Bonald asserts that the foremost instrument of knowledge is language. In this way he followed Hamann against the dominant currents of the time, who had asserted the primacy of communication above abstraction. Bonald was a Scotist in his application of the Univocity of Being. Bl. John Duns Scotus asserted that the ens commune, the essential order of Being was shared by God and Man, and thus they shared common transcendental predicates, a mathesis Universalis. We know this idea to have come about in defence in the writings of the Doctor Subtilis of illuminationism. It is in the immediate cognitive apprehension that the foundational correspondence between man and God is established by univocity. We do know Bonald read Nicolas Malebranche, and it is clear that the grand schema of Bonald’s society resembles the ordre of the great theologian. Malebranche’s concept of Occasionalism dealt with mathematical infinitude, and it is important to note that neither Scotus nor Malebranche ever deny the infinite application of univocal terms to God alone. One may be aware of the argument by Fr. Daniel Horan in opposition to the Radical Orthodox group that univocity is not an ontological but a semantic distinction. Theological discussion is beyond the scope of this writeup, but I’d point to the Ordinatio and Scotus’s own distinction between quid est and si est as regarding negative judgement and positive affirmation. In short, to Malebranche and Bonald, It is in His fullness that one can come to the conclusion that there is only one efficient cause and mover of things.
Thus the Provençal nobleman could equivocate the order of the secular world to the Divine with a form of Social Trinitarianism. The Divine Trinity to pouvoir/ministier/sujet in political society and then man/woman/child in successive order based on authoritative units within larger civil society. Language, which binds society, was god-given, indeed, Bonald calls God Verbe Eternel, the Eternal Word. This mirrors Hamann where sign as natural phenomena produced the first word. This is embodied rationality in it’s truest sense. Thus, the communal interchange is the product of the infinite word, society birthed from God. The revival of the concept of hexis in Phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s own exegesis on Intuition and knowledge critiqued disembodied objective knowledge as thrownness and situatedness are conditions of human finitude, it is a recognition. It is interesting to note that Bonald observed the usage of grammar, particularly substantives between the sexes and verbs the type of society and in the usage of we, a collective. In this sense, language is the constitutive factor in society. Humanity is acculturated by linguistic dependence on the Word itself.
“...it is natural that the fundamental rules of his expression or of his speech should be found in society, inasmuch as the essential reason for his being is to be found also”
But the personality of Bonald, comes out in what he believes this larger agglomeration, society,is, a moral being. Contrary to the historicist tendency in the later half of the 19th century, Bonald does not singularise the one event which shaped his life, but asserts that there were three revolutions. The Revolution of Morals, that occurred in the Regency court of the Duc d’Orleans, the Revolution of Doctrines in the halfway mark of the 18th century and the Revolution of Laws, which was the cause of the Revolutionary upheaval of the 1790’s. The processual theory’s backbone is evident, that mores affect language, which in turn affects relations, and only then do laws of lands change. We understand therefore the Tacitean currents in the writer, observing Montesquieu's moeurs no longer in practice in society.
His criticism of Anne-Jacques Turgot, the Physiocrat finance minister of Louis XVI, was adapted from that of Paris Parlement in debate in 1776, giving us a unique insight into the origins of Conservatism. The Physiocrats were popular in the royal courts and Quesnay, the school’s patriarch and personal advisor to Louis XIV was an avid Sinophile who wished to imitate China with centralised agriculture and divine monarchy. In the physiocratic conception, which Voltaire was sympathetic to, only a despot could uphold the free flow of goods against the vested interests of entrenched guilds. The person of Bonald, by recapitulating the social as a thing-past, was exalting Tradition as a conscious value. As such Tradition in an interpretive sense would take over the idea of civil society in a Ciceronian sense as the primary vehicle of Conservative politics. It lent it much needed appeal for dynamism but caused it’s diluting as Tradition and it’s understanding, save in a few institutions dims with time. However, we know that the Parlement as an institution and in it’s history acted as a check against excessive royal power. The Parisian parlement, to it’s embarrassment had supported the Bourbon cadets and the nobility in the Fronde against Louis XIV and had also after consideration in a lit de justice in 1527, forbidden King Francis from utilising emergency powers to raise the ransom money for his imprisonment caused by his foolhardy charge at Pavia and equally foolhardy expedition to recapture Milan in 1525.
