[4] Despite his close personal and intellectual ties with France, Maistre was throughout his life a subject of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which he served as a member of the Savoy Senate (1787–1792), ambassador to the Russian Empire (1803–1817),[5] and minister of state to the court in Turin (1817–1821).

"[17] A member of the progressive Scottish Rite Masonic lodge at Chambéry from 1774 to 1790,[18] Maistre originally favoured political reform in France, supporting the efforts of the magistrates in the Parlements to force King Louis XVI to convene the Estates General.

[19] Maistre was alarmed by the decision of the Estates-General to combine aristocracy, clergy and commoners into a single legislative body which became the National Constituent Assembly.

[23] His diplomatic responsibilities were few and he became a well-loved fixture in aristocratic and wealthy merchant circles, converting some of his friends to Roman Catholicism and writing his most influential works on political philosophy.

Maistre's observations on Russian life, contained in his diplomatic memoirs and in his personal correspondence, were among Leo Tolstoy's sources for his novel War and Peace.

He interpreted the Revolution of 1789 as a providential event in which the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Ancien Régime in general, instead of directing the influence of French civilization to the benefit of mankind, had promoted the atheistic doctrines of the 18th-century philosophers.

"[25] Maistre's analysis of the problem of authority and its legitimacy foreshadows some of the concerns of early sociologists such as Auguste Comte[26] and Henri de Saint-Simon.

[29] After the appearance in 1816 of his French translation of Plutarch's treatise On the Delay of Divine Justice in the Punishment of the Guilty, Maistre published Du Pape ("On the Pope") in 1819, the most complete exposition of his religious conception of authority.

Soirées de St. Pétersbourg (1821) is a theodicy in the form of a Platonic dialogue[33] in which Maistre argues that evil exists because of its place in the divine plan, according to which the blood sacrifice of innocents returns men to God via the expiation of the sins of the guilty.

[35] Maistre also argued, romantically, that genius plays a pivotal role in great scientific discoveries, as demonstrated by inspired intellects such as Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, contrary to Bacon's theory about conforming to a mechanistic method.

[39][40] Maistre exerted a powerful influence on the Spanish political thinker Juan Donoso Cortés,[41][42] the French royalist Charles Maurras and his nationalist movement Action Française[43] as well as the German philosopher of law Carl Schmitt.

[45] Early sociologists such as Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon explicitly acknowledged the influence of Maistre on their own thinking about the sources of social cohesion and political authority.

"[49]The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 describes his writing style as "strong, lively, picturesque" and states that his "animation and good humour temper his dogmatic tone".

[51] Admiring the splendour of his prose, Lamartine stated: "That brief, nervous, lucid style, stripped of phrases, robust of limb, did not at all recall the softness of the eighteenth century, nor the declamations of the latest French books: it was born and steeped in the breath of the Alps; it was virgin, it was young, it was harsh and savage; it had no human respect, it felt its solitude; it improvised depth and form all at once ... That man was new among the enfants du siècle [children of the century].

[36][57][24][58] Among those who admired him was Charles Baudelaire – the most famous Romantic poet in France – who described himself a disciple of the Savoyard counter-revolutionary, claiming that Maistre had taught him how to think.