Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern

LOUIS DE BONALD: NEGLECTED ANTIMODERN
On Divorce
Louis de Bonald;; edited and translated by Nicholas Davidson
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992
Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-­
Revolutionary Tradition
Edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum
Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004
The True and Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Econo-­
my and Society
Louis de Bonald;; translated by Christopher Olaf Blum
Naples, FL: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2006
Reviewed by F. Roger Devlin
On the European continent, Louis de Bonald has long been named
alongside Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre as a foremost first-­
generation critic of the French Revolution and founder of modern
conservatism. De Maistre himself, late in life, wrote to Bonald: “I have
thought nothing you have not written;; I have written nothing you
have not thought.” But while Burke became the object of a veritable
twentieth-­century cult, and de Maistre is at least widely known and
available in translation, it was not until 1992 that a work of Bonald’s,
viz., On Divorce, finally appeared in English.
Christopher Olaf Blum has more recently expanded the English
reader’s access to Louis de Bonald with the other two books under re-­
view here. Critics of the Enlightenment contains excerpts from the
works of six French counterrevolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth
century, of whom the largest share (four selections, ninety pages) is
allotted to Bonald. The True and Only Wealth of Nations collects nine
further pieces of Bonald’s (one hundred forty-­three pages), filling in
our knowledge of several other aspects of his thought. All these pieces
were written between 1802 and 1829, subsequent to On Divorce. A Pro-­
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fessor of History at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia
when he produced these volumes, Blum is currently Dean of Thomas
More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire.
EARLY LIFE
Louis Gabriel Ambroise Viscount de Bonald was born the only son
of a landowning family near Millau in the Rouergue region of South-­
ern France in 1754. The area had long been a center of religious strife,
with a Protestant rebellion breaking out as late as 1702. Bonald’s fa-­
ther died when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, a pious
Jansenist. He remained an orthodox Catholic his entire life.
Bonald received an unusually extensive education for a provincial
nobleman of his time. He attended the celebrated Collège de Juilly near
Paris (1769–1772), run by the Oratorians after the Jesuits were expelled
from France in 1762. While the Jesuits had offered a classical educa-­
tion, the Oratorians embraced Cartesianism and the latest advances in
science. Bonald’s closest mentor, Fr. Mandar, with whom he always
remained in contact, was even a disciple of Rousseau! After gradua-­
tion, Bonald joined the Royal Musketeers and served until their disso-­
lution in 1776. He then returned to his native region and married. He
and his wife of forty-­eight years had seven children, of whom four
would survive to adulthood.
Though contented to devote himself to domestic life, Bonald was
pressed by the royal intendant into accepting the mayoralty of Millau
in 1785. When the office was made elective in 1790, the town’s citizens
voted to retain him in office. Bonald initially imagined the Revolution
might lead to a revival of localism, and even led civic celebrations of
some of the early acts of the National Assembly. He took special pride
in averting a threatened riot between Catholics and Protestants at this
time.
Elected to the departmental assembly, Bonald resigned rather than
countenance the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which subordinated
the Church to the revolutionary State. In October 1791, he fled with
his two eldest sons to Heidelberg, where the Duc de Bourbon was ga-­
thering a counter-­revolutionary army, and took part in the abortive
Jemappes campaign. Back home, the rest of his family was forced into
hiding.
During this exile, Bonald produced his first book: Theory of Political
and Religious Power (1796). Most copies were smuggled into Paris,
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where they were seized and burned by the authorities. This early
work has been described as “an immense, rambling statement of his
principles in impenetrable Latinate prose.” Bonald’s finest work is al-­
most always found in shorter pieces written in response to specific
situations;; his attempts at general treatises have contributed less to his
reputation.
In 1797 Bonald returned to France, “traveling across the mountains
at night to avoid French border patrols,” and was briefly reunited
with his family in Montpellier. But the brief “Jacobin revival” of 1798-­
99 intervened and he sought the anonymity of Paris. While in hiding
there, he produced three books: An Analytical Essay on the Natural Laws
of the Social Order (1800), “essentially a more economical statement of
A Theory of Power”;; On Divorce (1801), written in opposition to the le-­
galization of divorce in the proposed Civil Code of 1800;; and Primitive
Legislation (1802), “a systematic statement of the principles of his polit-­
ical philosophy.”
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS
On Divorce is a good place to begin studying Bonald’s leading
ideas. Unlike Burke and de Maistre, he devotes little space to analyz-­
ing the Revolution itself. He is interested in explaining what had been
lost because of it: the old social structure which he considered natural.
The work opens:
It is a fertile source of error, when treating a question relative to
society, to consider it by itself, with no relationship to other ques-­
tions, because society itself is only a group of relationships. In the
social body as in every organized body—that is, one in which
the parts are arranged in certain relationships to each other rela-­
tive to a given end—the cessation of vital functions does not
come from the annihilation of the parts, but from their displace-­
ment and the disturbances of their relationships. (3)
We note at once the rejection of enlightenment ”individualism.“
That vision of man and society, still very much alive, assumes a mate-­
rialist metaphysic: since only bodies are real without qualification, so-­
ciety is simply the sum of its members, and the social good is ”the
greatest good of the greatest number.“ Bonald described enlighten-­
ment thought (“la philosophie”) as “the universal solvent.”
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For Bonald, society has a natural structure analogous to that of a
living organism. Our social roles are part of what we are, so that
people are not interchangeable (“equal”). Society suffers, therefore,
when the natural disposition of different kinds of men to one another
is disturbed.
