In a manner he felt himself to be a Frenchman. All his life long he proclaims, and by his actions proves, himself to be the loyal subject and servant of the King of Sardinia; but, when he is more than usually ill rewarded for his services, the thought strikes him that it was really by a kind of mistake of nature that he was not born a Frenchman. We read in one of his letters (_Correspondance diplomatique_, i. 197): "I cannot get rid of the feeling that, let me do what I will, I am not the man to suit His Majesty. Sometimes in my poetic day-dreams I imagine that nature, carrying me in her apron from Nice to France, tripped on the Alps (a very excusable thing in an old lady) and let me fall into Chambéry. She ought by rights to have gone straight to Paris, or at any rate to have stopped at Turin, where I could have developed properly; but on the 1st of April 1754 the irreparable mistake was made. I discover in myself a certain Gallican element, for which, be it observed, I have all due respect." Thus it is not merely permissible but obligatory to set De Maistre's name first on the list of the men who brought about the powerful reaction in France against the fundamental ideas of the eighteenth century.
His first book, written in 1796, already shows the character of the reaction to which he gives expression, and which he endows with stubborn consistency. While the Revolution is still proceeding, but at the moment when the counter-revolution is beginning to make its influence felt, he eagerly vindicates the two powers which the century had repudiated--belief in the supernatural and fidelity to political tradition.
Maintaining that every nation, like every individual, has its mission to fulfil, he declares that France has guiltily abused the position of authority given to her in Europe. She stood at the head of the religious system, and not without reason were her kings called "the most Christian." As she has used her power to act in direct contradiction to her mission, it can surprise no one that she is being brought back to the right path by terrible chastisements. The French Revolution is marked by _Satanic_ traits, which distinguish it from anything ever seen before and possibly from anything that will ever be seen again. Its so-called legislators have issued such a proclamation as this: "The nation supports no religion," words which would almost seem to indicate hatred of the Divine Being.