Louis de Bonald

Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald (French: [lwi də bɔnald]; 2 October 1754 – 23 November 1840) was a French counter-revolutionary philosopher and politician. He is mainly remembered for developing a theoretical framework from which French sociology would emerge.

Bonald came from an ancient noble family of Provence. Louis was born in the chateau of Le Monna, a modest estate that served as the family seat; the only son in his family, Louis was heir to the family estate. Le Monna is situated just east of the market town of Millau, overlooking the Dourbie river. His father, Antoine Sébastien de Bonald, died when Louis was four years old and the young boy would be brought up by his pious mother Anne née de Boyer du Bosc de Périe. Like many in the provincial nobility of the time, Anne was influenced by the Jansenists and brought up her son with a stern Catholic piety. De Bonald was tutored at Le Monna until the age of eleven, when he was sent to boarding school in Paris. He would then move to the Oratorian College of Juilly at age fifteen at the behest of his mother. The Oratorians were known for their rigor and grounded de Bonald in the classics, as well as in mathematics, philosophy, and especially history. The headmaster of the school, Father Mandar, was a friend of Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and de Bonald was most likely acquainted with the writings of the philosophes early on.

He left Juilly in 1772 and entered the musketeers the following year. His unit was attached to King Louis XV at Versailles before being disbanded in 1776. After leaving the military, de Bonald returned to his estates in his native region of Rouergue. He assumed the life of a country gentleman, and took an interest in growing his properties and making them as productive as possible. He married a country nobleman’s daughter, Elisabeth-Marguerite de Guibal de Combescure, and the two had seven children, four of whom lived past childhood. One of their sons, Louis Jacques Maurice de Bonald, would go on to become the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lyon. His other son, Victor, would have a writing career of his own and would write a biography of his father.

He was elected to the town council of Millau in 1782 and was appointed mayor by the province's royal governor in 1785. He was popular as mayor and after the introduction of election for local officials in 1789, rather than appointment, he easily won reelection in February 1790. He was elected as a deputy to the departmental assembly later that year. De Bonald was at first supportive of the French Revolution and its initial decentralizing tendencies, and hoped the nobility would recover powers lost during the centralization of the 17th century. He even lead the citizens of Millau in drafting a letter of congratulations to the National Assembly, King Louis XVI, and to finance minister Jacques Necker, expressing the wish that "this sacred title of citizen [and] the spirit of concord and fraternity" would lead to a new sense of solidarity. He managed to quell the Great Fear in his region and would earn the thanks of the National Assembly, and he would be elected president of the departmental assembly soon after. However he soured on the Revolution with the enactment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790. Feeling unable to carry out the decrees of the Constitution in good conscience, he resigned from his post in January 1791.

Fearing that his position as a former public official would make him the target of reprisals, he emigrated with his two eldest sons – leaving behind his wife, mother, and his remaining children – in October 1791 and joined the army of the Prince of Condé. He was within earshot of the Battle of Jemappes in November 1792. He soon settled in Heidelberg and later moved to Switzerland. There he wrote his first important work, the highly conservative Theorie du Pouvoir Politique et Religieux dans la Societe Civile Demontree par le Raisonnement et l'Histoire (3 vols., 1796; new ed., Paris, 1854, 2 vols.), which the Directory condemned. His exile would separate him from his family for more than a decade, with only a brief reunion in 1797.

He returned to France in 1797 and largely spent the next five years in Paris in a sort of internal exile. Napoleon was an admirer of de Bonald's writings and had him removed from the list of proscribed émigrés in 1802. This amnesty granted de Bonald a greater degree of freedom to travel and publish his writings. He moved within literary and political circles, and would make the acquittance of writers such as La Harpe, Lacretelle, and, most importantly, François-René de Chateaubriand. During this time he wrote a critical review of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, arguing that the true common good of a nation lies in a shared life of law-abiding virtue and not simply in material prosperity. He would strike up a long correspondence and friendship with the conservative Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre, however the two would never meet. In 1806, he, along with Chateaubriand and Joseph Fiévée, edited the Mercure de France. Two years later, he was appointed counsellor of the Imperial University, which he had often attacked previously.

The Bourbon Restoration saw de Bonald's political fortunes increase. He was made a member of the Royal Council for Public Instruction, and in 1816 was appointed to the French Academy by Louis XVIII. From 1815 to 1823, de Bonald served as an elected deputy for Aveyron in the Chamber of Deputies. A member of the Ultra-royalist faction (also known as "Ultras"), his speeches were extremely conservative and he vigorously sought to undo the legislation passed in the wake of the Revolution. He opposed the Charter of 1814, seeing it as giving too many concessions to the revolutionaries and enfeebling the government. He sought strong protections for the traditional family and in 1815 successfully argued for the repeal of laws passed during the Revolution permitting divorce, which afterwards remained illegal in France until 1884.

The Revolution had abolished the remainder of the medieval trade guilds, affording little protection to workers. The Le Chapelier Law of 1791 forbade workers the right to form workers' associations and prohibited strike actions. De Bonald worked to reverse the Le Chapelier Law and reintroduce guilds but his efforts were unsuccessful, and the right to form workers' associations would not be reintroduced in France until 1864.