Editor Nicolas Davidson points out the relevance of this organic
view of society to the failure of modern ”progressive” social crusades.
The reformer does not grasp “the infinite feedback loops that relen-­
tlessly frustrate [his] targeted plans” (p. xx). For example, he sets out
to help ”the working man” by championing him against his employ-­
ers, forgetting that employer and worker are engaged in a common
enterprise. Or he seeks to benefit women by encouraging them to
compete in a zero-­sum contest for power against men instead of part-­
nering with them in marriage.
A little farther down, Bonald states that all beings and their rela-­
tionships can be comprehended under the “three general ideas: cause,
means, and effect.” They may be seen, for example, in the natural hu-­
man family:
[T]he father has, or is, the power to accomplish through the
means or ministry of the mother the reproductive and conserva-­
tive action of which the child is the term or subject.... The father is
active or strong, the child passive or weak;; while the mother,
median term between the two extremes of this continuous pro-­
portion, is passive to conceive, active to produce, receives to
transmit, learns to teach, and obeys to command. (44–45)
The purposes of the natural family are the production and conserva-­
tion of man. The relationship between the sexes produces the child, and
the relationship between the ages (parenthood) conserves him. Conser-­
vation includes not only nourishment and physical preservation but
everything which comes under the heading of education.
The reader of Bonald cannot fail to notice his frequent references to
“conserving” and “conservation.” His use of these terms is, in fact, the
direct source of the modern political noun “conservative.” In 1818,
Bonald and Chateaubriand would found a newspaper called Le Con-­
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servateur, which made the term popular. 1 The three fundamental so-­
cial relations power, minister, and subject apply not only to family
members but “to all intelligent beings;; [they] embrace the generality,
the immensity of their relationships, and open the very gates of the in-­
finite to contemplation.” For even the relations between God (“our Fa-­
ther”) and man are conceived no differently:
The society between God and primitive man has all the general
characteristics of the society we have observed between men,
and I see in it the moral persons: the power, who is God;; the sub-­
jects, who are the domestic persons;; the minister, who is the fa-­
ther of the family. The father is at once passive and active, par-­
taking of the dependence of the child and the power of God
himself;; receiving orders to transmit them, and obeying one to
command the other. (50)
According to Bonald, this original religion of the family predates
the establishment of civil society: “nowhere do I find a historical truth
better established than the religion of the first families and the priest-­
hood of the first patriarchs.” (50;; examples include the Roman lares
and Laban’s family “gods” mentioned in Genesis 31: 19, 30–35).
As the domestic society of the family is necessary to conserve man,
so the public or political society becomes necessary to conserve fami-­
lies:
Common needs bring [families] together but equally strong pas-­
sions more often disunite them. Women, children, herds, territo-­
ries, hunting and fishing grounds—everything becomes a subject
of conflict between families. In every society there are private
wars as soon as there are families living close together, and
neighbors who sue each other today would have taken up arms
a few centuries ago. (54)
The order of public society is once again a mediated hierarchy:
1 Chateaubriand is more often given the credit, but the word does not occur fre-­
quently in his works. The first “liberal” was a Spanish parliamentarian of 1812 who
opposed restoration of the old regime.
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Among all peoples I perceive a man who speaks and commands
and men who listen and obey—i.e., men in an active state and
men in a passive one. I perceive other men (magistrates or war-­
riors) mediate between the two extremes, who receive orders
which they transmit, and obey to command. (54)
CONTRA ROUSSEAU
Bonald’s explanation of the social order as a mediated hierarchy
may strike the reader as trite or obvious if he does not perceive the
implied polemic against Rousseau. “What God wills man to do,” de-­
clared Rousseau, “he does not tell him through another man;; he tells it
to him Himself, and writes it on the bottom of his heart.” In other
words, Rousseau rejects all human or visible forms of authority. The
Social Contract was precisely an attempt to construct a state without
any such authority. The result was his idea of the “general will”—
combined with an inability or refusal to provide any unambiguous
method for determining what this supposed will dictates. 2
The notion of God writing things on the heart, otherwise known as
direct inspiration, Bonald calls “the theory of all extravagances and
the arsenal of all crimes” (51). For anyone may assert that God has
“told” him to do anything. Some radical Puritans, indeed, were
known to claim divine inspiration as authority for criminal behavior,
and Bonald believed Rousseau got the idea from his early Protestant
upbringing. 3
Bonald even defines “fanaticism” as “believing that God perpetual-­
ly acts without means, like a prince who, relying on God for the care
of his defense by a supernatural operation, neglects to levy troops.”
Rousseau does not explain what criterion to use when the message
God has written on one man’s heart turns out to be contradicted by
the message found on another man’s heart. It seems there would have
to be some public authority to make such decisions.
Cf. my “From Salon to Guillotine,” TOQ 8:2, p. 74.
Incidentally, a secular version of the claim to private inspiration, viz., the im-­
puting of “false consciousness” to others, is alive and well on American university
campuses today. Thus, happy wives and non-­militant Blacks are said to be in need
of “consciousness raising” to make them properly discontented with their lives. This
must be provided to them by those who are more enlightened. How do we know
who is more enlightened? They themselves are kind enough to tell us so!
2
3
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
111
NATURE IN BONALD: CONTRA ROUSSEAU AGAIN
“Everything that is not in nature has its disadvantages,” writes
Rousseau, “and civil society more than all the rest” (quoted in 9).
