After the still further losses which, in the year of the publication of this book, the French Revolution inflicted on Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel summoned Joseph de Maistre to Turin, and he remained there for the brief space during which the king retained a remnant of territory on the mainland. Then he went to the island of Sardinia itself, and held office at Cagliari. In 1802 he was appointed envoy extraordinary an! minister plenipotentiary at St Petersburg, and journeyed thither the next year. Although his post was no sinecure, its duties were naturally less engrossing than the official life, with intervals of uneasy exile and travelling, which he had hitherto known, and his literary activity was great. He only published a single treatise, on the Principe générateur des Constitutions; but he wrote his best and most famous works, Du Pape, De V Église Gallicane, and the Soirées de St Pétersbourg, the last of which was never finished. Du Pape, which the second-named book completes, is a treatise in regular form, dealing with the relations of the sovereign pontiff to the church, to temporal sovereigns, to civilization generally, and to schismatics, especially Anglicans and the Greek Church. It is written from the highest possible standpoint of papal absolutism. The Soirées de St Pétersbourg, so far as it is anything (for the arrangement is somewhat desultory), is a kind of théodicée, dealing with the fortunes of virtue and vice in this world. It contains two of De Maistre’s most famous pieces, his panegyric on the executioner as the foundation of social order, and his acrimonious, and in part unfair, but also in part very damaging, attack on Locke. The Du Pape is dated May 1817; on the Soirées the author was still engaged at his death. Besides these works he wrote an examination of the philosophy of Bacon, some letters on the Inquisition (an institution which, as maybe guessed from the remarks just noticed about the executioner, was no stumbling-block to him), and, earlier than any of these, a translation of Plutarch’s “Essay on the Delay of Divine Justice,” with somewhat copious notes. After 1815 he returned to Savoy, and was appointed to high office, while his Du Pape made a great sensation. But the world to which he had returned was not altogether in accordance with his desires. He had domestic troubles; and chagrin of one sort and another is said to have had not a little to do with his death by paralysis at no very advanced age. Most of the works mentioned were not published till after his death, and it was not till 1851 that a collection of Lettres et Opuscules appeared, while even since that time fresh matter has been published.

Joseph de Maistre was one of the fnost powerful, and by far the ablest, of the leaders of the Neo-Catholic and anti-revolutionary movement The most remarkable thing about his standpoint is that, layman as he was, it was entirely ecclesiastical. Unlike his contemporary Bonald, Joseph de Maistre regarded the temporal monarchy as an institution of altogether inferior importance to the spiritual primacy of the pope. He was by no means a political absolutist, except in so far as he regarded obedience as the first of political virtues, and be seldom loses an opportunity of stipulating for a tempered monarchy. But the pope’s power is not to be tempered at all, either by councils or by the temporal power or by national churches, least of all by private judgment. The peculiarity of Joseph de Maistre is that he supports his conclusions, or if it be preferred his paradoxes, by the hardest and heaviest argument. Although a great master of rhetoric, he never makes rhetoric do duty for logic. Every now and then it is possible to detect fallacies in him, but for the most part he has succeeded in carrying matters back to those fundamental differences of opinion which hardly admit of argument, and on which men take sides in consequence chiefly of natural bent, and of predilection for one state of things rather than for another. The absolute necessity of order may be said to have been the first principle of this thinker. He could not conceive such order without a single visible authority, reference to which should settle all dispute. He saw that there could be no such temporal head, and in the pope he thought that he saw a spiritual substitute. The anarchic tendencies of the revolution in politics and religion were what offended him. It ought to be added that he was profoundly and accurately learned in history and philosophy, and that the superficial blunders of the 18th century philosophes irritated him as much as their doctrines. To Voltaire in particular he shows no mercy.

A good and complete edition of De Maistre lias yet to appear. Of the two works named as his masterpieces, Du Pape is to be found in the Bibliothèque Charpentier, and the Soirées de St Pétersbourg is printed in two volumes, the fifteenth edition, so-called, bearing date Lyons, 1878.

MAISTRE, Xavier de, the younger brother of Joseph, was born at Chambéry in October 1763, and died at St Petersburg on the 12th June 1852. He served when young in the Piedmontese army, and wrote his Voyage autour de ma Chambre when he was in garrison at Turin. This, a delightful fantasy piece which may have owed something to the example of Sterne in its conception, but which is quite original in execution, he showed to his brother Joseph, and on his approval it was published at Turin in 1794. Xavier, however, shared the politics and the loyalty of his brother, and the annexation of Savoy, followed as it was at no long date by the extinction of Piedmontese independence, made him quit his country. He served in the victorious Austro-Russian campaign in which Suwaroff performed such wonders, and accompanied the marshal to Russia. For a time he was in very reduced circumstances, and is said to have supported himself by painting. But on his brother’s arrival in St Petersburg he was introduced to the minister of marine. He was appointed to several posts in the capital, but also saw active service, was wounded in the Caucasus, and attained the rank of major-general. He married a Russian lady and established himself in his adopted country, even after the overthrow of Napoleon, and the consequent restoration of the Piedmontese dynasty. For a time, however, he lived at Naples, but he returned to St Petersburg and died there. He was only once at Paris (in 1839), when Sainte-Beuve, who has left some pleasant reminiscences of him, met him. Besides the Voyage already mentioned, Xavier de Maistre’s works (all of which are of very modest dimensions) are Le Lépreux de la Cité d’Aoste, a touching little story of human misfortune, Les Prisonniers du Caucase, a powerful sketch of Russian character, La Jeune Sibérienne, and the Expédition Nocturne, a sequel to the Voyage autour de ma Chambre. But his Voyage is, with the Lépreux, his title to fame. Both have a certain resemblance to Sterne, the first in its quaintness and desultory arrangement, the second in its sentiment. Xavier de Maistre is, however, much less artificial than his forerunner, especially in his pathos, and he is also much better bred. His style is of remarkable ease and purity. The works of Xavier de Maistre, with the exception of some brief chemical tractates, are usually printed in a single volume, which figures in the collections of Charpentier, Garnier, &c.