Louis-Gabriel-Аmbroise Vicomte De Bonald Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de Bonald (1754–1840) was a French counter revolutionary writer, conser vative polemicist, and statesman. He lived a quiet life in provincial obscurity until the French Revolution (1789–1799), when he fled into exile to join the Army of the Condé to fight against the armies of revolutionary France. During these years, Bonald lived in Heidelberg, Germany, where he wrote his first major theoretical work, Théorie du pouvoir politiqueet religieux (1796).

Following the Restoration of the monarchy in France with the defeat of emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Bonald sat as a deputy for the Aveyron department in the French National Assembly, supporting the Ultra-Royalist faction (the Ultras).This was the majority faction in the assembly during the reign of the moderate, constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII, who considered the Ultras more royalist than he. Louis was succeeded as king in 1824 by his reactionary brother Charles X, who was himself an Ultra. Charles supported the enactment of many conservative laws during his reign, including the Anti-Sacrilege Act (1825), which provided for capital punishment for some acts of blasphemy and sacrilege against the Catholic Church. Bonald defended this law in the National Assembly, where he also defended laws restricting freedom of the press. He argued for the repeal of the French Revolutionary law that legalized divorce, a stance he defended in his essay On Divorce (Du divorce, 1801). Bonald was a supporter of capital punishment and was fiercely hostile to democracy, liberalism, and industrialization, against which he campaigned tirelessly as both a lawmaker and a writer. He was eventually appointed a minister of state and made a peer before retiring from politics in 1830 with the abdication of Charles X. He died a decade later.

As a writer, Bonald sought to explain and justify philosophically what he campaigned for politically as a member of the assembly. Conceptually, he started from a complete rejection of methodological individualism—the idea that fully-formed humans with reason and identity and agency pre-exist society, which has been created by humans to further their interests. Bonald believed that it was not individuals who constitute society, but society that constitutes individuals. Because the modern age has put the individual before society, it has instituted a form of life fundamentally and dangerously incompatible with society, as the events of the 1790s so graphically demonstrated. Unless the individual is wholly subordinated to and subsumed within society, social disintegration and political anarchy will be ever-present dangers.

Bonald also believed that just as men do not create societies, so they do not invent languages. This is because the creation of a language presupposes the existence of a language. From this Bonald drew the conclusion that only God could create language, and he implanted it humans. Given these views, it is not surprising how much Bonald’s ideas were admired by French philosopher Auguste Comte, the so-called father of sociology, whose own “science of society” started from the same assumption of methodological holism.

Bibliography:

Bonald, Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de. Oeuvres complètes, 3 vols, edited by Abbé Migne. Paris: Migne, 1859–1864.
Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, edited by Colette Capitan. 1796. Reprint, Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1965.
Démonstration philosophique du principe constitutif de la société: Méditations politiques tirées de l’Evangile. Paris: Librairie philosophique J.Vrin, 1985.
On Divorce, translated and edited by Nicholas Davidson, foreword by Robert Nisbet. New Brunswick, N.J.:Transaction, 1992.
Klinck, David. The French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, Louis de Bonald (1754–1840). New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
Reedy,W. Jay. “The Traditionalist Critique of Individualism in Postrevolutionary France:The Case of Louis de Bonald.” History of Political Thought 16, no. 1 (1995): 49–75.
Toda, Michel. Louis de Bonald:Théoricien de la Contre-Révolution. Clovis, France: Étampes, 1997.