To this vision of an originally good nature corrupted by the devel-­
opment of society, Bonald opposed his idea of “the three states: imper-­
fect;; perfect, or natural;; [and] corrupted or against nature.” These states
apply to all living beings:
The organized beings which have an end and the external means
to attain it are born in a state of weakness of means which pre-­
vents them from attaining their end. So begin man and society.
This is the imperfect state;; and it is imperfect since it tends to-­
ward another state which is better and stronger, and since the
being perishes if it does not attain this latter state.
Time and acquisitions develop its means, and cause the being
successively to pass to a more advanced state. Thus the seed be-­
comes a plant, the fetus becomes a man, and a savage people be-­
comes civilized. (67)
There is no such thing as a natural man prior to all society: if noth-­
ing else, we are born into the domestic society of our family.
Some [beings] use their developed means in the manner best
suited to the end for which they exist, and attain that state which
is called maturity in the plant, manhood and reason in the man,
and civilization in society. This is the perfect or natural state of
beings. (67) Thus the adult is more natural than the child, the
educated man more natural than the ignorant, the virtuous man
more natural than the vicious, and the civilized man more natu-­
ral than the savage. (71)
Bonald is here implicitly returning to the premodern understand-­
ing of nature found in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. He cites a
remark by Leibniz, the modern philosopher most conversant with this
older tradition: “Certain philosophers locate nature in the state which
has the least art, failing to notice that perfection always includes art.”
Society, to attain its end, which is its conservation, has laws,
which are its will, and persons, the means or ministers of the
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laws in the execution of social action. Nascent society is in the
imperfect state: it has weak laws and a weak or violent action
(for violence is weakness). [This] is political despotism which
subjects everything to its whims. Sometimes it acts without mi-­
nisters, like Clovis, who personally split the skull of one of his
soldiers. Sometimes power is usurped by its ministers, [e.g.,] by
the mayors of the palace under the first dynasty. (68)
In the good or perfect state of society, will, represented by the laws,
is perfect, and action is ruled by will. Power is absolute and not arbi-­
trary;; the ministers are subordinate, the subjects obedient. This state of
society rests on laws rather than persons. (69)Later on, Bonald con-­
cedes that the “natural, perfect” society is an ideal type which actual
societies—particularly Christian societies—do not reach but tend to
approach: “although no society is in this fulfilled state, no more than
any man, one can observe, in the social world, more enlightenment,
virtue, strength and resolve among Christians than among other
peoples” (76).
Rousseauan primitivists made their same characteristic mistake in
treating religion:
As the religion of primitive families was exclusively called natu-­
ral, and the religion of the State was exclusively called revealed, it
was concluded that only primitive or patriarchal religion was
natural, and that the religion of the State was artificial, and the re-­
ligion of priests. (72)
There was a great debate in the eighteenth century opposing the
”positive” religion of Christian dogma to an alleged ”natural” or ”ra-­
tional” religion which never quite got worked out;; eminent thinkers
such as Kant, Fichte and Hegel contributed. Bonald rejected the very
terms of this debate. To him, the religion of the Christian State was the
natural development of the original patriarchal religion (which he
tended to identify with biblical Judaism).
The third state is the deviant state which beings fall into
either because their means are insufficiently developed, because
they have deviated in the course of their development, or be-­
cause they do not use them in a manner appropriate to their end.
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113
For man, this is the state of bodily infirmity or moral weakness.
In society, it is the state opposed to civilization: evil, corrupt,
unnatural. (67)
In other words, corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is
the worst. For once, Bonald cites a remark of Rousseau’s with approv-­
al: “If the legislator, mistaking his object, establishes a principle differ-­
ent from that which arises from the nature of things, the State will not
cease to be agitated until it is destroyed or changed, and invincible na-­
ture has resumed her sway” (75–76).
Bonald continues:
Once a nation has attained the perfect state, and has tasted the
heavenly gift of natural laws, it cannot descend from thence
without falling into the last degree of misery and degradation.
France, having fallen into the monarchical democracy of 1789,
descended to the vile and bloody demagogy of 1793. Thus a na-­
tion declines and falls when it descends from the perfect state.
Who would dare to contemplate the probable consequences of
this revolutionary delirium, if the principle of life which fourteen
centuries of constitution had given this society had not drawn it
back from the abyss of shame, corruption and sorrow.
The Assyrians, Medes, Romans and Greeks perished because
they had passed from the imperfect state of nascent peoples to
the corrupt state of degenerate peoples. The Northern peoples
continue to exist in Europe, stronger than at the time of their es-­
tablishment, because they have passed from the imperfect to the
perfect state of society. There is no rest for a people but in socie-­
ty’s perfect state. (75–77)
DIVORCE
The reader may be forgiven for wondering why the foregoing mat-­
ters are discussed at length in a treatise called On Divorce. Today we
are inclined to view marriage as a “personal matter.” But it is not.
Most obviously, it also concerns the interests of the children it pro-­
duces:
Public power is the guarantor of the commitment of the two
spouses to form a society;; for public power always represents
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the absent person in the family: the child before birth, the father
after death. The contract formed between three persons cannot
be broken by two, to the prejudice of the third, the weakest one
in the society. (176)
It also concerns the larger society, since the family is its fundamen-­
tal unit.
As Bonald says, “no question is simpler in its principles or more
fertile in its consequences, since by itself [divorce] raises all the fun-­
damental questions for society concerning power and duty” (38).
