Maistre () was born in 1753 at Chambéry, in the Duchy of Savoy, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, ruled by the House of Savoy. His family was of French origin. His grandfather André Maistre, who came from a modest Provençal background, had been a draper and councilman in Nice, while his father François-Xavier had emigrated to Chambéry in 1740, rising to the rank of Senator and magistrate, and eventually receiving the title of count from the King of Piedmont-Sardinia. His mother's family, whose surname was Desmotz, were from Rumilly. Joseph's younger brother, Xavier, would become a military officer and a popular writer of fiction.

Joseph was probably educated by the Jesuits. After the Revolution, he became an ardent defender of their Order, increasingly associating the spirit of the Revolution with the spirit of the Jesuits' traditional enemies, the Jansenists. After completing his training in the law at the University of Turin in 1774, he followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a Senator in 1787.

A member of the progressive Scottish Rite Masonic lodge at Chambéry from 1774 to 1790, Maistre was initially sympathetic to reform movements in France and supported the efforts of the magistrates in the Parlements to force King Louis XVI to call the States-General. As a landowner in France, Maistre was eligible to join that body, and there is some evidence that he contemplated that possibility. He was alarmed, however, by the decision of the States-General to join the three orders of clergy, aristocracy, and commoners into the single legislative body that became the National Constituent Assembly, and he turned against the course of events in France after the revolutionary legislation of 4 August 1789 was passed (see August Decrees).

Maistre fled Chambéry after it was taken by a French revolutionary army in 1792. Unable to find a suitable position in the royal court in Turin, he briefly returned to Chambéry the following year, but decided that he could not support the French-controlled regime and soon departed for Lausanne, in Switzerland. He visited the salon of Madame de Staël, where he discussed politics and theology, and began his career as a counter-revolutionary writer with works such as Lettres d'un royaliste savoisien ("Letters from a Savoyard Royalist", 1793), Discours à Mme. la marquise Costa de Beauregard, sur la vie et la mort de son fils ("Discourse to the Marchioness Costa de Beauregard, on the Life and Death of her Son", 1794) and Cinq paradoxes à la Marquise de Nav... ("Five Paradoxes for the Marchioness of Nav...", 1795).

From Lausanne, Maistre emigrated to Venice, and then to Cagliari, where the King of Piedmont-Sardinia was exiled after the French armies took control of Turin in 1798. Maistre's relations with the court at Cagliari were not always easy, and in 1803 he was sent to Saint Petersburg, Russia as ambassador to Tsar Alexander I. There Maistre, whose diplomatic responsibilities were few, became a well-loved fixture in aristocratic circles, converting many 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 abundant personal correspondence, would become one of Tolstoy's sources for the novel War and Peace. After the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the House of Savoy's dominion over Piedmont (under the terms of the Congress of Vienna) Maistre returned to Turin in 1817 and served there as magistrate and minister of state until his death. He died on 26 February 1821 and was buried in the Jesuit Church of the Holy Martyrs (Chiesa dei Santi Martiri).

In Considérations sur la France ("Considerations on France," 1796), Maistre maintained that France had a divine mission as the principal instrument of good and of evil on Earth. He considered the Revolution of 1789 a Providential occurrence: the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the whole of the old French society, instead of using the influence of French civilization to benefit mankind, had promoted the atheistic doctrines of the eighteenth-century philosophers. The crimes of the Reign of Terror were the apotheosis and logical consequence of the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century, and the divinely decreed punishment for it.

His short book Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines ("Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions," 1809), Maistre argues that constitutions are not artificial products but come from God, who slowly brings them to maturity. 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, in 1819 Maistre published Du Pape ("On the Pope").

Unlike earlier monarchists, Maistre did not simply invoke the divine right of kings, but also argued for the social utility of the belief in such a divine right: any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to the questioning of those grounds and to unsolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government. This, in turn, will lead to violence and chaos. The social legitimacy of government must therefore be based on compelling non-rational grounds, which its subjects should not be willing (or allowed) to question. Furthermore, all government must ultimately depend on a single, supreme authority, not subject to any appeal. For Maistre, such ultimate authority had to be tied to religion, and could in Europe only be provided by the person of the Pope. This analysis of the legitimacy of political authority foreshadowed some of the later concerns of sociologists such as Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte.

