Maistre: Considerations On France 🔥

For Maistre, a constitution cannot be "made" by a committee; it must be "grown" through history, tradition, and divine sanction. He believed that the more a constitution is written down, the weaker it is, as true political authority rests on the "unwritten" prejudices and religious sentiments that bind a people together. The "Miracle" of the Restoration

He argues that the revolutionaries were merely "instruments" of a higher power. He notes that the leaders of the Revolution—Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just—possessed no true greatness; rather, they were swept along by a "revolutionary torrent" they could not control. Their role was to punish the French nobility and clergy for their decadence and skepticism, effectively "bleeding" France so it might eventually return to its traditional roots. The Fallacy of Written Constitutions Maistre: Considerations on France

A significant portion of the essay is dedicated to a critique of rationalist political theory. Maistre famously mocked the abstract "Rights of Man" championed by the National Assembly. He argued that "Man" as a universal concept does not exist: For Maistre, a constitution cannot be "made" by