Bonald’s treatise was occasioned by the proposal of a new Civil
Code which allowed divorce on various grounds. Arguing against the
permission, he referred to his threefold division of societies: primitive
or patriarchal, perfect or natural, and deviant or unnatural. The law of
polygamy, as well as the Mosaic permission to repudiate wives, are
imperfect laws permissible for a primitive society:
[They] can be tolerated in that state of society which precedes
any public establishment and is called the patriarchal state;; be-­
cause the multiplication of the species, which polygamy encou-­
rages at this age of society alone, may be appropriate to a small
tribe which is trying to raise itself to the strength and dignity of a
nation. (79)
Polygamy is imperfect because it creates conflicting interests within
the family;; but it does not separate children from their parents, as di-­
vorce does.
Similarly, the law of repudiation is harsh, since it punishes a wom-­
an for the fault of nature (childlessness). But it is not unnatural, since it
leaves exclusively in man the essential attribute of power, the right to
judge the woman;; it is always an act of jurisdiction even when it is not
an act of justice. The power vested in the man is, indeed, excessive
and despotic;; but in this respect it merely resembles public authority
in its earliest stage.
The permission of repudiation has less dangerous consequences
among a nascent people than it would in the modern world. The fami-­
ly lived a rural life, isolated from other families, occupied with
healthy work;; repudiation was seldom used except in cases of infertil-­
ity.
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
115
In a more advanced state of society, “communication of the sexes
becomes more frequent through the proximity of families, and less in-­
nocent through the taste for pleasure and the progress of the arts,
which follows that of wealth” (79). Under these circumstances, repud-­
iation is certain to be abused. Among the Jews of a later age, for ex-­
ample, one famous rabbi taught that a man could repudiate his wife
for having burned the soup;; another because he found one more beau-­
tiful, or even without any pretext at all. (82)
“Among Christian peoples,” says Bonald, “marriage makes wom-­
an, not a being equal to man, but a helper (or minister) similar to him”
(108). The purpose of the union is not merely the production of child-­
ren (for which marital indissolubility is unnecessary), but for their
proper conservation—what sociobiologists term “high-­investment pa-­
renting.” For society does not consist of those who are born, but of
those who subsist.
“The law of indissoluble monogamy is perfect,” declared Bonald;;
“its opponents themselves acknowledge this, since they only criticize
its perfection.” (The French legislators had alleged that indissolubility
laid too great a burden on weak human nature.) He even quotes Chr-­
ist’s injunction “be ye perfect!” (96):
It is not difficulties which must be opposed to man’s desires, for
difficulties only enflame them, but the impossibility of satisfying
them altogether. (185)
Laws must be more severe in proportion as society is more ad-­
vanced and man looser. Thus the grown man has duties to fulfill
which are far broader and involve a whole different level of ob-­
ligation than those to which the child is subject. (129)
Like many writers of our time, Bonald notes that divorce can be es-­
pecially hard on women:
Out of everything [the wife] brought into the [domestic] society,
she can only, in the case of dissolution, recover her money. And
is it not supremely unjust that the woman, having entered the
family with youth and fertility, must leave it with sterility and
old age;; and that, belonging only to the domestic state, she
should be put out of the family to which she gave existence, at
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the time in life when nature denies her the ability to begin
another one?
But unlike many of our contemporaries, Bonald was perfectly cog-­
nizant “that most divorces are provoked by women;; which proves
that they are weaker or more impassioned, not that they are more un-­
happy” (106). He even considers indissolubility a way of protecting
women from their own inconstancy, a privilege which feminists have
rarely thought to demand. He also notes that the plurality of men is
“more contrary to nature” than the plurality of women practiced by
primitives (119). 4 Moreover, allowing women to divorce the father of
their children overturns the natural pattern of authority within the
family;; it makes wives the judges or tyrants of their husbands.
Bonald notes that separation remains perfectly legal even where
marriage is indissoluble: “the separation of goods and bodies (a mensa
et a toro) remedies all the disorders of the disunion of hearts: reason is
satisfied with it. It is the passions which go further and demand the
capacity to form new bonds” (177–178).
To allow divorce on the grounds of adultery is to offer adultery as a
means to divorce;; such a law makes “change the cure for inconstancy
[and] pleasure the restraint on voluptuousness” (197). It also encou-­
rages false accusations of adultery. And it creates analogous incen-­
tives for abandonment, cruelty, or false accusations of mistreatment,
wherever these are named as permissible grounds. Divorce
takes all authority from the father, all dignity from the mother,
all security from the child, and transforms domestic society into
a struggle between strength and weakness;; [it] constitutes the
family as a temporary lease, where the inconstancy of the human
heart stipulates its passions, and which ends where new pas-­
sions begin. (38)
The reader may wonder: was this book really written in 1801?
Bonald did not succeed in persuading the Empire’s legislators;; the
Civil Code was ratified, including the provisions for legal divorce. But
after the Bourbon Restoration, he would be given a second chance.
4 The sociobiologist would say that polyandry does not contribute to the evolu-­
tionary fitness of the species.
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THEORY OF THE NOBILITY
We turn now to the other two books under review.
Editor Christopher Olaf Blum calls Bonald’s ideas about the func-­
tion of the nobility “his most original contribution to the theory of the
counter-­revolution.” They are presented in his review of Mme de
Staël’s Considerations on the Principle Events of the French Revolution.
Any advanced society requires men who devote themselves to the
public good in preference to the private good of their families. This is
particularly so in the professions of law and war: Bonald calls judges
and warriors “merely the internal and external means of society’s con-­
servation,” and hence the two fundamentally political or public pro-­
fessions.
