Joseph de Maistre was a very frightening figure to many of his contemporaries – frightening because of what he wrote rather than because of what he was. Indeed his contemporaries had not very much chance of meeting him, since the most important years of his life were spent in the service of the King of Sardinia, and at the court of St Petersburg, to which he was appointed as diplomatic representative. He was frightening to them because of the violence, the intransigence and the extremely uncompromising and hard-headed dogmatism with which he wished to strike down the doctrines of which he disapproved.

The normal view of him is fairly stated by Émile Faguet, perhaps the most accurate and the fairest-minded critic of Maistre in France in the nineteenth century. He calls Maistre ‘a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner’. And again, ‘his Christianity is terror, passive obedience and the religion of the State’; his faith is merely ‘a slightly touched-up paganism’; he is a ‘Praetorian of the Vatican’. An admirer speaks of his ‘Christianity of terror’; Edgar Quinet, a Protestant under the influence of the German romantics, writes of Maistre's ‘inexorable God aided by the hangman; the Christ of a permanent Committee of Public Safety’; and in our own day the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno refers to Maistre's ‘slaughter-house’.

Digression on Christianity

There is a satanic quality to the French Revolution that distinguishes it from everything we have ever seen or anything we are ever likely to see in the future. Recall the great assemblies, Robespierre's speech against the priesthood, the solemn apostasy of the clergy, the desecration of objects of worship, the installation of the goddess of reason, and that multitude of extraordinary actions by which the provinces sought to outdo Paris. All this goes beyond the ordinary circle of crime and seems to belong to another world.

Even now, when the Revolution has become less violent, and wanton excesses have disappeared, the principles remain. Have not the legislators (I use their term) passed the historically unique rule that the nation will support no form of worship? Some of our contemporaries, it seems to me, have at certain moments reached the point of hating the Divinity; but this frightful act of violence was not necessary to render the very greatest creative efforts useless. The mere omission (let alone contempt) of the great Being in any human endeavour brands it with an irrevocable anathema. 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.

Man can modify everything within the sphere of his activity, but he creates nothing: such is his law, in the physical world as in the moral world.

Undoubtedly a man may plant a seed, raise the tree, perfect it by grafting, and trim it a hundred different ways, but he would never imagine that he had the power to make a tree. How can he have imagined that he had the power to make a constitution? Would it be from experience? Let us see what experience teaches us.

All free constitutions known to men have been formed in one of two ways. Sometimes they have germinated, as it were, in an unconscious manner through the conjunction of a multitude of so-called fortuitous circumstances, and sometimes they have a single author who appears like a sport of nature and enforces obedience. In either case, here are the signs by which God warns us of our weakness and of the rights that He has reserved to Himself in the formation of governments:

1 No constitution is the result of deliberation. The rights of the people are never written, or at any rate, constitutive acts or fundamental written laws are never more than declaratory statements of anterior rights about which nothing can be said except that they exist because they exist.

2 God, not having judged it appropriate to use supernatural means in this area, has at least so far circumscribed human action that in the formation of constitutions circumstances do everything and men are only part of the circumstances.

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.

In the works of man, everything is as wretched as their author; views are restricted, means rigid, motives inflexible, movements painful, and results monotonous. In divine works, the riches of infinity are openly displayed in the least part. Its power is exercised effortlessly; everything is supple in its hands, nothing resists it, and for it everything, even obstacles, are means; and the irregularities introduced by the operation of free agents fit into the general order.

If we imagine a watch all of whose springs vary continually in strength, weight, dimension, form, and position that nevertheless invariably keeps perfect time, we will form some idea of the action of free beings relative to the plans of the Creator.

In the political and moral world, as in the physical world, there is a usual order and there are exceptions to this order.

The king of Dahomey, in the African interior, was not so wrong, unfortunately, when he recently told an Englishman, ‘God made the world for war; all realms, great and small, have always practised it, although on different principles.’

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.

The closing of the temple of Janus under Augustus can be cited; there was one year in Charlemagne's warlike reign (the year of 790) when there was no war. One can point to a short period after the Peace of Ryswick in 1697 and another equally short after that of Karlowitz in 1699 when there was no war, not only in Europe, but even in all the known world. But these are merely exceptions. Moreover, who can know what is happening over the entire globe at a given time?

