Political Works

"The return to order will not be painful, because it will be natural and because it will be favoured by a secret force whose action is wholly creative. We will see precisely the opposite of what we have seen. Instead of these violent commotions, painful divisions, and perpetual and desperate oscillations, a certain stability, and indefinable peace, a universal well-being will announce the presence of sovereignty. There will be no shocks, no violence, no punishment even, except those which the true nation will approve. Even crime and usurpation will be treated with a measured severity, with a calm justice that belongs to legitimate power only. The king will bind up the wounds of the state with a gentle and paternal hand. In conclusion, this is the great truth with which the French cannot be too greatly impressed: the restoration of the monarchy, what they call the counter-revolution, will be not a contrary revolution, but the contrary of revolution."

"The Count was too restless by nature to write a dull political treatise on the state of affairs in Europe. To satisfy his creative instincts he had to express his personal reflections on theology and present a theosophic interpretation of the future of Europe. When he voices his own views on man's relationship to God his affinity to the Romantics at once becomes apparent."

"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."

"In order to bring about the French Revolution, it was necessary to overthrow religion, outrage morality, violate every propriety, and commit every crime. This diabolical work required the employment of such a number of vicious men that perhaps never before had so many vices acted together to accomplish any evil whatsoever."

"Frenchmen, it was to the noise of hellish songs, the blasphemy of atheism, the cries of death, and the prolonged moans of slaughtered innocence, it was by the light of flames, on the debris of throne and altar, watered by the blood of the best of kings and an innumerable host of other victims, it was by the contempt of morality and the established faith, it was in the midst of every crime that your seducers and your tyrants founded what they call your liberty."

"The vices are very justly man's executioners."

"Almost all errors spring from the misuse of words."

"'Long live the king,' cry the loving and the loyal, beside themselves with joy. 'Long live the king,' responds the republican hypocrite in dire terror. What does it matter? There is only one cry. And the king is crowned."

"Because every plebeian tyranny is by its very nature impetuous, insulting, and ruthless, that which accomplished the French Revolution had to push these characteristics to excess. The world has never seen a baser or more absolute tyranny."

"All honour comes from God, said Homer of old; he spoke exactly like St Paul, without having plagiarized him. One thing certain is that man cannot impart that indefinable characteristic that is called dignity. Honour belongs preeminently to the sovereign alone; from him, as from an immense reservoir, it is bestowed in proper number, weight, and measure on various classes and individuals."

"The art of the legislator is not to make a people free, but free enough."

"Open your eyes and you will see that [the French constitution] does not live. What an enormous machine! What a multiplicity of springs and clockwork! What a fracas of pieces clanging away! What an immense number of men employed to repair the damage! Everything tells us there is nothing natural in these movements, for the primary characteristic of the creations of nature is power accompanied by an economy of means. Everything being in its place, there are no jerks or bumps, friction is low, and there is no noise, only majestic silence. So it is that in the mechanism of nature, perfect balance, equilibrium, and exact symmetry of parts give even rapid movement the satisfying appearance of repose."

"There is the same difference between political theory and constitutional laws as there is between poetics and poetry. The illustrious Montesquieu is to Lycurgus, in the intellectual hierarchy, what Batteux is to Homer or Racine. Moreover, these two talents positively exclude each other, as can be seen by the example of Locke, who fumbled badly when he presumed to give laws to the Americans."

"I have spoken of one basic characteristics of true legislators. Another very remarkable feature, on which it would be easy to write a book, is that they are never what are called scholars: they do not write, they act on instinct and impulse more than on reasoning, and they have no other means of acting than a certain moral force that bends men's wills like grain before the wind."

"The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me."

"Evil has nothing in common with life; it cannot create, since its power is purely negative. Evil is the schism of being; it is not true."

"Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force."

"[Friends of order] are often heard to say that the Jesuits must be reestablished. Without disputing the merits of this order, one must say that this suggestion for their reestablishment indicates a lack of deep reflection. Do they mean that St Ignatius is at hand ready to serve our purposes? If the order were destroyed, perhaps it could be reestablished by some lay brother with the same inspiration that created it originally, but all the sovereigns in the world would never succeed."

