Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism was the satisfaction of imaginative cravings. When JOSEPH DE MAISTRE (1753-1821) revolted against the eighteenth century, it was a revolt of the soul; when he assailed the authority of the individual reason, it was in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of the Senate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the French Republican soldiery in 1792, and he retired to Lausanne. He protested against the Revolutionary aggression in his _Lettres d'un Royaliste Savoisien_; inspired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his _Considerations sur la France_, he interpreted the meaning of the great political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France--assigned by God the place of the leader of Christendom, the eldest daughter of the Church--for her faithlessness and proud self-will. The sacred chastisement accomplished, monarchy and Catholicism must be restored to an intact and regenerated country. During fifteen years Maistre served the King of Sardinia as envoy and plenipotentiary at the Russian Court, maintaining his dignity in cruel distress upon the salary of a clerk. Amiable in his private life, he was remorseless--with the stern charity of an inquisitor--in dogma. In a style of extraordinary clearness and force he expounded a system of ideas, logically connected, on which to base a complete reorganisation of European society. Those ideas are set forth most powerfully in the dialogues entitled _Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg_ and the treatises _Du Pape_ and _De l'Eglise Gallicane_.