Summary

Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, viscount de Bonald, born on October 2, 1754 in Millau where he died on November 23, 1840, was a French politician, philosopher and essayist, great opponent of the French Revolution.

Monarchist and Catholic, this gentleman from Rouergue, who came from a long line of jurists, was the great voice of the legitimists. In his numerous works, he attacked the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Social Contract of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the social and political innovations of the Revolution to advocate a return to royalty and the principles of the Roman Catholic Church.

He is considered one of the precursors of sociology.

Born into a noble family from Rouergue, Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, "viscount" de Bonald, lost his father at the age of four, then entered the college of Juilly in 1769, with the Oratorians. He served as a musketeer until the suppression of this corps in 1776, before returning to his land and marrying Elisabeth Guibal de Combescure, from an old family of Vigan in the Gard. In 1785, he became mayor of Millau. He regularly visited the family estate of Las Canals in Aveyron.

When the Revolution occurred, he was initially a supporter. He received a civic crown from his fellow citizens and was re-elected in February 1790 as mayor by a majority of 293 votes out of 368. A few months later, he was elected member of the Assembly of the department, which obliged him to resign from his office as mayor. His peers appointed him president of this assembly. Soon after, his deep religious feelings were shocked by the bringing of the Roman Catholic Church to heel (sale of the clergy's property, civil constitution). On January 31, 1791, he resigned from his positions as president and deputy of the departmental assembly and, to avoid reprisals, emigrated with his two eldest sons to Heidelberg where the army of the Prince of Condé was stationed.

It was in Heidelberg that Bonald discovered his vocation as a writer. He was inspired by the few volumes he was able to bring with him: a few volumes of Tacitus, Bossuet's Histoire Universelle, Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des Lois and Rousseau's Du Contrat Social. His first work is the Theory of political and religious power, printed in 1796 in Constance. He announces from the beginning his intention: "I believe it is possible to demonstrate that man can no more give a constitution to religious or political society, than he can give gravity to bodies or extent to matter."

In 1797, he returned to Paris clandestinely. He reappeared officially only after the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire. Fontanes, director of the Mercure de France, called him to collaborate in its publication. Bonald also met Louis-Mathieu Molé and Chateaubriand. In 1800, he published his Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l'ordre social, then in 1801, Du divorce, in which he pleads for the indissolubility of marriage. In 1802, he published Législation primitive in which he defends the thesis that, thanks to the institution of nobility, our ancestors had their eyes fixed on an ideal that protected them against catastrophes (according to the magazine "Le Gotha français" in 1904). According to him, "The Constitution says to all private families: When you have fulfilled your destination in domestic society, which is to acquire the independence of property through work, order and economy: when you have acquired enough to no longer need others and to be able to serve the State at your own expense, the greatest honor you can claim will be to pass into the service of the State". This work is published at the same time as Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme. Commenting on the lack of success of his work, in contrast to that of his colleague, Bonald simply notes that he "gave his drug in kind and Chateaubriand gave it with sugar."

At that time, he retired to his land, while continuing to publish in the Mercure de France and the Journal des débats. In 1806, following an article entitled "Philosophical reflections on the tolerance of opinions", he received a reprimand from Fouché. Fontanes' intervention with Napoleon himself was enough to make him lift it. However, Bonald, a fervent royalist, refused Napoleon's offer to reprint his Théorie du pouvoir if he removed the name of the king. In 1807, he also declined the position of director of the Journal de l'empire, then that of adviser to the University in September of the following year. He accepted this position in 1810 under the pressing demands of Fontanes.

During the Restoration, his fight for the monarchy earned Bonald official recognition and great influence for his ideas. Created knight of Saint-Louis, he played an active political role. He kept up a regular correspondence with Joseph de Maistre. He was appointed to the Royal Council of Public Instruction by Louis XVIII during the Hundred Days. In 1815, elected to the Chamber of Deputies by the department of Aveyron, he proposed a law prohibiting divorce, which he called "revolutionary poison". The Bonald law, which was voted on May 8, 1816, re-established legal separation and remained in force until 1884.

In 1816, he was appointed to the French Academy by the Count of Vaublanc where he occupied the chair 30, succeeding Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and giving up his place to Jacques-François Ancelot. He was deputy of 1815 to 1822, then peer of France in 1823, while continuing a career in the press, in particular in Le Conservateur (between 1818 and 1820) and, following this one, Le Défenseur which however does not know the same success as the Conservateur. He gave up politics in 1830 and died in 1840 of an asthma attack. His son Louis-Jacques-Maurice de Bonald was archbishop of Lyon and cardinal.

He is the leader of traditionalism, he advocates a society where God is sovereign, a society "of divine right".

He develops his theories in his works, especially in the book Theory of political and religious power.

Bonald's work contradicts the theories and ideas that Rousseau develops in his Social Contract, he opposes the philosophy of the individual man to that of the social man. He believes that individuals have no power over the rules of society, and therefore cannot be its actors. For him, the society is prior to the individual, the social authority cannot thus come from him. The nature of the society is to preserve itself, to perfect itself, that of the Man is to exist, to tend towards the happiness, the Man appears thus as the product of the society: "the Man exists only for the society and the society forms him only for it".

