’s bloodthirsty escapades.