MAISTRE, JOSEPH DE

born April 1, 1753, Chambry, Fr. died Feb. 26, 1821, Turin, kingdom of Sardinia French polemical author, moralist, and diplomat who, after being uprooted by the French Revolution, became a great exponent of the conservative tradition. He studied with the Jesuits and became a member of the Savoy Senate in 1787, following the civil career of his father, a former Senate president. After the invasion of Savoy by Napoleon's Revolutionary army in 1792, he began his lifelong exile in Switzerland; there he frequented Mme de Stal's literary salon at Coppet. Appointed envoy by the king of Sardinia to St. Petersburg in 1803, he remained at the Russian court for 14 years, writing Essai sur le principe gnrateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (1814) and his best work (unfinished), Les Soires de Saint-Petersbourg (1821), acclaiming the public executioner as the guardian of social order. On his recall he settled in Turin as chief magistrate and minister of state of the Sardinian kingdom. Maistre was convinced of the need for the supremacy of Christianity and the absolute rule of both sovereign and pope. He opposed the progress of science and the liberal beliefs and empirical methods of philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke. He also wrote Du pape (1819) and Lettres sur l'Inquisition espagnole (1838), an apology for the Spanish Inquisition's punitive role, defending his absolutist convictions with rigorous logic. It was as a logical thinker, pursuing consequences from an accepted premise, that Maistre excelled; the poet Charles Baudelaire acknowledged that it was Maistre who taught him to think.