BONALD, LOUIS DE (1754–1840)
BONALD, LOUIS DE (1754–1840)
Count Louis de Bonald was a dominant force in the French counter-revolution, both as a theorist and as a political figure. Although he lacked the polemical skills of his contemporary, JOSEPH DE MAISTRE, Bonald developed a set of social theories that exercised a powerful influence on both counter-revolutionary and sociological thought in the nineteenth century. His organicism drew the attention of HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON and his one-time disciple AUGUSTE COMTE, credited as the founder of sociology. Comte honoured Bonald with an entry in his positivist calendar and echoed Bonald in his recognition of the need to study society as a collective phenomenon. Although his key theoretical works, the three-volume Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile, démontrée par le raisonnement et l’histoire (Theory of Political and Religious Power in Civil Society, Proved by Reasoning and History, 1796), Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles (Analytical Essay on Natural Laws, 1799) and the three- volume Législation primitive (Primitive Legislation, 1802) were little read, and little appreciated, Bonald was a prominent counter-revolutionary journalist, a contributor to the Mercure de France, the Gazette de France and a co-founder of CHATEAUBRIAND’S Le Conservateur . Bonald’s organicism exercised a strong influence on the discourse of Legitimists (the supporters of the ousted Bourbon monarchy), who contrasted an ancien régime characterized by a harmonious system of corporate bodies with the individualistic post-revolutionary order. In the late nineteenth century, Catholic traditionalists René de La Tour du Pin and Albert de Mun put forward Bonaldian views, believing corporatism, in the form of ‘organized professions’, to be a remedy for the corrosive individualism born out of the Revolution. Arguably the organicism championed by Pétain’s Vichy regime bore the stamp of such ideas.
Louis-Gabriel-Ambrose de Bonald was born into a wealthy provincial noble family with a tradition of municipal service in the local town of Millau. His education at the prestigious Oratorian Collège de Jully brought him into contact with both the modern ideas of Buffon, Bayle, Malebranche and Newton, and the austere Jansenist strain of Catholicism. After a brief stint in the exclusive but anachronistic Musketeers Bonald returned to his estates in Rouergue, and, in accordance with family tradition, became mayor of Millau. A supporter of the ‘aristocratic revolution’ of 1787–8, Bonald looked to
a revival of provincial estates, seeing in them a solution to what he identified as a noble crisis of identity. In the context of the revolutionary agitation of August 1789 he proposed a confederation of the towns of the Roucrgue, a proposal he later sent to the National Assembly as a blueprint for provincial representation. Despite Bonald’s concern
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for noble leadership, his break with the Revolution came relatively late, precipitated by the issue of the enforcement of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a project to which he was in principle sympathetic.
Although initially enlisted in a émigré force, Bonald soon settled in Heidelberg to serve the counter-revolution with his pen. The result was Théorie, which appeared in 1796 to general indifference. In 1797 Bonald made a clandestine return to France and became active in the Parisian counter-revolutionary circles. His interests in science and affinity to the Idéologues (a group concerned with establishing empirical social sciences) made for a difficult relationship with mainstream counter-revolution was a literary and aesthetic movement. As with many counter-revolutionaries, Bonald entertained certain hopes about the Napoleonic state, but was ultimately disappointed. He nonetheless served Napoleon, accepting a position on the Grand Council of the University in 1810.
The moderate nature of the Restoration was a further disappointment, although Bonald enjoyed an influential political career among the ultra-royalists, becoming a minister of state in 1821, followed by elevation to the Chamber of Peers in 1823 as the Vicomte de Bonald. Convinced of the unwork-ability of the constitutional monarchy established by the Charter, Bonald urged a return to absolute monarchy. His repressive and intolerant attitudes were expressed in his sponsorship of the infamous Sacrilege Law, which proposed the death penalty for sacrilege. Bonald even recommended that the condemned should be forced to make a public confession and beg for forgiveness. This idea of a ritualized punishment is quite as unpleasant as anything encountered in Maistre’s writings, although Bonald lacked Maistre’s dark fascination with bloodshed and expiation. However with the fall of the Bourbon monarchy in the July Revolution Bonald’s counter-revolutionary career effectively came to an end. He withdrew from politics and the only major work he produced in the last decade of his life was his Réflexions sur la révolution du Juillet 1830 (Reflections on the Revolution of July 1830, 1988), a testament to an old man’s bitterness at the perceived inadequacies of the Restoration, ‘a fifteen year farce’.