It should surely surprise people that the origins of conservatism do not lie in the exaltation of absolute power of the monarch but rather the constitutional aristocratic interests but also that of the clergy and guild artisans. This is not to say that Bonald’s own reading of Cardinal Bossuet at a young age did not influence his own perspective on the role of the monarch, however the degree of power traditionally ascribed to the King, as we find Bonald later describing during the Restoration was never absolute in the sense of detached and dependent on sovereign will alone. Panagiotis Kondylis, writing about Conservatism and it's origins, refuted the psycho-anthropolological characterisation of the conservative position as being purely legitimation/ projection on the part of the powers that be. Indeed, how can Action Francaise’s radical activism against the liberal order of the Third Republic fit with the psycho-anthropological schema of the passive, orderly and puritan conservative?. The tyrannicidal intent and active resistance to the King’s power was traced to the Fronde by Kondylis as his example. I would extend the metaphor to as far back as the rallying of a noble ligue around Charles de Valois against Louis X and his personal counsellor Enguerrand de Marigny. But I shall stick to the ancien regime, to the reign of the Valois and Bourbons for historical background.
15th century theologian and jurist, Jean Gerson wrote that “And just as men are joined together spiritually in the spiritual body, the head of which is Christ . . . , so are men joined together morally and politically in the respublica, which is a body the head of which is the Prince”. Such discourse on the corpus of state would resonate down the centuries as far to Honore de Balzac, whose resigned realism at the sight of the urban Rastignacs he saw led him to lament that, “When it beheaded Louis XVI, the Revolution beheaded in his person all fathers of families”. Archbishop Claude de Seyssel of Turin went as far to warn Louis XII that the “contentment of the three orders” was what the monarchy depended on for it’s survival. Louis’s astute annual regulation of the Taille, the flat land tax, despite his defeat in Naples in 1504 against the Spanish, made him quite a popular king. The French etat-nationale was not an overarching state for most of the ancien regime, but it was only in times of invasion that the national interest was brought up to be of supreme importance. Constitutionalism was not only a force in the Ile-de-France. The annexation of large feudal territories by the French Crown, such as Normandy in 1358 and Burgundy in 1477 by conquest or reversion to the eldest Capetian branch was a process of compromise. The King had to acknowledge the local rights and privileges of the land. The Burgundian parlement in Dijon of Charles the Bold was fully incorporated into the state apparatus. Normandy, was represented by a parlement called the Exchequer(Echiquier de Normandie) from 1499, founded by local cardinal Georges d’Amboise. Legal customs remained unwritten and there were regional variations such as the influence of Roman civic laws in Occitan-speaking lands. In fact, the taille and gable(the salt-tax) were open to negotiation at the behest of the local Consultative estates. Later during the Bourbon monarchy, new interest groups called the bureaux des finances arose. The assumed total power of monarchs which our modern monarchomachist society tends to believe is total fiction. Burgundy, despite it’s wealth, paid no taille tax whatsoever. We find wisdom astonishingly, from Diderot, with regards to the the abolition of parlements under the orders of De Maupeou in 1771, 'Farewell to every privilege of the various Estates constituting a corrective principle which prevents the monarchy from degenerating into despotism’.
A speech given by Bonald in the Chamber of Deputies in 1817 deals with the question of administrative centralisation. The profligation of administration would attract too many interests to Paris, overcrowding the capital and robbing the provinces of it’s most “precious treasure of peoples”, men of “substance and reputation”. Paris would become the Rome of Tacitus, the source of moral despotism and vice. “Where the King is everywhere…a real presence” he begins, but adds, “a State must have centralised surveillance…Every other centralisation has served only revolutions”. Properly interpreted, the King, as the supreme judge, equal to Law itself, by his presence was to be everywhere where his law was decreed to him but other realms of interest, that which constitutes societas civilis were to be left alone. It is worth noting that the exercise of limited control was evident in the Ancien Regime where Breton towns such as Saumur, Nantes and Rennes received privileges confirming their civil autonomy. I am intrigued by the accusation of Bonald’s principle of authority by Georg Brandes as “degrading” considering the the liberal Dane’s contemporaneous Third French Republic banned the use of Breton and the previous Revolutionary Directory had derogatorily termed the language and various regional dialects as patois. The linguistic diversity of France has greatly declined since the days of the Revolution, by nefarious design. Aside from this, we also know that the wealthy Norman town of Rouen referred to itself as a republic within the King’s law. The French King was himself referred to as maritus respublicae, the idea was formalised properly during Henry II’s coronation in 1547 with the wearing of a special coronation ring. Aristotle in Politics 1259a had already established a tradition by comparing matrimony to political governance. By utilising established Salic law and the notion that the mortal body of the King was continued by his progeny, the successive nature of the French monarchy further established an idea that Jean Bodin quipped about, “the King never dies”, represented most vividly by the expressive bowing effigies of Kings that fill the Royal tombs in the Basilica of St.Denis. The representation of the likeness of the deceased Kings and their consorts symbolised the victory over death of the monarch.The body politic however, was generally distinct and as a representation of the three ordres was a res publica.
