Devlin-Louis de Bonald. Neglected Antimodern.pdf

L o u is d e B o n a l d : N e g l e c t e d A n t im o d e r n

On DivorceLouis de Bonald; edited and translated by Nicholas Davidson New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992

Critics o f the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter- Revolutionary TraditionEdited and translated by Christopher Olaf BlumWilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004

The True and Only Wealth o f Nations: Essays on Family, Economy and SocietyLouis 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 review here. Critics o f 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 o f 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

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 LIFELouis Gabriel Ambroise Viscount de Bonald was born the only son

of a landowning family near Millau in the Rouergue region of Southern 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 father 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 fuilly near Paris (1769-1772), run by the Oratorians after the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1762. While the Jesuits had offered a classical education, 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 graduation, Bonald joined the Royal Musketeers and served until their dissolution 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 Due de Bourbon was gathering 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 o f Political and Religious Power (1796). Most copies were smuggled into Paris,

106 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 2010

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 almost 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 o f the Social Order (1800), "essentially a more economical statement of A Theory o f Power"; On Divorce (1801), written in opposition to the legalization of divorce in the proposed Civil Code of 1800; and Primitive Legislation (1802), "a systematic statement of the principles of his political philosophy."

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTSOn Divorce is a good place to begin studying Bonald's leading

ideas. Unlike Burke and de Maistre, he devotes little space to analyzing 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 questions, 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 relative to a given end—the cessation of vital functions does not come from the annihilation of the parts, but from their displacement 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 materialist metaphysic: since only bodies are real without qualification, society is simply the sum of its members, and the social good is "the greatest good of the greatest number." Bonald described enlightenment thought ("la philosophie") as "the universal solvent."

Devlin, “Louis de Bonald: Neglected Antimodem 107

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 relentlessly frustrate [his] targeted plans" (p. xx). For example, he sets out to help "the working man" by championing him against his employers, 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 partnering with them in marriage.

A little farther down, Bonald states that all beings and their relationships can be comprehended under the "three general ideas: cause, means, and effect." They may be seen, for example, in the natural human family:

[T]he father has, or is, the power to accomplish through the means or ministry of the mother the reproductive and conservative 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 proportion, 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 conservation of man. The relationship between the sexes produces the child, and the relationship between the ages (parenthood) conserves him. Conservation 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-


servateur, which made the term popular. i The three fundamental social 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 infinite to contemplation." For even the relations between God ("our Father") 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 subjects, who are the domestic persons; the minister, who is the father of the family. The father is at once passive and active, partaking 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 priesthood 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 families:

Common needs bring [families] together but equally strong passions more often disunite them. Women, children, herds, territories, 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 fi-e- quently in his works. The first "Hberal" was a Spanish parHamentarian of 1812 who opposed restoration of the old regime.

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 warriors) mediate between the two extremes, who receive orders which they transmit, and obey to command. (54)

CONTRA ROUSSEAUBonald'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," declared 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.^

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 perpetually 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.


2 Cf. my "From Salon to GuiUotine," TOQ 8:2, p. 74.3 Incidentally, a secular version of the claim to private inspiration, viz., the im

puting of "false consciousness" to others, is aHve 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 teU us so!

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: imperfect; 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 prevents them from attaining their end. So begin man and society. This is the imperfect state; and it is imperfect since it tends toward 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 becomes a plant, the fetus becomes a man, and a savage people becomes civilized. (67)

There is no such thing as a natural man prior to all society: if nothing 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 natural than the savage. (71)

Bonald is here implicitly returning to the premodern understanding 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


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 ministers, 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 arbitrary; the ministers are subordinate, the subjects obedient. This state of society rests on laws rather than persons. (69)Later on, Bonald concedes 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 natural, 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 religion o f priests. (72)

There was a great debate in the eighteenth century opposing the "positive" religion of Christian dogma to an alleged "natural" or "rational" 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 because they do not use them in a manner appropriate to their end.


