French Counter-Revolutionary Theorist Louis de Bonald (1754-1840)

[Marcus Marulus]

French Counter-Revolutionary Theorist Louis de Bonald (1754-1840)

Canadian Journal of History, Aug 1997 by W Jay Reedy

The French Counter-Revolutionary Theorist Louis de Bonald (17541840), by David Klinck. New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 1996. 301 pp. $53.95 U.S.

The Vicomte Louis de Bonald was a major ideologist of the French counterrevolution, a "prophet of the past" who diagnosed and even anticipated many of modernity's social problems. He was also a considerable figure in the parliamentary life of the Bourbon restoration. Yet he has never garnered the same attention as his reactionary colleague, Joseph de Maistre. David Klinck's monograph, though hardly definitive or flawless, is a step toward remedying this situation. Although not displacing Henri Moulinie's 1915 intellectual biography, it is now the place to begin the study of Bonald and his ideas, particularly for the non-specialist.

Despite stretches of wooden prose and sometimes wayward or superficial analyses, Klinck's book is a useful achievement. For one thing, it draws upon untapped archival records, especially collections in the Aveyron and in the possession of Bonald's descendants. These fill a few of the gaps in Bonald's life and thought, especially as regards the period before the Revolution when he was a student of the Oratorians, a royal musketeer, and mayor of Millau. The intellectual tensions which scholars such as Guy Chausssinand-Nogaret have shown to be common among the educated nobility of the second half of the eighteenth century also affected Bonald.

While Bonald was not a "liberal" member of the second estate even before the revolutionary cataclysm (he did not emigrate until 1791), as a pupil of the Oratory he assimilated a good deal of mathematics and science, philosophical rationalism and the ideas of the Enlightenment, including Rousseau's. This familiarity with the lexicon of the philosophes left a deep mark on the ideological discourse he would adopt. When he became a counter-revolutionary theorist and journalist around 1795 - his first book, the Theorie du pouvoir was written then - he chose to defend theocratic tradition by trying to co-opt the rationalist philosophizing that originated with Descartes, appeared in the writings of Port-Royal, Malebranche, and Leibniz, and was still strong among the would-be empiricists of the siecle des lumieres. This formal influence surfaces everywhere in Bonald's major treatises. In pseudoScholastic fashion, those works set forth what he called his "science of society," a "science" which, its rationalistic rhetoric notwithstanding, was permeated by anachronistic dreams and prejudices. Yet while it intended to "prove" that obedience to throne and altar was natural and logical, the sociocentric project of Bonald also gives that thinker an underappreciated place in the pre-history of what Auguste Comte referred to as "sociology" by the 1830s.

Klinck's labours have uncovered or confirmed other details about the first four decades of Bonald's life. For instance, the further information about his attitudes toward pre-revolutionary experiments with provincial assemblies is provocative if inconclusive. Clearly, Bonald was more of a critic than a blind defender of Bourbon absolutism in the 1770s and 80s. But that does not mean that he favoured an overthrow of the society of estates or anything like a republic or a constitutional monarchy along English lines. Klinck also shows that Bonald championed agrarian localism, though above all this seems to have been a means of preserving the authority of his caste. Nonetheless, the Vicomte countenanced propertied bourgeoisie as fellow (if lesser) members of French society's ruling echelon. One question that defeats Klinck, however, is exactly why the "moderate" Bonald changed his mind and turned against the Revolution in 1791. Evidence relating to this question is almost nonexistent. Klinck correctly notes that since Bonald reacted with ambivalence to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, that document cannot bear full responsibility for his alienation from Revolutionary France.

