BONALD, Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, Viscount of. – French philosopher and statesman, b. at Le Monna near Millau in Rouergue on 2 Oct. 1754, d. at Lyon on 23 Nov. 1840. A member of the central administration of the department of Avignon (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 this period he collaborated with Chateaubriand on the *Mercure de France* and the *Journal des débats*; later with Lamennais’ *Conservateur* and *Défenseur*. He welcomed with satisfaction the restoration of the monarchy. In 1814 he was appointed by Louis XVIII to the Council of Public Instruction. From 1815 to 1822 he was deputy for Avignon; in 1823 he was made a peer of France and subsequently 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 passed the following year. Opposed to press freedom, he fought against it, accepting the appointment as president of the censorship commission. After the July Revolution of 1830, he retired into private life, having refused to take the oath of allegiance.
B. was among the principal advocates of the re-establishment of the alliance between throne and altar; yet the vehemence of his polemics led him into excesses. He claimed that society and religion have their origin in God, but, drawing on G. B. Vico, he held that the idea of primitive man was mute, and at this point he grafted his theory of a divinely inspired and revealed language.
According to B., language is, in fact, prior to thought and absolutely necessary for thinking; 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 faculty of intellection, so he could not have given himself language; all the more so because to invent it man must think, and to think it is necessary. Language, therefore, is not a product of individual reason; nor is it a product of society, by which it is presupposed, since society can exist only because of II. Hence it comes from God, as do man and society. But the revelation of language is not an end in itself; it is merely the necessary means for the revelation of higher truths, moral and civil, which are transmitted by language and believed because they are transmitted. Tradition, in fact, guarantees science, the principles of human knowledge, and reason itself; it alone is the criterion for distinguishing truth from error (*Recherches philosophiques*, ch. 1). In conclusion: social education is the only means of learning truths of a supersensible order, and social authority is the only motive for the assent of reason.
On this philosophical basis, B. erected his religious-political-social construction. It should be noted first 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. Postulating man as naturally sociable in opposition to Rousseau’s conception, B. affirmed that the basis of every society is the religious society. The perfect type of religion is the Catholic religion, because only in it, with the belief in the God-Man, is there a link between the extreme terms of man, heaven, and earth. The perfect type of civil society is the ancient French society under monarchical government. This form of society, in accord with the Catholic religion, brought civilization to its highest peak. The State must be the religion, but the religion must not overpower the State. Faith, we, law: these are the cornerstones of B.’s politico-social thought. The 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 expounded, are: *Théorie du pouvoir politique et religion* (3 vols., Constance 1796); *Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles et l'ordre social* (n.p. 1800), under the pseudonym of 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 modernes* (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).
The philosophical and theological conception of B. does not entirely correspond to the goodness of his intentions. His work aims to provide a philosophical foundation for social, moral, religious, and Christian values. Yet, by 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. Indeed, he deprived faith of its primary essential condition: rationality, thereby irreparably damaging II. A consequence of this first error was, in the theological field, the confusion of the natural and the supernatural, an error already fostered by the long Jansenist controversy, and, in the philosophical field, the original theory of language, now generally abandoned.