To entice men into public service, two things are required. First,
such men must be economically independent. They cannot rely on the
changeable will of an employer who pays them a salary, however ge-­
nerous. Nor would their public duties allow them leisure to busy
themselves with commerce. Hence, they must be landowners.
Second, men must be socialized to see public service as an honor
and a distinction:
The [pre-­revolutionary] constitution said to every private family:
“when you have fulfilled your destination in domestic society,
which is to acquire an independent property through work, or-­
der and thrift—when, that is, you have acquired enough that
you have no need of others and are able to serve the state at your
own expense, from your own income and, if necessary, with
your capital—the greatest honor to which you can aspire will be
to pass into the order particularly devoted to the service of the
state.”
In reality, this is a kind of noble fiction: the service nobility’s “dis-­
tinction, by a strange reversal of conceptions, has seemed, even to
them, to be a prerogative, while it is in fact nothing but servitude.”
Their personal interest naturally dictates continued devotion to their
families and the concerns of private life.
Prerevolutionary France had a remarkable way of filling public of-­
fices: they were sold. Known as the “venality of offices,” the system is
most often cited as an example of the irrationality of the ancien
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régime’s finances. Liberal historians especially have criticized the sys-­
tem for delaying the onset of large-­scale capitalism in France: instead
of expanding their commercial operations indefinitely, successful
merchants would convert their fortunes into land in order to purchase
more ”honorable” offices for themselves or their sons. Bonald warmly
defends the custom:
There could be no more moral institution than one which, by the
most honorable motive, gave an example of disinterestedness to
men devoured by a thirst for money in a society in which the
passion was a fertile source of injustice and crime. There could
be no better policy than to stop, by a powerful yet voluntary
means, and by the motive of honor, the immoderate accumula-­
tion of wealth in the same hands.
A large payment for occupying offices of public trust, he says, func-­
tioned as proof of a candidate’s independence and disinterestedness.
The opening of careers to talents, which the Revolution made such a
fuss over, merely encouraged bribery and endless disagreement over
who was talented. Open venality was, strange to say, the more objec-­
tive procedure.
Bonald contrasts the service nobility of France favorably with what
he calls the political nobility of England: the English peers were “no
body of nobles destined to serve political power but a senate destined
to exercise it.” Nor were they wholly devoted to public duties: “The
peer who makes laws for three months of the year sells linens for the
other nine.”
The liberal might respond that “private” linen merchants are serv-­
ing the public just as much as judges or military men: they provide
merchandise to the “general public.” Contemporary libertarians have
effectively satirized the notion of “public servants” who consume half
our incomes, while “selfish businessmen” labor so that we may feed,
clothe and house ourselves more cheaply than any people in history.
Bonald thought differently. He mentions someone’s suggestion that
actors be considered “public servants” since they perform for the pub-­
lic: this notion was universally and deservedly ridiculed, even by
many who could not explain why actors were not “public men.” Prop-­
erly considered, the case of merchants is analogous to that of actors:
“the merchant who arranges for a whole fleet of sugar and coffee
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119
serves individuals no less than the shopkeeper who sells them to me.”
They all serve the general public qua individuals. But the soldier who
sacrifices his life for his country does not act merely for the benefit of
the particular persons who make up the country at a particular mo-­
ment. Justice has a similar irreducibly impersonal or universal inten-­
tion: it is ideally “blind” or without regard for persons. Soldier and
judge are not in business. Strictly economic thinking cannot account
for these types of human action. 5
It should be acknowledged that Bonald’s theory of the nobility is an
idealizing interpretation. Since the time of Louis XIV, the grande nob-­
lesse at Versailles had not performed much of any function, and well
before the Revolution, many noblemen bore a closer resemblance to
the dissolute characters in Laclos’ Liaisons Dangereux than to the ideal
type described by Bonald. As Blum says, “in making [his] argument,
[Bonald] was a reformer, for the French nobility had shown itself will-­
ing to jettison its duties in favor of the kind of freedom that would en-­
able them, the wealthy, to dominate more effectively and without the
hindrance of traditional strictures.”
ECONOMIC THOUGHT
The French Age of Enlightenment witnessed and celebrated an
economic revolution: the rapid growth of speculation and the money
economy—and a corresponding diminution in the importance of
landed wealth. Bonald believed that the change had been brought
about by the practice of usury. He did not condemn all lending at in-­
terest, but distinguished between the cases of lending for the acquisi-­
tion of productive goods (such as land or capital) and lending for un-­
productive goods meant for consumption.
For example, if I lend a man money to buy a farm, I may legitimate-­
ly charge him interest out of the goods produced by the farm. In the
France of Bonald’s day, this would usually have yielded an interest
rate of about four or five percent per annum. On the other hand, if I
lend a man money to buy bread, his purchase, far from being produc-­
tive of further value, loses what value it has if not quickly consumed.
In contrast to the earth itself, “the products of the earth, are dead val-­
The philosophically inclined reader may wish to consult my discussion of the
essential difference between universalist vs. particularist action in Alexandre Kojève
and the Outcome of Modern Thought, p. 92ff. Bonald’s views on the matter are similar
to Hegel’s.
5
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The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 2010
ues which diminish in quantity or quality.” To earn money by lending
for consumption is, in Bonald’s view, essentially unjust and a viola-­
tion of Christian charity even if freely agreed to between borrower
and lender.
