A Conservative Justification for the Political Violence of the French Revolution?

In this chapter, I explore Joseph de Maistre’s (1753–1821) providential views on the violence and the Terror of the French Revolution. Conservatism is usually described as the polar opposite and as the political counterforce to both the Jacobin radicalism of the Revolution and its modern political descendants. Soon after the bloody culmination of the French Revolution, many began to see the Enlightenment as the culprit behind the revolutionary violence and terror. One of the most fervent critics of both the Revolution and the Enlightenment was Joseph de Maistre, an ardently Catholic Savoyard writer, philosopher, and diplomat. According to him, the Revolution had brought about a final death battle between Christianity and something that he contemptuously called philosophism. By trying to understand and come to terms with the recent, shocking events, Maistre began to interpret them as a thoroughly planned, necessary and just interference of divine Providence. He claimed that the Revolution and its horrors were a divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. This way, he even came to provide the revolutionary violence with a moral and therefore positive purpose, since God’s punishment could have no other aim than to eliminate evil. Thus, rather unexpectedly, Maistre’s deterministic, providential interpretation of the violence of the revolutionary Terror ultimately led him to provide a type of justification for it. My focus in this chapter is on Maistre’s political intention and aspiration when portraying the violence of the Revolution, its immediate causes and its broader meaning as a decisive necessity ordained by the divine Providence. I argue that his providential account of the violent events of the French Revolution was no mere theological depiction but, rather, intended to serve a very normative and political purpose. By trying to convince his readers that humans themselves have no role nor agency in great upheavals, that the restoration of monarchy was a deterministic inevitability, Maistre wished to persuade them to join the Counter-Revolution and to abandon their dangerous, Enlightenment-rooted liberal values.