BONALD, LOUIS GABRIEL AMBROISE, VICOMTE DE
(1754–1840)

Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, the French publicist and philosopher, was born in the château of Le Monna, near Millau (Aveyron). He emigrated in 1791, during the Revolution, to Heidelberg, moving later to Constance, and joined the circle of royalist writers who in 1796 published a number of books attacking the Revolutionary Party and defending the monarchy. His own contribution to the propaganda was his famous Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux (3 vols., Constance, 1796), the first of a long series of volumes expressing the ultramontane position, the political supremacy of the papacy, absolute monarchy, and traditionalism.

The basic premise of Bonald, as far as his philosophy was concerned, was the identity of thought and language. Against the usual eighteenth-century idea that language was a human invention, he revived Jean-Jacques Rousseau's argument that since an invention requires thought and thought is internal speech, language could not have been invented. Consequently, he argued, it must have been put into the soul of man at creation. By means of certain philological investigations, Bonald was able to convince himself that there was a basic identity in all languages, as indeed there is in the Indo-European.

But language is a social, not an individual, phenomenon. It binds individuals together into groups and expresses an interpersonal set of ideas. These ideas are tradition. The unity of tradition may be disrupted, as it was during the Revolution, but nevertheless humankind will have to return to it if they have any hope of regaining social health. When this return occurs, people will cooperate in a single political system and a single set of religious beliefs. The former will be absolute monarchy, the latter Roman Catholicism, both having single and omnicompetent heads. Thus, just as the universe is created and governed by one God, so both the church and state must preserve administrative unity. But since the church is the direct channel of communication between God and his creatures, the state and its subjects must be governed in moral affairs by the church.

The ultramontanism of Bonald was as extreme as logically possible. He maintained that the arts, for instance, flourished only in an absolute monarchy, and hence saw nothing to praise in Greek art. In fact, he had nothing good to say about anything Greek, since Greece was given to democracy, though he made an exception of the Spartans. He was opposed to the legalization of divorce and to equal rights for women. He accepted capital punishment, since God would see to it that the innocent would not suffer in the afterlife. He supported general censorship and denounced freedom of the press. And since he was a man of Stoic morals, he did not worry much about human dissatisfaction or unhappiness.

Bonald was a philosopher who never changed his views. In each of his numerous works he repeated the same fundamental theses. His influence was restricted to men of the extreme right, in spite of his ingenuity in argument and logical rigor. His ideas survived in France in L'action française and even in the nonpolitical writings of Charles Maurras, through whom they passed in diluted form to T. S. Eliot.

See also Eliot, Thomas Stearns; Language and Thought; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Traditionalism.

Bibliography

The collected works of Bonald appeared as Oeuvres complètes, edited by Abbé Migne (Paris, 1859).

For works on Bonald, see G. Boas, French Philosophies of the Romantic Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925), ch. 3; Harold Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), which follows Moulinié; H. Moulinié, De Bonald (Paris: Alcan, 1916); C. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (Paris: Garnier, 1851–1862), Vol. IV, 426; Émile Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvième siècle, lère série (Paris, 1890).

other recommended titles

Dejnozka, Jan. "Origins of the Private Language Argument." Dialogos 30 (66) (1995): 59–78.

Reedy, W. Jay. "Language, Counter-Revolution and the 'Two Cultures': Louis de Bonald's Traditionalist Scientism." Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 579–598.

Reedy, W. Jay. "The Traditionalist Critique of Individualism in Post-Revolutionary France: The Case of Louis de Bonald." History of Political Thought 16 (1) (1995): 49–75.

George Boas (1967)

Bibliography updated by Tamra Frei (2005)