"A legislator resembles the Creator by not working all the time; he creates and then he rests. All true legislative action has its Sabbath, and intermittence is its distinctive characteristic."

"Men gather the clouds, and then they complain of the tempests that follow."

"There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil, since nothing is in its place."

"Why so many laws? Because there is no legislator. What have these so-called legislators done in six years? Nothing, for to destroy is not to make."

"There is no chastisement that does not purify; there is no disorder that ETERNAL LOVE does not turn against the principle of evil."

"You, masters of the earth – princes, kings, emperors, powerful majesties, invincible conquerors – simply try to make the people go on such-and-such a day each year to a given place to dance. I ask little of you, but I dare give you a solemn challenge to succeed, whereas the humblest missionary will succeed and be obeyed two thousand years after his death. Every year the people gather around some rustic temple in the name of St John, St Martin, St Benedict, etc.; they come, animated by a feverish and yet innocent eagerness; religion sanctifies their joy and the joy embellishes religion; they forget their troubles; on leaving they think of the pleasure that they will have on the same day the following year, and the date is set in their minds."

"To compare Christianity to other religions is mere wrangling; several striking characteristics exclude all comparisons. This is not the place to list them; just a word will be enough. Who can show us one other religion founded on miracles and revealing incomprehensible dogmas, yet believed for eighteen centuries by the greater part of mankind and defended down through the ages by the greatest men of each era from Origen to Pascal, despite the utmost efforts of an enemy sect that, from Celsus to Condorcet, has never ceased its bellowing?"

"Do not listen to the reasoners; there has been too much reasoning in France, and reasoning has banished reason. Put aside your fears and reservations, and trust the infallible instinct of your conscience. Do you want to redeem yourselves in your own eyes? Do you want to acquire the right of self-esteem? Do you want to accomplish a sovereign act? . . . Recall your sovereign."

"This makes me think that the French Revolution is a great epoch and that its consequences, in all kinds of ways, will be felt far beyond the time of its explosion and the limits of its birthplace."

"Providence has given the French nation precisely two instruments, two arms, so to speak, with which it stirs up the world – the French language and the spirit of proselytism that forms the essence of the nation's character."

"Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense, the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must flow without interruption somewhere or other on the globe, and that for every nation, peace is only a respite."

"Every nation, like every individual, has received a mission that it must fulfil. France exercises over Europe a veritable magistracy that it would be useless to contest and that she has most culpably abused. In particular, she was at the head of the religious system, and not without reason was her king called most Christian; Bossuet was never able to say too much on this point. And so, since she has used her influence to contradict her vocation and demoralize Europe, we should not be surprised if she is brought back to her mission by terrible means."

"We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us. Nothing is more admirable in the universal order of things than the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely slaves, they act voluntarily and necessarily at the same time; they really do what they will, but without being able to disturb the general plans. Each of these beings occupies the centre of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the will of the Eternal Geometer, who can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature."

"It is from the shadow of a cloister that there emerges one of mankind's greatest very greatest scourges. Luther appears; Calvin follows him. The Peasants' Revolt; the Thirty Years' War; the civil war in France; the massacre of the Low Countries; the massacre of Ireland; the massacre of the Cévennes; St Bartholomew's Day; the murders of Henry II, Henry IV, Mary Stuart, and Charles I; and finally, in our day, from the same source, the French Revolution."

"The Gallican church was a cornerstone of the Catholic system, or better, the Christian system, for in truth there is only the one. Although they may perhaps doubt it, churches opposing the universal Church subsist only by virtue of its existence, being similar to those parasitic plants, those sterile mistletoes that live only from the substance of the tree which supports them and which they impoverish."

