Joseph De Maistre and Money

This article focuses on the material aspect of the Savoyard philosopher’s life in the period of his emigration. Numerous biographers note the radicalization of Joseph de Maistre’s ideas following the French Revolution and the need to leave Savoy. A clue has been sought to the reasons for his vivid and radical conservatism for approximately two hundred years, giving de Maistre vibrant definitions of a “prophet of the past” or a harbinger of totalitarian regimes of the XX century. The author has chosen a different approach to this problem. His goal lies in coherently tracing the connection between changes in the views of the philosopher and his financial situation. The goal of the study is to describe the main points in de Maistre’s biography, examining it from an economic (more accurately, financial) point of view and taking into account the political, confessional, and ideological contexts within which it unfolded. The author comes to a conclusion consisting of the following. De Maistre’s new personality as a writer and diplomat in the service of the monarchy, developed in emigration, appeared from the fragments of pre-revolutionary life, using its potential in a new environment, putting it into circulation and trying to extract from it a necessary income. It is unclear how the intellectual fate of de Maistre would have turned out if not for the French Revolution and all the subsequent social cataclysms that left an imprint on his life. The French Revolution itself gave the history of philosophy and literature a bright and polemically charged figure, interest in which does not decrease to this day.

1. De Maistre J. Les carnets du comte Joseph de Maistre. Live journal (1790–1817), Paris, Lyon, Emmanuel Vitte, 1923.

2. De Maistre J. Œuvres (ed. P. Glaudes), Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. «Bouquins», 2007.