It might appear that such a doctrine would forbid an ordinary
greengrocer from operating his store at a profit. But Bonald holds that
the grocer’s ”profit” really amounts to a wage for the work he does:
The labor of men who purchase, transport, store, preserve and
improve goods merits a salary. The natural decrease, the acci-­
dental and eventual loss of goods and the inevitable waste they
suffer from their transformation into industrial values all require
compensation.
This contradicts the teaching of Adam Smith. 6 I will not venture to
decide the question in Bonald’s favor, but I am inclined to wonder
how many modern economists could give a coherent explanation of
why his unfashionable view is mistaken.
Money, in Bonald’s view, is properly a sign of value and medium
of exchange rather than a commodity like any other. It should not,
therefore, command a ”price” in the form of interest (except as noted).
Where usury is permitted,
interest, or rather the price of money, is infinitely greater than
the produce of the earth, [so] everyone wishes to sell his land in
order to procure money to lend. But when everyone wants to
sell, no one wants to buy. The produce of the land tends to rise
“The profits of stock, it may perhaps be thought, are only a different name for
the wages of a particular sort of labour, the labour of inspection and direction. They
are, however, altogether different [and] are regulated by the value of the stock em-­
ployed.... In many great works, almost the whole labour of [inspection and direc-­
tion] is committed to some principal clerk. His wages properly express the value of
this labour. [T]hey never bear any regular proportion to the capital of which he
oversees the management;; and the owner of this capital, though he is thus dis-­
charged of almost all labour, still expects that his profit should bear a regular pro-­
portion to his capital.” The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 6. Smith, like modern
economists generally, supposes a fundamental distinction between labor and capi-­
tal;; such a distinction may be hard to draw precisely in the case of a small-­time
grocer.
6
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
121
to the highest prices, and the lands themselves fall to the lowest,
or they are unable to be sold at any price, and one buys only
what misery leaves behind or revolutions make available. One
notes a general tendency to leave the home of one’s fathers, to
leave one’s family and country. A vague restlessness and desire
for change torments landowners. They complain of being at-­
tached to an estate burdened with so many cares, and with too
little income left to pay for their luxuries and pleasures. We see
an immoderate desire to become rich extending even to the low-­
est orders of society, causing horrible disorders and unheard of
crimes;; while in others giving rise to a cold, hard egoism, a total
extinction of every generous sentiment, and an insensible trans-­
formation of the most disinterested and friendly nation into a
people of stock-­jobbers who see in the events of society only
chances for gain or loss.
To this unstable, calculating and hectic system Bonald opposes the
traditional landed or agrarian system of economy which flourishes
when interest rates are not allowed to exceed the production of the
earth:
Those who can live within the revenue of their capital seek to
acquire productive land, because the revenue of land is approx-­
imately the same as the interest paid for money, and it is more
secure because the capital itself is more sheltered from events.
Yet where everyone wants to buy, no one wants to sell. Lands
are therefore at a high price relative to goods. All the citizens as-­
pire to move from being possessors of money to being posses-­
sors of land, i.e., from a mobile and dependent political condi-­
tion to a fixed and independent position. This is the most happy
and most moral cast of the public mind, the one most opposed to
the spirit of greed and to revolution.
The reader will learn more about agrarianism from a few pages of
Bonald than from all the literary exercises in I’ll Take My Stand.
The legislator should not remain neutral regarding developments
so harmful to the moral habits of society:
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A wise policy, one more attentive to general interests than to
private ones, would seek to render the circulation of money less
rapid: in Sparta, by using iron money, in modern states, by the
prohibition of lending at usury.... If the profits of commerce reg-­
ularly rise far above the revenue of the land, it would be a wise
measure to bring them back to equality, either by favoring the
cultivation of the earth in every possible way, or by containing
the speculations of commerce within the limits of general utility.
To restore the agrarian order, Bonald also advocated the restoration
of primogeniture and entail: “a law not made for the benefit of the
eldest, but for the preservation and permanence of the landowning
family.” Revolutionary legislation had mandated the equal division
and inheritance of landed estates. This was not unlike the judgment of
Solomon: a half or a quarter or an eighth of an estate is often not
worth the corresponding fraction of the original. It may be unfortu-­
nate that all men cannot live off their own lands, but parceling out es-­
tates into a welter of vegetable gardens does not improve matters;; it
only forces the ”heirs” to sell out for any price they can get. As a lead-­
ing citizen of his district, Bonald got to know the evils of the new sys-­
tem at first hand.
A rich cultivator whom the author congratulated for the good
state of his properties responded in a dolorous tone: “It is true,
my property is beautiful and well cultivated. My fathers for sev-­
eral centuries and I for fifty years have worked to extend, im-­
prove and embellish it. But you see my large family, and with
their laws on inheritance, my children will one day be servants
here where they were the masters.”
Bonald even defended the guild system, which Smith had criticized
for restricting competition and inefficiently requiring seven year ap-­
prenticeships for trades which took six months to learn:
For the inferior classes, the corporations of arts and trades were
a sort of hereditary municipal nobility that gave importance and
dignity to the most obscure individuals and the least exalted
professions. These corporations were at the same time confrater-­
nities, and this is what excited the hatred of the philosophes who
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
123
hunted down religion even in its most modest manifestations.
This monarchical institution brought great benefits to adminis-­
tration. The power of the masters restrained youths who lacked
education, who had been taken away from paternal authority at
an early age by the necessity to learn a trade and win their bread,
and whose obscurity hid from the public power. Finally, the in-­
heritance of the mechanical professions also served public mor-­
als by posing a check to ruinous and ridiculous changes of fa-­
shion.