The century that is just ending began, for France, with a cruel war that was not terminated until the Treaty of Rastadt in 1714. In 1719, France declared war on Spain; the Treaty of Paris put an end to it in 1727. The election of the king of Poland rekindled war in 1733; the peace was made in 1736. Four years later, the terrible War of the Austrian Succession broke out and lasted without interruption until 1748.

Digression on the king and on his declaration to the French of July 1795

People have held three different theories about the old French constitution: some have claimed that the nation had no constitution; others have claimed the contrary; and finally, others, taking a middle position, as usually happens on important questions, have claimed that the French really had a constitution, but that it was not observed.

The first view is indefensible; the other two do not really contradict each other.

The error of those who claim that France had no constitution stems from that great mistake about human power, prior deliberation, and written laws.

If a man of good faith, given only good sense and probity, were to ask what the old French constitution was, he could be answered boldly: ‘It is what you sensed when you were in France; it is that mixture of liberty and authority, law and opinion that would lead the foreign traveller in France, even though he was subject to a monarchy in his own country, to believe that he was now living under another government than his own’.

But if one wants to study the question more deeply, the characteristics and laws which ranked France above all known monarchies may be found in the corpus of French public law.

This monarchy possesses a certain theocratic element that is peculiarly its own and that has given it a lifespan of fourteen hundred years. There is nothing so national as this element.

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.

It has been a long time since we have seen such frightful punishment inflicted on such a large number of guilty people. No doubt there are innocents among the unfortunate victims, but they are far fewer than is commonly imagined.

All those who laboured to free the people from their religious beliefs, all those who opposed the laws of property with metaphysical sophisms, all those who said ‘Strike, so long as we win something’, all those who counselled, approved, or favoured the use of violent measures against the king, etc., all these willed the Revolution, and all who willed it have very justly, even according to our limited insight, become its victims.

We groan to see illustrious scholars fall beneath Robespierre's axe. Humanly, we cannot be too sorry for them; but divine justice has not the least respect for geometers or physicists.

While Philoctetes recounted his adventures, Telemachus had remained as if suspended and motionless. His eyes were fixed on this great man who was speaking. All the different passions with which Hercules, Philoctetes, Ulysses, and Neoptolemus had been affected, appeared successively upon the naive countenance of the young Telemachus as they were represented in the course of the narration. He sometimes exclaimed and interrupted Philoctetes undesignedly; sometimes he appeared very thoughtful, like one meditating deeply upon the consequences of things. When Philoctetes described the perplexity of Neoptolemus, who was incapable of dissimulation, Telemachus seemed to be in the same situation; and one would have taken him then for Neoptolemus himself.

Here begins the second part of this book, which addresses chivalrous nobles

The first chapter describes how these nobles are the arms and hands of the body politic

Having concluded speaking to princes whom we described according to Plutarch as the head of the living image of the body politic and exhorting them to a virtuous life, it is appropriate in this second part of the present book to keep our promise and speak of the arms and hands of this image which, according to Plutarch, are the nobles, knights, and all those of their estate. In order to follow the style already begun, we ought to discuss their introduction to virtue and good manners, and particularly to deeds of chivalry, for they are responsible for guarding the public, according to the writings of the authors. While the same virtue is just as appropriate and necessary for the ordinary person, the simple knight, or the noble, as for princes, nevertheless, the estates differ in their way of life, in their conversation, and kinds of activity; thus it is suitable for my treatment of the subject to differ as well. The thing that is appropriate for the prince to do is not appropriate for the simple knight or the noble, and likewise the opposite.

Considered to be the first woman of letters of France, Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430) was born in Venice. She was the daughter of Thomas de Pizan, medical doctor and astrologer, whose training at the prestigious University of Bologna brought him an appointment to the court of Charles V of France. In 1369 he settled his young family in Paris which became their permanent home. Christine was encouraged in her education both by her father and her young husband, Etienne du Castel, whom she married in 1380. Christine's love of learning and familiarity with court life brought their reward when she was suddenly left a young widow at the age of twenty-five, with three young children, a widowed mother, and an orphaned niece to support. Christine turned to a life of letters at first for consolation and later for income, writing a series of remarkable books that included works of poetry, biography, politics, chivalry, warfare, religion and philosophy for a variety of wealthy and noble patrons.

When The Book of the Body Politic was written between late 1404 and 1407, France was hovering on the brink of civil war. The intricate and complicated struggle between the French and the English commonly called the Hundred years War (1337–1453) was an extension of the conflict between these two developing nations that had begun in the twelfth century.