Joseph de Maistre, an unexpected Freemason

In continental Europe, and particularly in France, Freemasons are often thought to be necessarily progressive, republican, democratic, agnostic or even atheist, willingly anti-clerical and always committed to social progress. That a reactionary Catholic, monarchist and ultramontane could have been a Freemason seems at first sight incongruous. But this was the case of Count Joseph de Maistre, a high-ranking member of the Strict Templar Observance and later of the Rectified Scottish Rite, who was close to Jean-Baptiste Willermoz and Louis-Claude de St-Martin. We invite you to discover the surprising Freemason Joseph de Maistre.

The life and career of Joseph de Maistre before the Revolution 

Joseph de Maistre was born on 1 April 1753 in Chambéry, in the Duchy of Savoy, then part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. His father, a magistrate, had been ennobled by King Victor Amadeus III (1726-1796), from whom he derived his title of count. Educated by the Jesuits, Joseph de Maistre followed in his father's footsteps and entered the judiciary in 1774 as deputy advocate general, before being appointed senator of Savoy in 1788, i.e. a member of the duchy's highest court.

It was also in 1774 that he was initiated into Freemasonry, in the Lodge of Les Trois Mortiers in the Orient of Chambéry, which was dependent on the Grand Lodge of London. But he soon grew tired of ordinary Freemasonry, which he described as childish. He had more mystical expectations and in 1778, with a few brothers, he founded a new lodge in Chambéry, La Sincérité. This lodge worked under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Directorate of Lyon, the headquarters of the Auvergne Province of the Strict Templar Observance, led by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (1730-1824). 

In the same year, 1778, the French provinces of the Strict Templar Observance met in Lyon for the Convent of the Gauls and adopted the rituals revised by Willermoz, who had imbued them with Martinezian theosophy. The young Joseph de Maistre embraced the new system with enthusiasm and was made a Knight Beneficent of the Holy City under the name of Eques Josephus a Floribus. He was then admitted to the class of the Grand Professed, the highest and most secret class of the Order, unknown to the ordinary Knights. The complete doctrine of Martinès de Pasqually, as understood and formulated by Willermoz, was taught. This degree was only awarded to a limited number of brothers deemed worthy of it : in Chambéry there were only four, including Joseph de Maistre.

Jean-Baptiste Willermoz

In Germany, the Strict Templar Observance Order was going through a serious internal crisis at the time, and many lodges were leaving the Order to join competing systems (the Swedish Rite, the Zinnendorf Rite, the Golden Rose Croix of Ancient System, etc.). The legitimacy of the Order's founder, Baron von Hund (1722-1776), had already been questioned in the Convent of Kohlo (1772) : many doubted the existence of the Unknown Superiors whom Hund claimed to serve and the reality of the mission he was said to have received from the Stuart pretender Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788) to restore the Masonic Order. Without openly disavowing Hund, the Convent appointed Duke Ferdinand of Braunschweig-Luneburg (1721-1782) as Grand Superior General of the Order, implicitly meaning that there were no Unknown Superiors. Hund was relegated to the rank of Grand Master of the VIIth Province, Grand Visitor of the Order.

In 1775, at the Convent of Brauschweig, the attacks on Hund resumed and he finally broke down and confessed to the fraud. He died the following year.  Ferdinand of Brunswick then decided to reform the Order at a convent to be held in Wihelmsbad in 1782, and in 1780 sent a circular to all the jurisdictions of the Order, asking them to reply in writing to a series of questions which can be summarised as follows Does the Order have superiors? Who are they? Does the Order go back to the Templars? Can the Order of the Temple be restored? Are the rituals appropriate? Should the aims of the Order be secret or public? Does the Order have knowledge that no one else has? The Prefecture of Chambéry sent its official replies, but Joseph de Maistre chose to send his own reply to the Superior of the Order, in the form of a 64-page memoir in which he presented his conception of Freemasonry, its origins, its aims and its organisation. We shall return to this later.

Joseph de Maistre during the Revolution and the Empire

The events of the French Revolution would gradually change Joseph de Maistre's outlook. Hitherto, although a devout Catholic, he had tended to be Gallican (i.e. limiting the power of the Pope to the religious rather than the political sphere), sensitive to the new liberal ideas and supportive of certain republican ideas. Like many eighteenth-century mystics, pietists and exalted Catholics and Protestants, he displayed a form of millenarianism, predicting great events that would turn the world upside down and usher in a new age in which religion, purged of its dross, would finally unite a people of brothers. 

Joseph de Maistre initially recognised the Revolution as the beginning of these events, but quickly became disillusioned when France annexed Savoy in 1792 and imposed the civil constitution of the clergy decreed in 1790. The Terror, which raged between 1793 and 1794, convinced him of the intrinsically destructive and evil nature of the Revolution. He was also personally affected by the revolutionary turmoil, forced into exile in Lausanne, Switzerland, and lost his property, which was nationalised.

From Lausanne, as a correspondent for the Sardinian foreign ministry, he ran an intelligence service and recruited men to strengthen the ranks of the Savoy resistance. He also wrote several anti-revolutionary pamphlets.