The author’s first point is especially worth pondering: a man can be
happy in a low station, so long as it is a recognized station within his
society. The equality bug bites men who are deracinated, who do not
belong anywhere. Those with the dignity of even a modest ‘place’ are
less often disturbed by the greater fortunes of others.
Bonald criticized Smith directly in a review which provided the
title for one of Prof. Blum’s volumes:
Wealth, taken in a general and philosophical sense, is the means
of existence and conservation;; opes, in the Latin tongue, signifies
both wealth and strength. For the individual—a physical be-­
ing—these means are material wealth, the produce of the soil
and of industry. For society—a moral being—the means of exis-­
tence and duration are moral riches, and the forces of conserva-­
tion are, for the domestic society, morals, and for the public so-­
ciety, laws. Morals and laws are, therefore, the true and even the
only wealth of societies, families and nations.
Here again we see Bonald’s sharp distinction between universal or
public interests and particular or private ones: economic goods are al-­
ways private, even if they happen to be enjoyed by all the individuals
in a given society. This is why Liberalism (which, according to no less
an authority than Ludwig von Mises, is “merely applied economics”)
cannot give any account of why citizens should have to sacrifice their
lives for their country:
A public spirit cannot be maintained in a commercial and manu-­
facturing nation devoted to calculations of personal interest, and
still less today when the laws of war protect the personal proper-­
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ty of the vanquished and in our humanitarian sentiments we call
it a crime for a citizen not to be paid to defend his land. In every
era, poor nations have conquered rich ones, even though they
held in their wealth the most powerful motives for self-­defense.
Similarly, in his earlier treatise on divorce, Bonald pointed out that
commercial peoples tend to think even of marriage on the model of a
business contract. He writes of “the degradation of a neighboring
people [the English] which evaluates the weakness of a woman, the
crime of a seducer, and the shame of a husband in pounds, shillings
and pence, and sues for the total on expert estimates.”
Bonald also rejects the “privatize everything!” impulse which sees
socialism lurking in every town square:
The use of common things, temples, waters, woods and pastures
constitutes the property of the community. Indeed, there is no
more community where there is no longer a community of use.
It may be true that the commons were poorly administered. I
would even believe that their division, in some places, has pro-­
duced a little more wheat. Yet in some lands this division re-­
stricts flocks to spaces too small for them and thus ruins and im-­
portant branch of agriculture. More importantly, there is no
more common property among the inhabitants of the same place
and, consequently, no more community of interests, no more oc-­
casions for deliberation and agreement. For example, if there
were only one public fountain in a village from which water was
distributed to all the households, to take away the fountain
would be to deny the inhabitants a continual occasion to see,
speak and hear one another.
Bonald, like Marx after him, saw that industrial poverty was differ-­
ent in kind from the poverty in agricultural states, and a greater threat
to traditional social order. Indeed, he comes close to calling the indus-­
trial proletariat the vanguard of the Revolution.
The true politician is concerned about the disorders that arise
from the alternation of ease and misery to which the industrial
population is exposed, which, making the objects of industry
without being able to consume them, is no less obliged to con-­
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
125
sume the fruits of the soil without the ability to produce or even
purchase them—and which, finding itself without work and
without bread, is a ready-­made instrument for revolution.... Let
it not be doubted that it is in hopes of one day taking this supe-­
rabundant population into its pay that one party in Europe pro-­
motes the exaggerated growth of industry, certain that it can
give work to these idle arms in the immense workshop of the re-­
volutionary industry.
BOSSUET AND THE GRAND SIECLE;; EDUCATION
Critics of the Enlightenment includes Bonald’s review of a contempo-­
rary biography of Bossuet which he uses as an occasion for expound-­
ing upon his ideas regarding general education and culture as well as
the great age of French letters.
It is possible to be an educated person today without ever having
heard of Jacques-­Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. The Catholic En-­
cyclopedia describes him as “the greatest orator, perhaps, who has ev-­
er appeared in the Christian pulpit — greater than Chrysostom and
greater than Augustine;; the only man whose name can he compared
in eloquence with those of Cicero and of Demosthenes.” He was at
one time named alongside or ahead of Pascal, Racine, La Bruyère and
Fénelon as an ornament of the grand siècle. But no other figure of that
age has suffered as much from subsequent changes in fashion and
taste. He represents everything succeeding ages rebelled against: or-­
thodoxy, authority, rhetoric and high seriousness.
Bossuet’s biography, writes Bonald,
enables us to judge the importance that the public and the gov-­
ernment then attached to the moral life, with what respect and
what gravity they treated all related matters, and the place that
the doctrine and the ministers of religion occupied in society. …
Worldly fame and genius humbled themselves before the sub-­
lime dogmas and severe morals of Christianity. Racine expiated
his dramatic masterpieces by the long silence of his pen;; Cor-­
neille punished himself for having written Polyeucte and Cinna
by translating the Imitation of Christ into humble verse.
