Louis de Bonald. Neglected Antimodern.pdf

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L
OUIS DE
B
ONALD
: N
EGLECTED
A
NTIMODERN
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-­
106
The Occidental Quarterly,
vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 2010
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,
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
107
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.”
108
The Occidental Quarterly,
vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 2010
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-­
Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodern
109
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:
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.
1

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