Maistre, Joseph de (zhôzĕf ` də mĕs`trə), 1753–1821, French writer and diplomat. Born in Savoy, he was Sardinian ambassador at St. Petersburg from 1803 to 1817. A passionate Roman Catholic and royalist, he was master of a rigidly logical doctrine and the possessor of a great store of knowledge. These qualities, combined with a fine ability in writing French prose, made him perhaps the most powerful literary enemy of 18th-century rationalism, in which he delighted to detect logical weakness and shallowness. His principal works were Du pape [on the pope] (1819) and Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg [discussions in St. Petersburg] (1821). They develop his idea that the world should be one, ruled absolutely by the pope as the spiritual ruler, with no temporal ruler having an independent authority.

Maistre, Joseph de

(born April 1, 1753, Chambéry, France—died Feb. 26, 1821, Turin, kingdom of Sardinia) French polemical writer and diplomat. A member of the Savoy senate, he moved to Switzerland after the French invasion of Savoy in 1792. He served under the king of Sardinia as envoy to Russia (1803–17), then settled in Turin as chief magistrate and minister of state of the Sardinian kingdom. He was an exponent of the absolutist, conservative tradition and opposed the progress of science and liberal beliefs in such works as Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1814), On the Pope (1819), and The St. Petersburg Dialogues (1821). It was as a logical thinker, pursuing consequences from an accepted premise, that Maistre excelled.