BONALD, LOUIS-GABRIEL-AMBROISE, viscount. – French philosopher and statesman, born at Le Monna near Millau in Rouergue on 2 October 1754 and died at Lyon on 23 November 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 St-Séverin. During that period he collaborated with Chateaubriand on the journal Mercure de France and the Journal des débats; later on the Conservateur and Lamennais’s Défenseur. He welcomed the restoration of the monarchy with satisfaction. In 1814 Louis XVIII appointed him a member of the Council of Public Education. From 1815 to 1822 he was a deputy for Aveyron; in 1823 he was appointed a peer of France and subsequently a minister of state. An enemy of every form of liberalism, he opposed it in politics and religion. In 1815 he presented to the Chamber the law against divorce, which was subsequently 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 July Revolution of 1830, he withdrew into private life, having refused to take the oath.
B. was among the principal proponents of reconnecting the throne with the altar; however, the ardor of the polemic led him into excesses. He claims for God the origin of society and religion, but, taking up again the ideas of G. B. Vico, he accepts the notion of the ancient mute man, at which point he grafts on his theory of language as divinely inspired and revealed.
Speech, in fact, according to B., precedes thought and is absolutely necessary in order 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 because, in order to invent it, man must think, and it is necessary for him in order to think. Language, therefore, is not an invention of individual reason; nor is it an invention of society, since language is presupposed by society in order that society may exist. It therefore comes from God, like man and society. But the revelation of language is not an end in itself; it is only the necessary means for the revelation of truths of a higher, moral and civil order, to be transmitted through language and believed because they have been transmitted. It is tradition, in fact, that guarantees knowledge, the principles of human understanding, and reason itself; it alone is the criterion for distinguishing truth from error (Recherches philosophiques, ch. 1). In conclusion: social education is the sole means of learning truths of the supersensible order, and social authority is the sole motive for reason’s assent.
On this philosophical basis, B. erects his religious-political-social construction. It should first of all be noted that in his philosophy B. reduces everything to three elements: cause, means, and effect. Thus, in theology: God, God-Man, and man; in cosmology: God, motion, and body; in politics: king, nobility, and society; government, official, and subject, and so forth. Positing, against Rousseau’s conception, that man is naturally sociable, B. asserts that religious society lies at the basis of every society. The perfect type of religion is the Catholic religion, because only in it, through belief in the God-Man, is there a connection between the extreme terms God and man, heaven and earth. The perfect type of civil society is the ancient French society under monarchical government. This form of society, in agreement with the Catholic religion, brought civilization to its highest point. The State must respect religion, but religion must not overpower the state. Foi, roi, loi: these are the ospitaldi of B.’s political-social thought. Domestic society—father, mother, and child—the most ancient form of society, is unified by the father’s absolute power and strengthened by the perpetual bond of indissolubility.
B.’s most important works, 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 (n. p. 1800), under the pseudonym St-Séverin; Du divorce (n. p. 1801); La législation primitive (2 vols., Paris 1802); Pensées sur divers sujets et discours politiques (2 vols., n. p. 1817); Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales (2 vols., n. p. 1818); Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques (n. p. 1819); Démonstration philosophique du principe constitutif de la société (n. p. 1830); Discours sur la vie de Jésus-Christ (Paris 1843).
B.’s philosophical and theological conception does not entirely correspond to the worthiness of his intentions. His work aims to provide a philosophical foundation for social, moral, religious, and Christian values. But, depriving individual reason of its cognitive function and reducing it to a mere instrument for interpreting universal reason—that is, the authority of the community—he betrayed his own intentions, his cause, and his faith. For he thereby deprived faith of its primary essential condition: rationality, thus irreparably damaging II. The consequence of this first error was, in the theological field, the confusion of the natural and the supernatural—an error already brought to maturity by the long Jansenist controversy—and, in the philosophical field, the original theory of language, now generally abandoned.
Paris 1917, pp. 54 ff., 126 ff.; P. P. Trompeo, s. V. ENOCH. Ital., VII, pp. 380-81; S. Losch, s. V. in LThK, II, cols. 445-446. Vito Zollini