I suppose this is the sort of thought animating capital-C capital-N Christian Nationalists[0] in the Old Country? (albeit presumably, there, with more of a proddie than a catholic justification?)
IIRC, Isaiah Berlin suggested[1] that de Maistre was worth reading, because although he was a loon, he is no fool[2].
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/10/27/views-of-the...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin#Counter-Enlighte...
[2] by way of supportive evidence, he did help prepare Pound for capital-F Fascism
[Edit: some clarifications for modern readers:
> ... the nation which itself bears so great a name, since it gave its name to frankness, ...
Here, of course, de Maistre means the french and France.
etymologically similar: Ferengi, political franchise.
> ... inhabited by pickpockets and street girls.
In the days when (a) the institution of matrimony was between men of 35+ and girls of 15+ (leaving boys and younger men with a couple of decades of fending for themselves), and (b) OnlyFans would not be invented for at least another century (those days having ended ca. 1918), prostitution (especially of the sort that did not require ascending staircases) was much more common. ]
Lagniappe: https://youtu.be/JLMuZ517jfk?t=120
I was introduced to de Maistre years ago in my reading of Berlin. While I appreciate Berlin for having shared his name and thought to a generation of people who otherwise never would have heard of him, nowadays his reading of de Maistre appears to me to obscure his meaning.
Interesting about Pound; I was entirely unaware that he had read de Maistre, but I definitely see the connection.
I would certainly hesitate to class de Maistre as "proto-fascistic". Fascism was always opposed to the Church and held to an all-encompassing view of the state, and the Church hierarchy is not simply an alternative form that "the state" takes in de Maistre.
However, I can see how it would make sense to class de Maistre in such a way if one represents political thought strictly within the dimensions of "libertarian/authoritarian" etc. [For myself, the key dimension in politics is "modern" (in the sense of an obedience to what is immediate in the senses)/"traditional" (in the sense of an obedience to what is received mediately). There are, of course, many subsidiary dimensions that are important to consider, but from an aerial view it seems to boil down to this primary axis.]
> I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong, and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid. —GKC
(and the US context is just plain odd — some of the most vocal backers of "The Constitution is Divinely Inspired" dogma are not even protestant christian: they are Mormon)
