Tea at Trianon: Joseph de Maistre as a Neoplatonist

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, May 16, 2026

Joseph de Maistre as a Neoplatonist

From Philip Diaz-Lewis at Rationis Fines:

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) looms as a dark figure over European philosophy. Writing during the Wars of the French Revolution, and in opposition to everything which that Revolution stood for, the Savoyard count is seen as the father of reactionary thought. Isaiah Berlin rather infamously characterises him as an obscurantist, authoritarian, and a precursor to Fascism.2 Maistre is the thinker who, after all, praises the executioner as the man who holds society together with just violence3, and who writes in the St Petersburg Dialogues that, “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death”.4
I’ve lately been reading two scholarly works that challenge this picture, both from this century. The first is Cara Camcastle’s The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre (2005), and Joseph de Maistre and the Legacy of Enlightenment (2011). The latter especially interests me, because it makes a sustained case that Maistre should be read as a Christian Platonist.
First, a quibble with the sources to frame the context. Douglas Hedley says that, “The Romantic period was the age of a revival of Neoplatonism”, in order to characterise Maistre as part of this Romantic revival.5 This is true, but incomplete.
To see the continuity between Maistre and earlier Platonism, it’s important to understand the profound grip that Neoplatonism had on conservative thinking in 18th century France. Yes, this was the era of the philosophes, Voltaire and Diderot, who challenged religious and spiritual notions with an empiricist worldview. However, this was also the era in which Augustinianism was prominent in French Catholicism. (Read more.)