The New Enfant du Siecle: Joseph de Maistre as a Writer

Maistre owes his longevity as a writer to his forced habitation in history. The French Revolution was historically unprecedented in that it dragged every individual, willing or not, from the
private world of domesticity onto a public realm governed by the tyranny of journalism. Maistre’s compelled entry into history formed him as a writer – by obliging him to develop divergent writing personas, by subjecting him to the Revolution’s polemical paradigms, and by simply driving him to write.