Bonald attributes great importance to the more austere education
given to the youth of that age:
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The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 2010
In the era when Bossuet and all the great men of his day began
their careers, only colleges directed by religious existed in
France. He and his illustrious contemporaries were formed in
provincial monastic institutions where only Greek, Latin and re-­
ligion were taught. The sacred books, the Fathers of the Church,
and several authors of antiquity were sufficient to produce the
writers, orators, philosophers, moralists and poets who adorned
this beautiful era of the human mind, and that literature so earn-­
est in the most common genres and the least substantial sub-­
jects. 7
Bonald’s judgment in this matter is all the more remarkable in view
of his own education. “Unlike the Jesuits,” says editor Blum, “who
had retained their emphasis on classical education, the Oratorians had
embraced the new learning, particularly Cartesian philosophy and the
new empirical sciences. At the College de Juilly, Bonald’s education
was primarily in mathematics and philosophy. Indeed, Bonald’s tur-­
gid prose style betrays the influence of his education.”
Bonald contrasts Bossuet favorably with the semi-­Cartesian system-­
builder Malebranche;; he also gives him the preference over Fénelon, a
man whose mind was dominated by his imagination and whose
thought contained a great deal of politically naive humanitarianism.
The philosophes were correct in viewing Fénelon as in certain respects
their precursor;; for Bossuet they never had any use at all.
Bonald even held to a most unfashionable ranking of the discip-­
lines: “it is the eloquence of poetry that distinguishes the seventeenth
century,” while the greatest boast of the subsequent Age of Brass was
merely “the progress of the physical sciences.”
RELIGION
Like many religious thinkers, Bonald rarely makes religion itself
the object of thematic discussion. In his published writings, he refers
to Catholic Christianity as a social force rather than as a means of in-­
dividual salvation. This does not, of course, imply insincerity or a
merely instrumental view of Christianity;; it follows from the purpose
of his writings.
7
Probably an allusion to La Fontaine’s Fables.
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
127
He explicitly rejected the “separation of Church and State.” Instead,
his thought is marked by a dualism in which religion is related to poli-­
tics as authority to power: religion is the force which acts on men in-­
ternally, which checks their appetites, just as the system of justice
checks their behavior. “Religion directs will;; the civil laws repress ac-­
tions. To separate the direction of wills and the repression of actions
in a society is like separating the soul from the body in man.”
This conception is highly compatible with that of the modern anth-­
ropologist of religion Réné Girard, according to whom community of
worship is what originally permitted men to live together in peace.
Although often described by hostile critics as a “theocrat,” Bonald
opposed a proposal to make clergymen eligible to serve in the French
Chamber of Deputies:
Ministers of religion mixed into political assemblies and solicited
in contradictory ways by all those who seek their votes would
soon lose all consideration. I cannot accustom myself to the idea
of a bishop presenting himself on the ballot with a neighbor
from a country village and not being chosen over him. It is by
the exercise of their ministry that priests can affect our good
choices, by warning the people against their own passions and
those of others. It is here that we must invoke the maxim: “my
kingdom is not of this world.” Religion is outside the world only
in order better to govern our minds, and it should not descend
from the throne to mix itself in the crowd of those who minister
to our affairs.
LATER LIFE
As recounted above, Bonald’s breakthrough into public acclaim fol-­
lowed the successive publication of An Analytical Essay on the Natural
Laws of the Social Order (1800), On Divorce (1801) and Primitive Legisla-­
tion (1802). The last-­named book was reviewed favorably by Chateau-­
briand, the literary star of the hour. Napoleon was also impressed
with the intransigent royalist and struck his name from the list of pro-­
scribed émigrés. Bonald returned to his ancestral estate at Millau, but
continued to send articles and reviews to the Paris journals. The Em-­
peror offered to sponsor a reprint of his first book, and even wished to
appoint him tutor to his son. But the only preferment Bonald accepted
from “the usurper” was a position on the University Council.
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The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 2010
At the Restoration, the now sixty-­year-­old Bonald returned to polit-­
ical life. He was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies of 1815,
known as the chambre introuvable—the chamber the like of which can-­
not be found—for its solid conservative majority. Blum includes sev-­
eral of Bonald’s addresses among his selections.
His most notable legislative achievement was the abolition of di-­
vorce in 1816. It would be reinstituted only in 1884, under the Third
Republic. Did it influence the actual behavior of Frenchmen? During
those sixty-­eight years, French authors produced the world’s foremost
literature of adultery: Madame Bovary, Cousin Bette, The Red and the
Black and a dozen other books. On Divorce has never obtained the
same favor from the public.
Bonald was unsuccessful in his efforts to reinstate primogeniture
and entail: “the egalitarianism of the day was simply too strong,” in
Blum’s view. More generally, the chambre introuvable “accomplished
little, for the king was hemmed in by the old Napoleonic elite, which
was decidedly liberal, even anticlerical.”
Louis XVIII retained Bonald on the Royal Council for Public In-­
struction, named him to the Academie Française and raised him to the
peerage in 1823. In 1827, Charles X put him in charge of censorship.
Bonald had long been a critic of freedom of the press: “Absolute liber-­
ty of the press is a tax upon those who read. It is demanded only by
those who write.... It is difficult for the father of a family not to regard
as a personal enemy the author of a bad book that brings corruption
into the heart of his children.”
The July Revolution of 1830 swept the Bourbons from power, and
France has never again had a government that did not in some way
invoke the example of the Revolution. The uncompromising Bonald
retired from public life. Until his death in 1840, he devoted himself to
his estate and his by this time numerous family. His son Louis went
on to become Archbishop of Lyon and a Cardinal of the Catholic
Church. Another son, Victor, was the author of several books, includ-­
ing a biography of his father.
F. Roger Devlin, PhD, is the author of Alexandre Kojève and the
Outcome of Modern Thought and a contributing editor for The Oc-­
cidental Quarterly.