Joseph de Maistre: interpreting both the French Revolution and the Modernity

• Grant number: 09/18380-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: May 01, 2010
• End date: April 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Modern and Contemporary History
• Principal Investigator: Modesto Florenzano
• Grantee: José Miguel Nanni Soares
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This study aims to recover and explore the Maistrean interpretation of the French Revolution which, in opposition to a widespread historiographical assumption, did not limited itself to the Considérations sur la France (1797) and its providentialist scheme, but rather was expressed in many other writings, assembled in the fourteen volumes of his Oeuvres Complètes. We intend to show that Maistre's great merit was that of subsuming his reading of the French Revolution into the wider historical process of modernization suffered by the West, whose prerequisites, expressed both by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, allowed him to explain the Revolution in France as well as to outline prophetically a new "age of Revolutions". By taking account of the modern historiographical debate and collating it with the Maistrean interpretation of the phaenomenon - grounded, in its turn, on theological-political premises -, we intend to demonstrate how Maistre's interpretation surprisingly coincides with the way we interpret the making of the modernity.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

SOARES, José Miguel Nanni. Joseph de Maistre: interpreter of the French Revolution and modernity. 2014. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.