Besides a voluminous correspondence, Maistre left two posthumous works. One of these, the Examen de la philosophie de Bacon, ("An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon," 1836), develops a spiritualist epistemology out of a critique of Francis Bacon, whom Maistre considers a fountainhead of the Enlightenment in its most destructive form. The Soirées de St. Pétersbourg ("The Saint Petersburg Dialogues", 1821) is a theodicy in the form of a Platonic dialogue, in which Maistre proposes his own solution to the age-old problem of the existence of evil. He argues that evil throws light upon the designs of God. The shedding of blood, the expiation of the sins of the guilty by the innocent, is for Maistre a law as mysterious as it is indubitable, the principle that propels humanity in its return to God, supplying an explanation for the existence and the perpetuity of war.

Maistre can be counted, with the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, as one of the fathers of European conservatism. Since the 19th century, however, his providential, authoritarian, "throne and altar" conception of conservatism has declined in comparison with the more pragmatic conservatism of Burke. His stylistic and rhetorical brilliance, on the other hand, have made him enduringly popular as a writer and controversialist. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 describes Maistre's style as "strong, lively, picturesque," and adds, "animation and good humour temper his dogmatic tone. He possesses a wonderful facility in exposition, precision of doctrine, breadth of learning, and dialectical power." Alphonse de Lamartine, though a political enemy, could not but admire the splendour of Maistre's prose:

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.

—Alphonse de LamartineSouvenirs et portraits

Émile Faguet described Maistre as "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner".

Maistre's critique of the Enlightenment, especially its rationalism, made him an attractive countercultural figure. For example, the Decadent poet Charles Baudelaire declared himself a disciple of the Savoyard counter-revolutionary, and claimed that Maistre had taught him "how to think." More recently, Pat Buchanan has described Maistre as a "great conservative."

Isaiah Berlin in his Freedom and Its Betrayal views his writings as "the last despairing effort of feudalism...to resist the march of progress." According to Berlin, Maistre's emphasis on the need for a social order based on unquestioned authority and founded on an emotional allegiance, rather than on any of the claims of reason, makes him one of the earliest precursors of the fascist "vision of the universe." In fact, Maistre was one of the major influences on 20th century French right-wing politicians, such as the monarchist Charles Maurras and the members of his Action Française, whose prestige and influence were greatly damaged by their collaboration with the Nazi-controlled regime of Vichy (1940—44), during the Second World War.

• Nobilis Ioseph Maistre Camberiensis ad i.u. lauream anno 1772. die 29. Aprilis hora 5. pomeridiana (Turin, 1772) - Joseph de Maistre's decree thesis, kept in the National Library of the University of Turin ( link).
• Éloge de Victor-Amédée III (Chambéry, 1775)
• Lettres d'un royaliste savoisien à ses compatriotes (1793)
• Étude sur la souveraineté (1794)
• De l'État de nature, ou Examen d'un écrit de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1795)
• Considérations sur la France (London [Basel], 1796)
• Intorno allo stato del Piemonte rispetto alla carta moneta (Turn, Aosta, Venice, 1797—1799)
• Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (St Petersborg, 1809)
• Du Pape (Lyon, 1819)
• De l'Église gallicane, édit. Rodolphe de Maistre (Lyon, 1821)
• Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg ou Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la Providence, édit. Rodolphe de Maistre (Paris, 1821)
• Lettres à un gentilhomme russe sur l'Inquisition espagnole, édit. Rodolphe de Maistre (Paris, 1822)
• Examen de la philosophie de Bacon, édit. Rodolphe de Maistre (Paris, 1836)
• Lettres et opuscules inédits du comte Joseph de Maistre, édit. Rodolphe de Maistre (Paris, 1853)
• Mémoires politiques et correspondance diplomatique, édit. Albert Blanc (Paris, 1858)

Work in English translation

• Memoir on the Union of Savoy and Switzerland (1795).
• Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809, English translation 1847).
• The Pope: Considered in His Relations with the Church, Temporal Sovereignties, Separated Churches and the Cause of Civilization (1817, English translation 1850).
• Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisition (1822, English translation 1851)
• Blum, Christopher Olaf (editor and translator), 2004. Critics of the Enlightenment. Wilmington, Delaware : ISI Books.
• 1798, "Reflections on Protestantism in its Relations to Sovereignty". 133-56.
• 1819, "On the Pope". 157-96.
• Lively, Jack, 1965. The Works of Joseph de Maistre. Macmillan.