Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de°
BONALD, LOUIS GABRIEL AMBROISE, VICOMTE DE°
BONALD, LOUIS GABRIEL AMBROISE, VICOMTE DE ° (1754–1840), French political theorist. De Bonald fled France in 1791 during the Revolution. He later became a leading exponent of the Catholic and royalist political school and opposed all liberal tendencies. A logical outcome of his traditionalist views was to regard the Jews as a "deicide nation" and to combat their emancipation. In the Mercure de France (23 (1806), 249–67), which he directed with *Chateaubriand from 1806, de Bonald accused the Jews of aspiring to world domination. De Bonald's works, in particular the Théorie du pouvoir, formed the ideological arsenal from which the French clerical movement was later to forge its weapons of intolerance and antisemitism.
bibliography:
L. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme, 3 (1968), index.