"When the human soul has lost its strength through laziness, incredulity, and the gangrenous vices that follow an excess of civilization, it can be retempered only in blood. Certainly there is no easy explanation of why war produces different effects in different circumstances. But it can be seen clearly enough that mankind may be considered as a tree which an invisible hand is continually pruning and which often profits from the operation. In truth the tree may perish if the trunk is cut of the tree is overpruned; but who knows the limits of the human tree? What we do know is that excessive carnage is often allied with excessive population, as was seen especially in the ancient Greek republics and in Spain under the Arab domination."

"If Providence erases, it is no doubt in order to write."

"I am a perfect stranger to France, which I have never seen, and I expect nothing from her king, whom I shall never know."

"You feared the force of custom, the ascendancy of authority, the illusions of the imagination. None of these things are left; there are no more customs, there are no more masters, each man's mind is his own. Philosophy having corroded the cement that united men, there are no longer any moral bonds."

"Now the real fruits of human nature – the arts, sciences, great enterprises, lofty conceptions, manly virtues – are due especially to the state of war. […] In a word, we can say that blood is the manure of the plant we call genius."

"Our descendants, who will worry very little about our sufferings and will dance on our graves, will laugh at our present ignorance; they will easily console themselves for the excesses that we have seen and that will have preserved the integrity of 'the most beautiful realm after that of heaven'."

"Men do not lead the revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men. They are right when they say it goes all alone. This phrase means that never has the Divinity shown itself so clearly in any human event. If the vilest instruments are employed, punishment is for the sake of regeneration."

"Enthusiasm and fanaticism are not lasting phenomena. Human nature soon tires of this kind of ecstasy. […] The peak of the fever having subsided, great outbursts of enthusiasm are always followed by despondency, apathy, and indifference. This is precisely the situation in France at the moment, where nothing is desired passionately except repose."

"What are we, weak and blind human beings! And what is that flickering light we call Reason? When we have calculated all the probabilities, questioned history, satisfied every doubt and special interest, we may still embrace only a deceptive shadow rather than the truth. What decree has He pronounced on the king, on his dynasty, on his family, on France, and on Europe? Where and when will the troubles end, and by how many misfortunes must we purchase our tranquillity? Is it to build that He has overthrown, or are our hardships to last forever? Alas! A dark cloud hides the future and no eye can penetrate its shadows."

"In divine works, everything, even obstacles, are means."

"Too many French scholars were the principal authors of the Revolution, too many approved and gave their support so long as the Revolution, like Tarquinius' sceptre, struck down only the tallest heads. Like so many others, they said, It is impossible to make a great revolution without incurring misfortunes. But when a philosopher justifies evil by the end in view, when he says in his heart, Let there be a hundred thousand murders, provided we are free, and Providence replies, I accept your offer, but you must be included in the number, where is the injustice?"

"The people stand silently in long queues to cast their votes in the ballot boxes the same way as they throw other papers into the dustbin. This is the traditional democracy prevalent in the whole world, whether the system is one-party, two-party, multi-party or non-party. Thus it becomes clear that representation is fraud."

"If, however, the parliament emerges from a party as a result of winning an election, it is a parliament of the party and not of the people. It represents the party and not the people, and the executive power assigned by the parliament is that of the winning party and not of the people. The same is true of the parliament in which each party holds a number of seats. For the members of the parliament represent their party and not the people, and the power established by such a coalition is the power of the combined parties and not of the people. Under such systems the people are victims fooled and exploited by political bodies."

"Peoples are left with only false external appearance of democracy manifested in long queues to cast their votes in the ballot boxes."

"Parliaments have been a legal barrier between the peoples and the exercise of authority, excluding masses from power while usurping sovereignty in their place."

"The prevailing traditional democracy endows the member of a parliament with a sacredness and immunity denied to other individual members of the people. That means that parliaments have become a means of plundering and usurping the people's authority."

"The party, as stated above, represents the outlook of a certain group of people, or the interests of one group of the society, or one belief or one locality. Such a party must be a minority compared to the whole people just as the tribe and the sect are. The minority has common interests or a sectarian belief. From such interests or belief, the common outlook is formed."