The long and repetitious Théorie indicates the systematic cast of Bonald’s thought and his scientism. In its modes of argument, with frequent appeals to history and reason, and in its system-building pretensions it was a work of the Enlightenment, but in its conclusions it looked to the re-establishment of a revitalised ancien régime. It represented Bonald’s attempt to construct a science of political society, what he referred to as ‘moral or social science’. This endeavour diverged from Enlightenment science in significant ways, having a religious conception of man at its heart. Bonald’s reason was metaphysical, and he ultimately stood more in the Cartesian tradition than in the Enlightenment tradition. Thus for Bonald Condorcet’s ideas were flawed, not because of his notion of ‘social mathematics,’ but because he possessed a materialistic and sacrilegious view of human nature.
Bonald’s emphasis lay on the organization of society; indeed, organization was identified as the defining characteristic of human life. The divine power constituted society as series of interlocking social structures that contained the destructive human tendencies of egoism and individualism. Thus, as Bonald put it, man did not constitute society, but society constituted man. In a strikingly original insight Bonald also saw language as constituted by society and hence of divine not human origin. The laws, institutions and customs of the ancien régime were an expression of the divine organizing
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power, a set of necessary and legitimate social relations. The revolutionaries were therefore profoundly mistaken in their endeavour, opposing the natural order and ultimately God. The truth of this theory was proved by an appeal to history, which revealed that violence and instability were intrinsic to republics.
Bonald’s focus on the organization of society meant that he lacked Maistre’s obsession with the Revolution. His observations about the Revolution were nonetheless significant, revealing fundamental aspects of his thought. This analysis was most powerfully expressed in Considérations sur la révolution française (Considerations on the French Revolution, 1818) written to refute MME DE STAËL’S account. First Bonald rejected de Staël’s analysis of the ancien régime. Her image of unhappy and oppressed France was inaccurate. The ancien régime was only a time of oppression in one respect, oppressed by the false doctrines and impious writings of the Enlightenment philosophes. True oppression came with the Revolution. Second, Bonald dissected the Revolution. His starting point was to note that the spirit of the Reformation was active in modern revolutions, which rejected authority and attacked the Catholic political society. The spirit of Calvinism was the spirit of democracy. Whereas the revolutions of antiquity had been motivated by ambition for political power, modern revolutions had a moral dimension, an ambition for spiritual power. The Revolution, which Bonald revealingly identified as still active in Europe, had a religious not a political thrust; the intent to de- royalize was intrinsically linked to a project to de-Catholicize. Overall, opined Bonald, the Revolution represented the negation of all social power, political and religious atheism, the destruction of all ideas of power, duty, justice, divinity, humanity and society. It was moral evil at its most powerful.
Yet Bonald also located a further cause of the revolution: the decline of the nobility, which amounted to a loss of the active power of the monarchy. In France, as in every naturally constituted society the nobility represented what Bonald described as ‘the action of power’. The service nobility were evidently a central part of the monarchical state, and Bonald placed a corresponding value on the territorial wealth that buttressed this aristocracy, noting that liquid assets led to democracy. Bonald was intensely hostile to industrialization and urbanization, as conducive to individualism and egoism, identifying
a fatal shift away from the landed system beginning at the turn of the sixteenth century. Bonald’s restoration envisaged a radical reconstruction of society, which necessarily included a return to France’s agricultural traditions.
As has been seen, Bonald identified the revolution as an ongoing phenomenon; his considerations on social organization were concerned with the great question of how to bring the revolution to a close and undo its evils. Arguably this made his thinking on state centralization and the role of the state confused. His ideas appear to have either to have undergone substantial change or to be fundamentally inconsistent and contradictory. Certainly Bonald has been interpreted in diametrically opposed fashions on this issue. One interpretation sees Bonald as essentially a traditional counter-revolutionary, anti- individualist and anti-statist, looking to a reconstituted ancien régime ‘shorn of its abuses’. This was a vision of the ancien régime as a hierarchy of social groups (under noble guidance) that would mediate between the individual and the state. In this reading Bonald possessed a pluralistic theory of authority. The rival interpretation sees Bonald as
a believer in unrestricted state power, a theorist of absolutism.
