"A fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat... the champion of the
hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism... part learned
doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." Thus did Emile Faguet
describe Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753-1821) in his 1899 history of
nineteenth-century thought. This view of the influential thinker as
a reactionary has, with little variation, held sway ever since. In
The French Idea of History, Carolina Armenteros recovers a very
different figure, one with a far more subtle understanding of, and
response to, the events of his day. Maistre emerges from this
deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment
and the historicized thought of the nineteenth century. Armenteros
demonstrates that Maistre inaugurated a specifically French way of
thinking about past, present, and future that held sway not only
among conservative political theorists but also among intellectuals
generally considered to belong to the left, particularly the
Utopian Socialists. The historical rupture represented by the
French Revolution compelled contemporaries to reflect on the nature
and meaning of history. Some who remained religious during those
years felt history with particular intensity, awakening suddenly to
the fear that God might have abandoned humankind. This profound
spiritual anxiety emerged in Maistre's work: under his pen,
everything-knowledge, society, religion, government, the human
body-had to be historicized and temporalized in order to be known.
The imperative was to end history by uncovering its essence.
Socialists, positivists, and traditionalists drew on Maistre's
historical ideas to construct the collective good and design the
future. The dream that history held the key to human renewal and
the obliteration of violence faded after the 1848 revolutions, but
it permanently changed French social, political, moral, and
religious thought.
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