Roberto
de Mattei
Corrispondenza
Romana
February 24, 2021
On February 26th two hundred years ago, Count
Joseph de Maistre, one of the great masters of 19th century counter-revolutionary
thought, (1753-1821) died.
Joseph-Marie de Maistre was born at Chambéry in Savoy
on April 1, 1753, the first-born of ten in a family of loyal servants to the Savoyard
Dynasty, and successor to his father, Francois-Xavier, as Magistrate and
Senator of the Kingdom of Sardinia. After studying Jurisprudence in Turin and
concluding his studies in 1772, he commenced his work as Magistrate in his
birth-place. Consequent to the Napoleonic
invasion of 1796, he followed the misfortunes and exile of the Savoyard Dynasty
until 1802, when King Vittorio Emanuele I sent him as Plenipotentiary to Czar
Alexander I, in St. Petersburg.
Alphonse de Lamartine points out that “it would have been impossible to meet Count Joseph de Maistre without imagining your were in the presence of something great” , referring to the reading of the dispatches, Maistre, as representative of the King of Sardinia to the Court of the Czar, sent to his Sovereign. (cf. Joseph de Maistre, Napoleone, la Russia, l’Europa, Donzelli, Roma 1994). From the Petersburg dispatches we follow Napoleon’s advance step by step, in a contest where “the world is at stake”. More than dispatches, they are full reports, rich in erudite observations and insightful aphorisms, but not understood by Vittorio Emanuele I, an honest man but of mediocre intelligence and through his Prime Equerry he sent this message to his Minister in St. Petersburg: “For the love of God, tell Count de Maistre to write dispatches not dissertations.”
After the fall of Napoleon, Vittorio Emmanuele I
didn’t choose Maistre as his representative at the Congress of Vienna which
opened in 1814. The outcome of the historical congress, furthermore,
disappointed Maistre, who believed that a purely exterior restoration would not
have been able resist the revolutionary influence. “The Counter-Revolution – he stated succinctly – will not be a revolution of contrary signs,
but the contrary of the Revolution.”
On March 27 1817, Maistre definitively left Russia,
which by then had become his second-home, and returned to Turin where he was
showered with belated honors, like that of being appointed Regent to the
Kingdom of Sardinia’s Chancellery. Until his death he was a zealous member of
Padre Pio Brunone Lanteri’s * anti-Enlightenment Catholic association, diffused
in France, Austria and Piedmont. “Our objective – he wrote in December
1817 to Count Fredrich Stolberg, who had repudiated Protestantism, - is precisely the counterpart to the ruinous
propaganda of last century and we are perfectly sure that we are not mistaken,
doing for the good what it has done for evil with so much deplorable success.”
One of the shadows hovering round the figure of Maistre
is his youthful involvement in Freemasonry. In 1774 he joined the English Rite
Lodge Trois Mortiers and in 1778 he
switched to the Scottish Rite amended by the Parfaite Sincérité. After
the French Revolution, and notably commencing with his arrival in Russia in
1803, he abandoned Freemasonry, but seemed to make a distinction between the
Illuminati, who were conspiring against the throne and the altar, and a
spiritualist Freemasonry, favoring religion and the monarchy. This distinction
must however be clearly rejected. Papal
condemnations include all expressions of Freemasonry and not just one part of
it, as the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reiterates in a
document of November 1883, wherein it stipulates that “the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic
association remains unchanged since their principles have always been
considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church.”
The most serious scholars of the Savoyard thinker,
like Marc Frioidefont (Théologie de Joseph de Maistre, Garnier, Paris
2010) nonetheless, dismantled the attempt of certain esoteric environments to
appropriate for themselves an
authentically Catholic writer, as was Joseph de Maistre. He belongs, along with
Louis Gabriel de Bonald (1754-1840),
Juan Donos Cortés (1809-1853), Ludwig von Haller (1768-1854) and many others, to those authors who entered the fray to
denounce with courage and clarity the ruinous consequences of the French
Revolution. Monsignor Henri Delassus (1836-1921) whose work sums up the thought
of the Catholic Counter-Revolution of the 19th century, defines
Maistre “the visionary” (La Conjuration
antichrétienne, Lille 1910, vol. 3, p. 938) or “the prophet of the present times” (L’américanisme et la conjuration antichrétienne, Lille 1899, p.
235, indicating him as one of his main points of reference.
Joseph de Maistre was always thoroughly “Savoyard” , as was his
compatriot St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), Bishop of Annecy. On the spiritual
level he belonged to a school that had its roots in St. Francis de Sales, after
the “Ignatian” grafting of the Amicizie
Cattoliche , culminated in St. John Bosco (1815-1888), founder of the
Salesians. In his History of Italy,
Don Bosco dedicates an entire chapter to Joseph de Maistre and was very
attached to his family. Count Rodolfo de Maistre, Joseph’s son hosted Don Bosco
in his home at the Quirinale, during
the saint’s first sojourn in Rome, from February 21 to April 16 1858. Rodolfo’s sons – Francesco, Carol and Eugenio
– treated Don Bosco with likewise devotion and friendship.
When Don Bosco
died, Count Carlo de Maistre, wrote to Don Michele Rua (1837-1910), his
successor as Head of the Salesians: “In
our life, there was no joy, worry or sadness that we didn’t share with him. We shall do the
same with you. The attachment we had for Don Bosco will be the same for all his
sons, for the entire Salesian Congregation, with whom we are affiliated.” Also his brother Francesco, while writing to
Don Rua from France, recalled with heartache the close bonds Don Bosco and the
Maistre family had: “The friendship of
that saintly man was an incomparable treasure, which everyone at home enjoyed
immensely. In the trials that Divine
Providence is pleased to send us, a line, a word from Don Bosco was always a
great comfort to our grieving hearts.”
Count Joseph de Maistre died in Turin on February 26,
1821, and was buried in the Church of the Martyrs, run by the Jesuit Fathers he
had always passionately defended, especially in Russia. In turn, St. John Bosco
rests in the Church of Santa Maria
Ausiliatrice, some hundred meters straight down the road from where the
Savoyard Count awaits the eternal resurrection. On the walls of the first
chapel to the left of this church, you can see the headstone of Joseph de
Maistre’s sepulcher, today still visited by those who cultivate his memory.
*(1759-1830),
Translation:
Contributor, Francesca Romana
