"The Considérations sur la France (1797) uses the ancient technique of deinôsis, a Greek term signifying the religious horror that mortals experience in the presence of a terrifying divinity. The imprecations, vociferations and vituperations of his style are so many codes of his anti-modernity, of his repulsion for what Baudelaire called ‘that famous flowing style, dear to the bourgeois’ – and to the philosophes that Maistre decried. The bracing rage that erupts throughout his writings is a marker of class and political persuasion. More importantly, though, rage lends to pamphleteering a Scriptural dimension. Maistre himself saw his own writing as an ‘act of justice,’ a manifestation of holy wrath that emulated the Logos and set the mind on fire; while his pamphlets were the mouthpieces of an irate God who scandalized ignorance with prophecy in the tradition of the Old Testament."