ABSTRACT
France in the years since his death in 1821, Count Joseph de Maistre, author of Du Pape and Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, was little known in America. His works are not available in English, and when he is mentioned, it is usually simply as the supreme champion of clerical reaction. It is hard to imagine anyone more remote from the America of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman than this somberly reactionary envoy from Sardinia to the court of Alexander I. This general intellectual assault on the assumptions of democratic liberalism at a time when the United States was contending with Russia for world leadership in the name of democratic liberalism had caused a spiritual expatriation in the approach to literature which goes much deeper than the physical expatriation of the twenties. The central question is of the nature of man, and from its answer the religious, literary and political conclusions follow.
