The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854

This is a book about the beginnings of historical thinking as a philosophical enterprise. The historical rupture represented by the French Revolution compelled contemporaries to reflect on the nature and meaning of history. For the generation educated in the downfall of a whole world, history was no longer dead and distant, as it had often been for the detached writers of the Enlightenment. It was alive in blood and fire. Some who remained religious during those years felt history with particular intensity, awakening suddenly to the fear that God might have abandoned humankind altogether, and that his ways through time must be discovered if faith was to be kept and defended. To many who experienced the Revolution, history properly understood revealed Providence’s designs. This book focuses on the historical thought of a man to whom the Revolution brought profound spiritual anxiety. And it tells the story of the quiet upheaval that his reflections, dispersed across political and philosophical boundaries, effected in nineteenth-century French thought and politics. For Maistre’s bold propositions about the unfolding of time fired the imagination of friends as well as foes, inspiring socialists and royalists, positivists and traditionalists to recover the past, contemplate the future, and hasten the arrival of the utopia at the end of time.