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 approval: "If the legislator, mistaking his object, establishes a principle different 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 nature 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 nation 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 establishment, because they have passed from the imperfect to the perfect state of society. There is no rest for a people but in society's perfect state. (75-77)

DIVORCEThe 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 produces:

Public power is the guarantor of the commitment of the two spouses to form a society; for public power always represents


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 fundamental unit.

As Bonald says, "no question is simpler in its principles or more fertile in its consequences, since by itself [divorce] raises all the fundamental 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; because the multiplication of the species, which polygamy encourages 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 divorce does.

Similarly, the law of repudiation is harsh, since it punishes a woman 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 o i 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 family lived a rural life, isolated from other families, occupied with healthy work; repudiation was seldom used except in cases of infertility-


In a more advanced state of society, "communication of the sexes becomes more frequent through the proximity of families, and less innocent through the taste for pleasure and the progress of the arts, which follows that of wealth" (79). Under these circumstances, repudiation is certain to be abused. Among the Jews of a later age, for example, one famous rabbi taught that a man could repudiate his wife for having burned the soup; another because he found one more beautiful, or even without any pretext at all. (82)

"Among Christian peoples," says Bonald, "marriage makes woman, 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 children (for which marital indissolubility is unnecessary), but for their proper conservation—w hat sociobiologists term "high-investment parenting." 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 Christ'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 advanced and man looser. Thus the grown man has duties to fulfill which are far broader and involve a whole different level of obligation than those to which the child is subject. (129)

Like many writers of our time, Bonald notes that divorce can be especially 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


the time in Hfe when nature denies her the abiHty to begin another one?

But unlike many of our contemporaries, Bonald was perfectly cognizant "that most divorces are provoked by women; which proves that they are weaker or more impassioned, not that they are more unhappy" (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).^ 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 encourages false accusations of adultery. And it creates analogous incentives 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 passions 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 evolutionary fitness of the species.

THEORY OF THE NOBILITYWe 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 Stael's Considerations on the Principle Events o f 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 conservation/' and hence the two fundamentally political or public professions.

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 generous. 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, order 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 "distinction, 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 offices: they were sold. Known as the "venality of offices," the system is most often cited as an example of the irrationality of the ancien


régime's finances. Liberal historians especially have criticized the system 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 accumulation of wealth in the same hands.

A large payment for occupying offices of public trust, he says, functioned 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 objective 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 serving 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 public: this notion was universally and deservedly ridiculed, even by many who could not explain why actors were not "public men." Properly considered, the case of merchants is analogous to that of actors: "the merchant who arranges for a whole fleet of sugar and coffee


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 moment. Justice has a similar irreducibly impersonal or universal intention: 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. ̂

It should be acknowledged that Bonald's theory of the nobility is an idealizing interpretation. Since the time of Louis XIV, the grande noblesse 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 willing to jettison its duties in favor of the kind of freedom that would enable them, the wealthy, to dominate more effectively and without the hindrance of traditional strictures."

ECONOMIC THOUGHTThe 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 interest, but distinguished between the cases of lending for the acquisition of productive goods (such as land or capital) and lending for unproductive goods meant for consumption.

For example, if I lend a man money to buy a farm, I may legitimately 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 productive 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-


5 The philosophically inclined reader may wish to consult my discussion of the essential difference between universaHst vs. particularist action in Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome o f Modern Thought, p. 92ff. Bonald's views on the matter are similar to Hegel's.

ues which diminish in quantity or quaHty." To earn money by lending for consumption is, in Bonald's view, essentially unjust and a violation 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 accidental 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. 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 employed.... In many great works, almost the whole labour of [inspection and direction] is committed to some principal clerk. His wages properly express the value of this labour. [Tjhey never bear any regular proportion to the capital of which he oversees the management; and the owner of this capital, though he is thus discharged of almost aU labour, stiU expects that his profit should bear a regular proportion to his capital." The Wealth o f Nations, Book 1, Qiapter 6. Smith, like modern economists generally, supposes a fundamental distinction between labor and capital; such a distinction may be hard to draw precisely in the case of a small-time grocer.