Entries A-Z 83 The vision of Bonald-as-absolutist rests partly on the second volume of Théorie,
which presents a vision of a reconstituted ancien régime with intendants, no provincial assemblies, an infrequently convened Estates-General and a much-strengthened monarch whose powers would include appointing the members of the parlements. This is evidently at odds with Bonald’s indictment of the haughty central administration in the first volume, blamed for alienating the nobility, leading to apathy and a loss of enthusiasm for public service. His Du divorce (On Divorce, 1801) reinforces this idea of Bonald as a champion of an all-powerful state; the state should possess the right to regulate the family. Bonald’s Restoration politics also support such an interpretation; in his review of
de Staël’s work Bonald commented that in the context of the weak democratic constitution an absolutist administration was necessary. He supported the exceptional laws of the 1820s on the grounds that the stability of the state overrode any other considerations and urged stricter censorship, reiterating the arguments in favour of censorship he had made under the Empire, namely that God himself was ‘supremely intolerant’. There seems little trace of the man who had supported the aristocratic revolt and envisioned a return to provincial assemblies. On the other hand, it is notable that Bonald attacked the fiscal system of the Restoration, blaming high taxation on the mistaken practice of the state provision of public services. Such matters apparently should be left in the hands of the landed bodies of the Church and nobility, traditional providers of charity and education.
A possible way to resolve this argument is to look at Bonald’s position on the nobility. The systems that Bonald constructed were premised on a belief that there was an underlying natural triadic order, from the three estates to the Holy Trinity. Bonald’s image of society was thus expressed in the formula power, minister, subject; power was identified with the monarch, the ministers with the nobility as royal agents, through whom the state power acted on the subjects. Bonald was absolutely unequivocal on the issue of the nobility’s special role as ‘the action of power’. Bonald supported the traditional concept of dérogance, the loss of noble status for those who became involved in commerce, declaring that such activities made nobles unfit for public service, concerned with particular interests. The privileges that the nobles had enjoyed were justified by the nobles’ disinterested service of the state, renouncing lucrative professions and the need to strengthen landed wealth on which the aristocratic state rested. The nobility were thus conceived as a caste apart, albeit a caste into which it was possible to rise, a feature of the ancien régime that Bonald upheld as proof that true liberty and equality were enjoyed. In Théorie Bonald suggested that nobles should wear special insignia and share certain rituals to bind them together. The sons of the nobility would be educated for state service at special schools and his vision even encompassed a ‘Temple of Providence’ at which national festivals would be celebrated to inculcate a ‘religion of society’. Bonald’s stress on the collectivity thus led him to a distinctly Rousseauist idea. Yet this should not necessarily lead us to a conclusion that Bonald believed in an all- powerful state forcing men to be free. First, we should note Bonald’s assertion that a monarchical state, even if ruled by a tyrant, could never rival the oppressive power wielded under the Revolution; Bonald distinguished absolute power that respected the laws from arbitrary power, the result of popular sovereignty. As Maistre had argued, the monarch was only absolute in the sphere allotted to him by the law. Second, this conception of a service nobility connects back to long-established ideas of the nobility as
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mediating between monarch and locality. Bonald’s ideal was to reintegrate the nobility into the state. His vision of society was certainly authoritarian and presumed unity— pluralism was not part of Bonald’s agenda—but hardly proto-totalitarian.
At the heart of Bonald’s thought lay God, and a conception of the constituted society as divinized. Men encountered God in the legitimate social forms; power was constituted independently of men, according to natural laws of a divine nature. In the family the power of the father was thus of a divine nature. Legitimacy was nothing other than conformity to God’s laws, society as willed by God, an eternal order that could be found in the primitive and fundamental laws of human society. This conception of society meant that liberty of expression was dangerous licence, and moderation dangerous indifference: this was the criminal error of the Restoration governments. Legislation should prescribe sacred and indispensable duties. In a trope subsequently celebrated by Catholics and Legitimists, Bonald declared that the Declaration of the Rights of Man had opened the Revolution and a Declaration of the Rights of God would close it.