Two children had been born to him when the French Revolution broke out and made a complete change in his life. Savoy was incorporated with France, and to remain faithful to his king Joseph de Maistre gave up his home; he had to choose between becoming a citizen of the French Republic and having all his property confiscated, and he chose without hesitation. For a few years he lived in Switzerland. Here he wrote his first work, _Considérations sur la France_ (published anonymously in London in 1797), and made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël. Though he considered that her head had been turned by modern philosophy (in his opinion an inevitable consequence in the case of any woman), he acknowledged her to be "astonishingly brilliant, especially when she was not trying to be so." They bickered and wrangled, but were none the less good friends.
In 1797, when the King of Sardinia was obliged to leave his continental territories and take refuge on his rocky island, Count de Maistre happened to be in Turin. He fled to Venice, arriving after many hairbreadth escapes, and there he and his family suffered great privations. From 1800 to 1802, as chief magistrate of Sardinia, he laboured hard to improve the slovenly administration of justice which he found prevailing there. In 1802 the deserted king sent him as envoy-extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to St. Petersburg. His acceptance of this appointment obliged him to part from his wife and children, to whom he was tenderly attached. The pay was so miserable that it barely sufficed to cover his own necessary expenses--he could not afford to provide himself with a fur-lined coat. But in Russia, now passing through the most prosperous period of the reign of Alexander I, De Maistre's capacities found scope for development, and this poor ambassador of a petty power succeeded in winning the Emperor's entire confidence. The strength and purity of his character, his pronounced royalist and conservative views, his knowledge, his sagacity, and his wit ensured him a prominent place at a court whose sovereign knew how to appreciate both an uncommon character and remarkable talent.
Although by birth a Piedmontese, and as a diplomatist to a certain extent a cosmopolitan, Joseph de Maistre belongs by his language--and not by that alone--to French literature. All his literary theories were French, and there was much that was French in his intellectual idiosyncrasy. Not only was France always in his eyes the chief power in Europe, and the King of France, as "the most Christian king," the main bulwark of monarchy and Christianity, but he was at heart on the side of France even when it was for his ideas that her enemies were waging war upon her. In spite of everything he rejoiced when Republican France defeated the army of the allied monarchs. For what they desired was the division of France, the annihilation of its power. "But our descendants, who will think with indifference of our sufferings and dance upon our graves, will make very light of the excesses which we have witnessed and which have preserved undivided the most delectable kingdom after that of heaven." He desires the defeat of the Jacobins, but not the ruin of France, which would be equivalent to the inevitable intellectual relapse of the human race.