Klinck's study glosses most of Bonald's surprisingly sophisticated and prescient views about the nature of society and language and about the "constructed" nature of the individual. A proto-sociological preference for holism and hierarchy, not just Christian monarchism, anchored Bonald's objections to representative government, religious tolerance, divorce, freedom of speech, and so on. Klinck argues that Bonald's published polemics during the Napoleonic and Restoration decades reveal changes of position that match the fortunes of his Ultra clique. Certainly there is no doubt that when Bonald saw opportunities for his party to gain a practical advantage he voiced opinions about ministerial responsibility, centralization, and censorship that contradicted his previous views. On the other hand, the basic principles of his thought remained remarkably unaltered from the mid-1790s to his death. Whatever the pragmatic shift in certain of his views on specific matters, Bonald remained adamantly authoritarian in principle.

Besides relating Bonald's ideas to the context of intellectual trends, debates, and events in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, Klinck sometimes connects them to the findings and fashionable theses of recent historiography. These bids for relevance do not always convince, however. Sometimes, in fact, they only amount to invoking a present-day historian's name or a catchword associated with his/her historiographical interpretation. Nor can a brief reference to how Bonald's sociocentrism may anticipate 1990s communitarianism take the place of the sustained argument needed to establish such a parallel. Explicating the theoretical underpinnings of the Bonaldian world-view is not the greatest strength of this study.

Klinck is prone to measure Bonald's ideas against today's "neo-liberal" (Furetian) reading of the Revolution. The problem is that Bonald was anything but a liberal, neo- or otherwise. Dissecting his creed might have benefited from an approach - perhaps a neo-Marxist one? - more sensitive to the ruses and "substructural" correlates of conservative ideologies. Those who want to probe deeper into the philosophical and sociological side of Bonald should consult contributions by (among others) Robert Nisbet, Gerard Gengembre, Jean Bastier, and the writer of this review. Many, though by no means all, of these are included in Klinck's useful bibliography.

Bryant College W. Jay Reedy

Copyright Canadian Journal of History Aug 1997

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[Marcus Marulus]

Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, Vicompte de Bonald

French statesman, writer, and philosopher, b. at Monna, near Millau, in Rouergue (Aveyron) 2 October, 1754; d. at Paris, 23 November, 1840. He was educated by the Oratorians at the College of Juilly; joined the king's musketeers, returned to his own province in 1776, was elected mayor of Millau in 1785, and in 1790 was chosen member of the departmental Assembly for Aveyron. He resigned in 1781, emigrated, became a soldier in the army of Condé, and, when the army was disbanded, retired to Heidelberg, where he took charge of the education of his two elder sons.
Bonald published at Constance, in 1797, his first work: "Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux", which was suppressed in France by order of the Directory. In 1797 Bonald returned to France under the name of Saint-Séverin, and published "Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l'ordre social" (1800); "Du divorce" (1801); and "La législation primitive" (1802). He also collaborated with Chateaubriand and others in the "Mercure de France", contributing several articles which were published in book form with other studies in 1819 under the title "Mélanges littéraires, politiques, et philosophiques". In 1808 he declined to be a member of the Council of the University, but finally accepted in 1810. He refused to take charge of the education of the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and of the King of Rome, the son of Napoleon I.

A monarchist and royalist by nature and by principles, Bonald welcomed the restoration of the Bourbons. He was appointed a member of the Academy by royal decree in 1816. From 1815 to 1822 he served as deputy from Aveyron, and in 1823 became a peer of France. He then directed his efforts against all attempts at liberalism in religion and politics. The law against divorce was proposed by him in 1815 and passed in 1816. He took a prominent part in the law of 1822 which did away with the liberty of the press and established a committee of censure of which he was the president. In 1815 he published his "Réflexions sur l'intérêt général de l'Europe"; in 1817, "Pensées sur divers sujets" in 2 vols. 8 vo. (2d., Paris, 1887); in 1818 "Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaisances morales"; in 1827, "Démonstration philosophique du principe constitutif des sociétés". Meanwhile he collaborated with Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and Berryer, in the "Conservateur", and later in the "Défenseur" founded by Lamennais. In 1830 he gave up his peerage and led a life of retirement in his native city. — "There is not to be found in the long career", says Jules Simon, "one action which is not consistent with his principles, one expression which belies them."

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