BONALD, Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, Viscount of. - French philosopher and statesman, b. at Le Monna near Millau in Rouergue on 2 Oct. 1754 and d. at Lyon on 23 Nov. 1840. A member of the central administration of the department of Aveyron (1790), he resigned the following year, refusing to apply the civil constitution of the clergy; he then took refuge abroad. In 1797 he returned to France under the pseudonym of St-Séverin. During that period he collaborated with Chateaubriand on the review Mercure de France and on the Journal des débats; later on the Conservateur and the Défenseur of Lamennais. He greeted the restoration of the monarchy with satisfaction. In 1814 he was appointed by Louis XVIII a member of the Council of Public Instruction. From 1815 to 1822 he was deputy for Aveyron; in 1823 he was appointed a peer of France and then minister of state. An enemy of every form of liberalism, he opposed it in politics and in religion. In 1815 he presented to the Chamber the law against divorce, which was then approved the following year. An opponent of freedom of the press, he fought against it, accepting appointment as president of the censorship commission. After the revolution of July 1830, he retired to private life, having refused to take the oath.
B. was among the principal supporters of the reattachment of the throne to the altar; however, the ardor of polemic made him fall into excesses. He claims from God the origin of society and of religion, but, linking himself to G. B. Vico, he holds the idea of primitive mute man, grafting at this point his theory of language as divinely inspired and revealed.
The word, in fact, is, according to B., antecedent to thought and absolutely necessary in order to be able to think; it is the soul of thought, to which it stands precisely as the soul to the body. Now, just as man did not give himself the intellectual faculty, so he cannot have given himself language; all the more so since, in order to invent it, man must think, and in order to think it is necessary. Language, therefore, is not an invention of the individual reason; nor even of society, by which it is presupposed, in order that society may exist. Therefore it comes from God as do man and society. But the revelation of language is not an end in itself, but is only the necessary means for the revelation of truths of a higher order, moral and civil, to be handed down with language and to be believed because they are handed down. It is tradition, in fact, that guarantees science, the principles of human knowledge and reason itself; only it is the criterion of distinction between truth and error (Recherches philosophiques, ch. 1). In conclusion: social education is the only means of learning truths of a suprasensible order and social authority is the only motive of assent for reason.
On this philosophical basis, B. raises his religio-political-social construction. It should be noted first of all that in his philosophy B. reduces everything to three elements: cause, means and effect. In theology, therefore: God, God-Man and man; in cosmology: God, movement and body; in politics: king, nobility and society; government, official and subject, and so on. Having thus posited man as naturally sociable against the conception of Rousseau, B. affirms that at the basis of every society is religious society. The perfect type of religion is the Catholic religion, because only in it, with belief in the God-Man, is there the connection between the extreme terms God and man, heaven and earth. The perfect type of civil society is the ancient French society with monarchical government. Such a form of society, in accord with the Catholic religion, has brought civilization to its highest summit. The State must respect religion, but religion must not overpower the state. Foi, roi, loi: these are the watchwords of B.'s politico-social thought. Domestic society - father, mother and child - the most ancient form of society, is unified by the absolute power of the father and strengthened by the perpetual bond of indissolubility.
The most important works of B., in which his thought is set forth, are: Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux (3 vols., Constance 1796); Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles et l'ordre social (s. l. 1800), under the pseudonym of St-Séverin; Du divorce (s. l. 1801); La législation primitive (2 vols., Paris 1802); Pensées sur divers sujets et discours politiques (2 vols., s. l. 1817); Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales (2 vols., s. l. 1818); Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques (s. l. 1819); Démonstration philosophique du principe constitutif de la société (s. l. 1830); Discours sur la vie de Jésus-Christ (Paris 1843).
B.'s philosophical and theological conception does not entirely correspond to the goodness of his intentions. His work aims to give a philosophical basis to social, moral, religious and Christian values. But, by depriving the individual reason of its cognitive function and reducing it to a pure instrument of interpretation of the universal reason, that is, of the authority of the community, he betrayed his own intentions, his cause and his faith. From faith, in fact, he took away its primary essential condition: rationality, thus damaging it irremissibly. The consequence of this first error was, in the theological field, the confusion of the natural and the supernatural, an error already matured by the long Jansenist controversy, and, in the philosophical field, the original theory of language, now generally abandoned.
Bibliography9 works
Paris 1917, pp. 54 ff., 126 ff.; P. P. Trompeo, s. v. in Enc. Ital., VII, pp. 380-81; S. Losch, s. v. in LThK, II, coll. 445-446.
Vito Zollini