Joseph de Maistre

In 1797 he joined King Charles-Emmanuel IV of Sardinia (1751-1819) in Turin, but the following year Piedmont was also invaded by the French, forcing him into exile in Venice and then in Cagliari, Sardinia. After the abdication of Charles-Emmanuel IV in 1802, his brother and successor Victor-Emmanuel I (1759-1824) appointed Joseph de Maistre minister plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of Sardinia to Tsar Alexander I. He remained in St Petersburg for 14 years.

Joseph remained in St Petersburg for 14 years, witnessing the rise of Bonaparte and the creation of the First Empire. The Napoleonic adventure did little to reassure him, and he denounced Napoleon's warmongering and his desire to subject the religious sphere to the authority of the state. For him, it was nothing more than a continuation of the Revolution.

It was in Russia that Joseph de Maistre began to correspond with French anti-revolutionary figures, starting with Viscount Louis de Bonald (1754-1840), one of the main propagandists of the Bourbon Restoration and a pillar of reactionary thought. It was only then that he began to accept the theses of Abbé Barruel (1740-1820), who blamed Freemasonry for the Revolution. Until then, he had always refuted them.

After the Congress of Vienna (1815)

The fall of Napoleon in 1815 led the European powers to redefine their borders at the Congress of Vienna. Savoy, the County of Nice and Piedmont were returned to the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Close to the Jesuits, Joseph de Maistre was suspected of converting Russian personnalities to Roman Catholicism and was forced to leave Russia in 1817. The Jesuits were expelled from Russia in 1820.

Joseph de Maistre first spent three weeks in Paris, where he met Louis XVIII and received a standing ovation at the Académie Française. He returned to Turin, where he was appointed President of the Chancellery and Minister of State, and where he died on 16 February 1821.

The posterity of Joseph de Maistre

Few writers have had such a mixed legacy as Joseph de Maistre. Admired by both the right and the left, he was regarded as a standard bearer by traditionalist Catholics, monarchists, legitimists, traditionalist Freemasons and Catholic Freemasons alike. His dynamic and pamphleteering thought naturally inspired the monarchist movement up to Charles Maurras (1868-1952), as well as that of de Bonald. More surprisingly, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the father of positivism, acknowledged that Joseph de Maistre was one of his sources of inspiration. Similarly, the socialist utopianism of the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists saw him as a precursor. And through Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854), Joseph de Maistre also influenced liberal Catholicism, social Catholicism and Christian democracy.

We might be surprised by this unexpected legacy if we recall Joseph de Maistre's work Du pape (1819) and its defence of papal infallibility, Catholic hegemony, Ultramontanism, the necessary alliance of throne and altar, the necessity of capital punishment and the fight against Protestantism.

Du pape, original 1819 edition

It is probably in the Freemason Joseph de Maistre that we will find the nuances that explain his success in much wider circles than those of the traditionalist and monarchist Catholic reaction. Joseph de Maistre was a Catholic and a monarchist all his life, but in different ways before and after the Revolution.

Before the Revolution, the young Joseph de Maistre was a somewhat exalted Catholic who believed that a great social movement would reform the world and that the different Christian denominations would finally unite under the benevolent leadership of the Pope. His memoir to the Duke of Braunschweig tell us a great deal about his hopes and the role he assigned to Freemasonry in this great project of political, social and religious regeneration. He saw Freemasonry, at least in the highest Martinist degrees of the Rectified Scottish Rite, as the receptacle of a primordial religion from which the various peoples had gradually departed and of which authentic Christianity would be the culmination. The primary aim of Freemasonry would therefore be to re-establish the unity of Christianity, initially around the single head of the Masonic Order (in this case, the Duke of Braunschweig), as a sort of prerequisite for a union with Rome, which he does not openly mention here. Freemasonry would therefore be an opportunity for non-Catholics to participate in the work of renewing the world. 

The form of power he envisaged was autocratic without being authoritarian. He believed that a single leader was necessary, but that the lower levels had a degree of autonomy in the management of their internal affairs, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. He therefore did not rule out a form of local democracy, at the level of grand lodges and individual lodges, but within a model centralised around a single superior general, the guarantor of the whole project.

While the later Joseph de Maistre defended an authoritarian version of papal power, imposing the truth without consultation, the Freemason Joseph de Maistre presented a much more nuanced model, in which the search for compromise played a major role in the quest for the common good. He sincerely believed in this, as shown by his long resistance to the anti-Masonic theses of Abbé Barruel. Even after he ceased to attend lodges, Joseph de Maistre remained loyal to his former brethren. Although he acknowledged that certain secret societies, such as the Illuminates of Bavaria, had reprehensible political projects, he considered ordinary Freemasonry to be mere childishness with no consequences, and he maintained a high regard for the true Illuminates, who for him were the Martinists (at that time the term was used to include both Matinezism and Martinism).

Why such a turnaround in Joseph de Maistre's thinking, from a Catholicising universalism to an intransigent ultramontanism ? History in general and his own particular history were undoubtedly to blame. The excesses of the Revolution, the invasion of his country, his exile and the loss of his lands, Europe in flames and bloodshed, all conspired to show him that his idealistic dreams as a young Mason were clearly a pipe dream. Not absolutely, of course, but until man had reached a certain level of spiritual evolution. That's why he never renounced his Martinist past, and no doubt in his heart he always remained a slightly exalted and idealistic Catholic, with a somewhat questionable orthodoxy.