Maistre. JOSEPH MARIE, COMTE DE, was born 1st April 1754, at Chambéry, of a noble French family which had settled in Savoy. While Savoy was occupied in 1792 by the French, De Maistre, who was a member of the senate, withdrew from the country; and when the king of Sardinia retreated to the island of Sardinia, he accompanied his court. In 1803 he was sent as ambassador to St Petersburg, and here he remained until 1817, when he was recalled to occupy a place in the home government. Thereafter he lived in Turin till his death, February 25, 1821. De Maistre was an ardent ultramontane, and argued with an incisive force of logic and brilliancy of rhetoric more often associated with the opposite side. He maintained the pope as the source and centre of all earthly authority, and an ordered theocracy as the only protection from social and religious anarchy. He is an unusually strong and steady thinker, and has a remarkable faculty of forcing plain arguments forward to an irresistible conclusion. He is profoundly learned as well as logical, and, in short, is much more easily denounced than answered. His first work was Considérations sur la France (1796), an able defence of Legitimist views, and onslaught on the philosophes of the 18th century. In St Petersburg he wrote his Constitutions Politiques (1810), Du Pape (1821), De l'Église Gallicane (1821-22), Soirées de St Pétersbourg (1822). The last is unfinished and desultory, but is pregnant with strong thought and suggestiveness. Here is to be found the panegyric on the hangman as the foundation of social order. Other works are his Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon (1836) and Lettres et Opuscules (1851). See Life by Glaser (Ber. 1865), by Margerie (Par. 1886); Sainte-Beuve's Portraits Cont. (vol. iii.); John Morley's Critical Miscellanies; Descotes, Joseph de Maistre avant et pendant la Révolution (1893-95); and other books by Lescure (1893) and Cogordan (1894).
XAVIER DE MAISTRE, his younger brother, was born at Chambéry in October 1763, and from an early age served in the Sardinian army. He shared his brother's politics, and after the campaign of 1799 followed Suwaroff to Russia. Here he served with distinction, rising to the rank of geueal, married a Russian lady, and settled down, even after the fall of Napoleon had restored the dynasty of Piedmont. He paid visits to Naples and Paris, where Sainte-Beuve saw him, and died at St Petersburg, 12th June 1852. His name is remembered for a few delightfully fresh and unpretending books, written in perfect French, and showing that rare mastery of the narrative art in the simple fashion for which Sainte-Beuve sets him beside Prosper Mérimée. The best known is the Voyage autour de ma Chambre (1794), a quaint fantasy, giving an account of a temporary confinement to his quarters at Turin, that might have been written by a stainless Sterne. Le Lépoux de la Cité d'Aoste, a sweet and touching little story, shows the same inspiration and the same originality in the use made of it. Other stories are Les Prisonniers du Caucase and La jeune Sibérienne. The Expédition Nocturne autour de ma Chambre is a less successful continuation of his earliest book. De Maistre's Œuvres appeared at Paris in 1825 (new edition, 3 vols. 1881). See Rey's Xavier de Maistre (1865).