The Icon and the Axe

Man will finish by destroying himself in accordance with an "occult and terrible law" which permeates nature. It was far harder for Peter the Great to abolish beards than to get his people to go to war-even when they were losing. There is an irresistible fascination with bloody violence, which is attested to even in man's highest religions. Lofty prophetic monotheisms, such as Islam and Judaism, require bloodletting in circumcision, and the loftiest of all, Christianity, required crucifixion. Salvation is a mysterious gift gained only through bloody sacrifice and requiring a special priestly caste to keep the secrets and disperse authority.13 Political authority likewise is based on fear of the hangman and requires the right of summary execution by the sovereign to be effective.14 He hails the Jesuits as "the Janissaries of St. Peter," who "alone could have prevented the Revolution."15 But he feels that Europe is disintegrating and will give way to some savage tribe, such as the natives of New Holland, who have a word lor forced abortion but not for God.1(i His last words were: "the earth is trembling, yet you want to build."17

A hint of premonition is introduced at the beginning of his most famous work dealing with Russia. The setting for the Evenings is the "fleeting twilight" of the northern summer, where the sun "rolls like a flaming chariot over the somber forests which crown the horizon, and its rays reflected by the windows of the palaces give the spectator the impression of an immense conflagration."18 De Maistre believed that the flames were already reaching St. Petersburg; but, like the Old Believers, he considered fire a purifying rather than a destructive force. He saw the flame of poetry mixed in with the flame of revolution, and he betrays the same mixture of horror and fascination with which many Russian intellectuals were to look on their country. De Maistre was appalled in 1799 at the arrival in Italy of Suvorov's army, "Scyths and Tatars from the north pole coming to slit the throats of the French,"10 yet he soon became convinced that Russia was an instrument chosen by Providence for the salvation of Europe. He spoke contemptuously about Russia's tendency toward violence and assassination, yet was fascinated with the potentialities for sudden political and ideological change with which this "Asiatic remedy" provided Russia.20 He loved to visit the supposedly haunted regions of Gatchina and the room in the Mikhailovsky Palace in which Paul was killed.

Almost immediately upon arrival he wrote of the danger to Russia of "minds fashioned by La Harpe"21 in the Tsar's entourage and soon gathered about himself a constellation of older noblemen who also had reason to be apprehensive of the Tsar's new advisers and liberal inclinations: the Stroganovs, Tolstoys, Kochubeis, and the Viazemskies. The leader of the latter family, Catherine's former procurator general, provided the salons which, along with the new Jesuit headquarters in St. Petersburg, became the centers for De Maistre's activities.

Like Possevino in the sixteenth century and Krizhanich in the seventeenth, De Maistre became fascinated by the possibility of converting this vast land to Catholicism. He launched a program for the conversion of "one dozen women of quality" and helped gain for the Jesuits increasing authority within the empire.22 As the euphoria of the summit meeting of 1807 between Napoleon and Alexander receded and the possibility of war with France grew, De Maistre's influence increased proportionately. He became a leader in the ideological mobilization of the Russian aristocracy, portraying their struggle as that of Christian civilization against the new Caesar.

He began his public attack on the liberalism of Alexander's earlier years in 1810 with Five Letters on Public Education in Russia, an indictment of Speransky's proposed educational reforms.23 The following year he began his correspondence with Count Uvarov, the future minister of education and theoretician of reaction. He also delivered a long memorandum to

Alexander Golitsyn, later printed as Four Chapters on Russia,2* and participated with Admiral Shishkov and other reactionary leaders in the newly formed patriotic society Lovers of Russian Speech. At the time of Speransky's dismissal in the spring of 1812, De Maistre reached the height of his influence. He held a number of long private conversations with the Tsar and was offered the position of official editor of documents published in the Tsar's name.