According to his conception, to believe that the Men can live free and sovereign is contrary to what the History showed, indeed, there is always a power (God, the King, the father), ministers (the priesthood, the nobility, the mother) and subjects (the faithful, the vassals, the children). This idea will be taken again at the beginning of the XXth century concerning the social relations of sex, in particular by the antifeminist theoretician Marthe Borély.

Louis de Bonald strongly criticizes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The law is, in his thought, an idea generating anarchy. It would even be prudent that this word not be part of the vocabulary of political life. The idea of individual freedom appears as destructive of the social and political order and of hierarchies. Just as he cannot act on society, man also has no influence on History and each time he has tried to modify the established order he has derailed society, Bonald gives us the example of the Protestant reform.

As the philosopher Jean-Yves Pranchère points out, "most of the studies devoted to Bonald's work emphasize that there is nothing anachronistic in describing it as the elaboration of a true sociology before the letter; it is moreover on this account that Auguste Comte, who imposed the word 'sociology', declared his admiration for Bonald. His thesis is that "society is a being" (1796, I, p. 40) and that it therefore has its own laws which justify it being the object of a specific science, the "science of society" (1800, p. 33, 130, 157)". According to Colette Capitan Peter, he is "the precursor of a sociology that will be called, after Auguste Comte, a sociology of order, man has no control over his history". According to Pierre Macherey, he is "one of the first in the 19th century to affirm the primacy of the social, and the necessity to think of it as such, as a constitutive principle (or "constitutive"), which escapes itself from the enterprise of a constitution. One can speak in this respect of a "sociologism" before the letter, which goes quite far in the anticipation of the discourses of the "scientific sociology" such as these will be elaborated at the end of the XIXth century".

His doctrine of social conservatism is based on a theory of language: "Man thinks his word before he speaks his thought", Man cannot express his ideas if he has no idea of how to express them. Man cannot think without speech, thought comes after language, it is linked to it, man cannot invent it. It is God who has given speech to humanity at the same time as the thought touching the truths about religion, morals and the foundations of the social order. A society cannot be envisaged without language, it is thus the keystone of any social organization. He shares this doctrine with Charles X, king of France in his ultra conservative current.

In 1806, at the beginning of the period of the French concordat regime initiated by Napoleon, Louis de Bonald published an anti-Semitic text questioning the Jewish emancipation acquired as a result of the upheavals of the Revolution and of new currents of ideas among philosophers. Louis de Bonald wrote 19 pages in the Mercure de France of February 8, 1806 There is no doubt that, if the Jews had been as numerous in the other provinces as they were in Alsace, the friends of the Jews would have had, sooner or later, to reproach themselves, like the friends of the Negroes, for the haste with which they called for liberty, which at that time was domination, a people who were always strangers, even in the place where they were established ; and who also had to avenge the irremissible offense of a long proscription I do not know whether some day the Jews will be sovereign; but if they should ever become legislators, it must be said to our shame, one could defy a Sanhedrin of Jews to bring in laws more senseless and atrocious than those which a Convention of philosophers has fabricated. "

Louis de Bonald is also seen as a precursor of linguistic structuralism.

Sources

1. Louis de Bonald
2. Louis de Bonald
3. ^ Rosengarten, Frank (2012). Giacomo Leopardi's Search For A Common Life Through Poetry. A Different Nobility, A Different Love. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. p. 6. ISBN 9781611475067.
4. ^ Beum, Robert (1997). "Ultra-Royalism Revisited: An Annotated Bibliography with a Preface," Modern Age, Vol. 39, No. 3, p. 302.
5. Œuvres complètes de M. de Bonald, Paris, Migne, 1859, p. 6
6. Louis de Bonald. Réflexions sur la Révolution de juillet 1830 et autres inédits. Par Jean Bastier. Éd. DUC/Albatros, 1988
7. Jean-Yves Pranchère, « Totalité sociale et hiérarchie. La sociologie théologique de Louis de Bonald », Revue européenne des sciences sociales, nos 49-2,‎ 2011, p. 145-167 (lire en ligne, consulté le 7 janvier 2021).
8. Apontamento biográfico baseado em Oeuvres Complètes de M. de Bonald, tomo I, ed. de M. L'Abbé Migne, Paris, 1859, pp. I-XXVIII
9. Бональд : [арх. 4 января 2023] / А. В. Чудинов // Большой Кавказ — Великий канал. — М. : Большая российская энциклопедия, 2006. — С. 19. — (Большая российская энциклопедия : [в 35 т.] / гл. ред. Ю. С. Осипов ; 2004—2017, т. 4). — ISBN 5-85270-333-8.
10. Бональд, Луи-Жак-Морис // Энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона : в 86 т. (82 т. и 4 доп.). — СПб., 1890—1907.