Since then, France's history features said recurrent patterns of political thought, with reactionaries longing for an erstwhile pre-Revolutionary Golden Age, by repudiating two centuries of progress since the Revolution in 1789.
(see Action Française) Joseph de Maistre, even though not a French citizen (being a magistrate and diplomat of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia), is the Bourbon Restoration's philosopher of reaction; his writings are authoritative sources of reactionary ideas advocating authoritarian government of a society classified according to a divinely-established "natural inequality".
A pessimist about Man's nature, he repudiated the Revolution's humanist principles and socio-political institutions, because they originated in the anti-Christian Enlightenment, saying it was God who created the State, not a human social contract; societal order and stability are paramount, yet feasible only via obedience to a Church-anointed absolute monarch; and that civil law expressed custom and tradition, not the fickle opinion of the people.
He buttressed the convictions of already-convinced reactionaries; attacked the Revolution for creating individualism and centralization in government; championed absolute monarchy and the Church as the only means of securing domestic tranquillity.
He proposed restoring the mediaeval guild system to ensure the rights (and obligations) of every French social class.