Bonald, Louis de

Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) was, with Joseph de Maistre, one of the founders of modern French conservative thought, defending the Catholic monarchy against the secular and democratic claims of the French Revolution. Unlike Maistre, Bonald argued for traditional authority from a rationalist and quasi-scientific position. He sought to create a science of society, understood as a theory of social order, based wholly upon empirical facts and necessary laws. In this way, he became an important forerunner of positivist social science.

Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise vicomte de Bonald was born in 1754 to an old noble family from the south of France. A supporter of the French Revolution in its early stages, he broke with it in 1791 over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which subordinated the church to the control of the state. After serving for a year in counterrevolutionary armies, in 1796, he published his magnum opus, the Théorie du pouvoir politique et réligieux (Theory of Political and Religious Power), a systematic statement of the theoretical foundations of French monarchism. Granted amnesty by Napoleon in 1802, Bonald published his other major work, Législation primitive, considérée dans les derniers temps par les seules lumières de la raison (Primitive Legislation, Considered in the Latest Times by the Sole Light of Reason). He gradually came to terms with the emperor as an embodiment of order and authority, joining his Grand Council of the University in 1810. After the fall of Napoleon, Bonald served the restored Bourbon regime in the Chamber of Deputies (1815–1823) and the Chamber of [Page 66]Peers (1823–1830), arguing the royalist cause both in the government and in his writings. After the 1830 revolution overthrew the Bourbons, Bonald retired to the provincial quiet of his hometown, where he died in 1840.

Bonald, like other early conservatives, argued against the individualist and utilitarian assumptions of the Enlightenment that only submission to tradition can provide social order. Unlike them, however, his traditionalism is highly rationalized. History, for Bonald, is a thoroughly structured and unitary process, a logical development of the principles of human nature, the gradual coalescence or constitution of society according to its truth. Tradition is precisely the sum of those truths that history has confirmed while shedding all falsified practices and opinions. This deep rational structure is a society's constitution, something that exists prior to any specific legislation or administration, the sum of necessary relations that give society its unity. What Bonald calls the constitution is thus the deep structure of society, the scientific laws of its way of life, manifested in its political, religious, familial, and linguistic institutions.

This argument from unity and necessity led Bonald to extremely monistic conclusions. As history is identified with the unfolding of the general, fundamental, and necessary truth of human society, there is ultimately only one tradition shared by all peoples, albeit encrusted with their deviations, which finds its apogee in the Catholic monarchy and its unrivalled unity of spiritual and political power. Bonald's monism is confirmed by the triadic structures he finds everywhere in society, the relation between power, minister, and subject, in which the first provides agency, the second mediation, and the third obedience. In politics, this takes the form of king, nobility, and people; in religion, of God, Christ, and man; in language, of subject, verb, and object; in the family, of father, mother, and child; in the person, of mind, organs, and passions. Each social sphere is thus the embodiment of the same fundamental structural relations. Social order requires that the third term always be subordinated to the second, and the second to the first. In a very influential book on divorce, Bonald thus argued that it dissolved the necessary relations of society, destroying woman's necessary subordination to man and thus unraveling society into a mass of egoistic individuals. Everywhere, Bonald defended what he saw as the holistic hierarchies of Catholicism, feudalism, and tradition against the individualism of Protestantism, capitalism, and the Enlightenment, which he believed incapable of creating or maintaining a society. Such claims were common among opponents of the French Revolution, but Bonald was unique in arguing them with the language of science.

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