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Entry: Libertarians in Heaven Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/blessed_libertarian#13573 Post contents: @Frank, I think the Revolution had a dramatic effect on De Maistre, as it did on other intellectuals (both pro and con). But anyone who has read DU PAPE or SOIREES DE SAINT PETERSBURG could never mistake him for any kind of proto-neo-con. What I have always found fascinating about De Maistre, as indeed other figures of that transitional period, is indeed how they reacted to the upheaval in France. Most on this list know about Burke (and his translator in German lands, Friedrich Gentz), but, as Paul Gottfried has shown in an earlier volume, the "Revolution" (capital "R")caused tremendous intellectual ferment and re-examination on the part of many former "illuminees" (who perhaps weren't really that "illuminee" to begin with?). In Bavaria, with Adam Mueller and others, in Spain with Jaime Balmes and "Lost Persos" and their famous manifesto, with Villeneuve-Bargemont in France...there is indeed a mini-Counter-Reformation not only politically but intellectually, as the fact of the Revolution forced willy-nilly the defenders of the ancien regime to re-examine their unstated postulates and to formulate, on paper, their beliefs and views, most of which were wrapped up very closely with "altar and throne." Indeed, this is more or less the origin of the modern distinctions between what we call "right" and "left" (or "siniestra"...as the Right would call their opponents, with the implication of "sinister" as well). Those beliefs that men had assumed were unassailable prior to 1789 now required written and argued responses. Bertier de Sauvigny's book THE RESTORATION (on France) recounts some of that history in "the eldest daughter" of the Church, as doews Rene Remond's classic THE RIGHT-WING IN FRANCE and Matthew Elbow's FRENCH CORPORATIVE THEORY. My friend Alexandra Wilhelmsen (in her book on Carlism) has done the same thing for Spain. And Sir Harold Action, in his two delightufl books on the Bourbons of Naples, details, using diaries and journals of the period, the raw popular and Catholic reaction to the Revolution in Naples and parts of Italy. Who can forget the incredible action of Cardinal Ruffo di Calabria, who landed in 1799 with just a handful of retainers on the coast of wild southern Italy and organized an army of 100,000 Italian Catholic peasants, defeating the best armies that the French Revolutionaries could throw at him? And then, retaking Naples for the Bourbons, tried without much success to restrain the faithful peasants who severed the heads of any "liberal" or revolutionary they could find in that city (tossing the heads over the royal palace gates to salute the return of their rightful king!?) Or Andreas Hofer in Austria, who lead a tremendous uprising of Catholic volk against the French? Yes, we know about the Vendee, the Chouans in Normandy, and of course, the pre-Carlists revolt against Revolution in Spain, but we need to focus the reactions in other Catholic countries as well, and see the reaction, both popular AND intellectual across the board. I think De Maistre was part of that. Sent at: 2008 11 21