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 attached 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 lowest 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 transformation 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 approximately 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 aspire to move from being possessors of money to being possessors of land, i.e., from a mobile and dependent political condition 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:


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 regularly 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 unfortunate that all men cannot live off their own lands, but parceling out estates 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 leading citizen of his district, Bonald got to know the evils of the new system at first hand.

A rich cultivator whom the author congratulated for the good state of his properties responded in a dolorous tone: "It is tiue, my property is beautiful and well cultivated. My fathers for several centuries and I for fifty years have worked to extend, improve 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 apprenticeships for tiades which took six months to learn:

For the inferior classes, the corporations of arts and tiades 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 confraternities, and this is what excited the hafred of the philosophes who


hunted down religion even in its most modest manifestations. This monarchical institution brought great benefits to administration. 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 inheritance of the mechanical professions also served public morals by posing a check to ruinous and ridiculous changes of fashion.

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 being—these means are material wealth, the produce of the soil and of industry. For society—a moral being—the means of existence and duration are moral riches, and the forces of conservation are, for the domestic society, morals, and for the public society, 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 always 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 manufacturing nation devoted to calculations of personal interest, and still less today when the laws of war protect the personal proper


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 produced a little more wheat. Yet in some lands this division restricts flocks to spaces too small for them and thus ruins and important 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 occasions 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 different in kind from the poverty in agricultural states, and a greater threat to traditional social order. Indeed, he comes close to calling the industrial 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


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 superabundant population into its pay that one party in Europe promotes the exaggerated growth of industry, certain that it can give work to these idle arms in the immense workshop of the revolutionary industry.

BOSSUET AND THE GRAND SIECLE-, EDUCATIONCritics o f the Enlightenment includes Bonald's review of a contempo

rary biography of Bossuet which he uses as an occasion for expounding 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 Encyclopedia describes him as "the greatest orator, perhaps, who has ever 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: orthodoxy, authority, rhetoric and high seriousness.

Bossuet's biography, writes Bonald,

enables us to judge the importance that the public and the government 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 sublime dogmas and severe morals of Christianity. Racine expiated his dramatic masterpieces by the long silence of his pen; Corneille punished himself for having written Polyeucte and Cinna by translating the Imitation o f Christ into humble verse.

Bonald attributes great importance to the more austere education given to the youth of that age:



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 religion 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 earnest in the most common genres and the least substantial subjects.^

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 turgid 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 disciplines: "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."

RELIGIONLike 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 individual salvation. This does not, of course, imply insincerity or a merely instrumental view of Christianity; it follows from the purpose of his writings.

' Probably an allusion to La Fontaine's Fables.

He explicitly rejected the "separation of Church and State." Instead, his thought is marked by a dualism in which religion is related to politics as authority to power: religion is the force which acts on men internally, which checks their appetites, just as the system of justice checks their behavior. "Religion directs will; the civil laws repress actions. 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 anthropologist 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 counfry 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 LIFEAs recounted above, Bonald's breakthrough into public acclaim fol

lowed the successive publication of An Analytical Essay on the Natural Laws o f the Social Order (1800), On Divorce (1801) and Primitive Legislation (1802). The last-named book was reviewed favorably by Chateaubriand, the literary star of the hour. Napoleon was also impressed with the infransigent royalist and sfruck his name from the list of proscribed émigrés. Bonald returned to his ancesfral estate at Millau, but continued to send articles and reviews to the Paris journals. The Emperor oftered 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.


At the Restoration, the now sixty-year-old Bonald returned to political life. He was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies of 1815, known as the chambre introuvable—the chamber the like of which cannot be found—for its solid conservative majority. Blum includes several of Bonald's addresses among his selections.

His most notable legislative achievement was the abolition of divorce 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 Instruction, named him to the Academic 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 liberty 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, including a biography of his father.


F. Roger Devlin, PhD, is the author o f Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modem Thought and a contributing editor for The Occidental Quarterly.

Documents

Devlin-Louis de Bonald. Neglected Antimodern.pdf