"For Justice is immortal and does not cease"- Wisdom 1:15
It is interesting to dive further into the origin of the notion of French nationhood. It is clear that the "nation" at the turn of the first milennium referred to the nobles of a Kingdom. Until the reign of Philip Augustus, the kingdom was called the Kingdom of the Franks. We also have the curious claim of the Franks to be the new Israelites and modelling their kingship on the Davidic accounts in the Old Testament. The Regnum Davidocorum of legend and the Christomimesis was evident in the proclamation of the Frankish noble Amalar of Metz at the coronation of Louis the Pious in 814, where he acclaimed, "Divo Ludovico vita!"(Long Live divine Ludwig/Louis). In another case, that of Hungary, we have the term Natio Hungarica used to refer to the nobility of the kingdom in a jurido-political sense in it's earliest use. Later use, from 1290's on widened the scope to the constitutional body of the Kingdom, the Diet of Hungary, which comprised multiethnic nobles, Church prelates and representatives of the free settled Saxon cities. In the case of France, we see the development of the nation in times of foreign invasion, when fealty to the manorial lord was superseded by the priority of the King. At the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, citizens were armed and formed a part of the Armee Royale. Over time, the patria became synonymous with the body politic as a whole. Once again, it was against a foreign enemy, the Flemings, that caused Philip the Fair to make an appeal to the patria. It was innately tied to the idea of France being sancti reges, a sacred kingdom, and the justice of the King within his realm could be applied to foreign enemies as well in times of war. And finally, the greatest invasion, that of the English Kings, Henry V and VI led to the levy of a great number of troops which became the greatest medieval standing army, the compagnes d'ordinnances. The figure of Joan of Arc and her specific proclamation to Charles VII in Bourges, "Those who wage war against the Holy realm of France wage war against the King, Jesus" reveal well the perception of nationhood in the martyr from Domremy's time. Naturally, this reflected the application of the corpus mysticum theopolitics, where the Head of the State was being assailed would translate as a threat to the entire body politic. Guillaume Durande, in his magnum opus Speculum Iuris spoke of the range of the monarch's power in the defence of the patria et coronae. The specific juxtaposition of crown and nation is to be understood in the context that the body politic was now spoken of as patria, over which the Head, the King ruled.
The balance between orders was refered to by Louis XVI himself at the Royal Session on the 23rd of June, 1789. In this speech, the King rejected the Tennis court oath and the wild assertion on the part of the Third Estate that they represented the popular will of the nation. The King would concede that the matters of the royal fisc were open to discussion, but between all of the orders. It is also here that the question of the jurisdiction of the commons comes up. Bonald’s own part in the debate for the Budget of 1816 names the King as the “guardian of the interests of the commons”, further stating that the King was not the owner of common property. On that note, he vehemently rejects the idea that the civil government had any right to seize common property of the communes. This constituted one of his critiques of industrialisation. The other being alienation from labour. In this discussion, Bonald writes of the natural income of the land and the unity of agricultural labour in contrast to the continual contract of commercial labour. The Bonaldian critique of industrialism and it’s effects passed onto Balzac and of course, Royalist politician Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont, who was important in the formation of the first provincial advisory health board, the Department de la Seine and for advocating fraternal charities in service of the urban poor. The question of social concern being one that was raised by Legitimist conservatives prior to the inception of political socialism is now simply curious trivia. But a connection also existed between Bonald and Saint-Simon. Mainly that of an avid follower and reader of Bonald’s speeches to the Chamber of Deputies and his own published essays.
If we follow the divisions Schumpeter made with regards to the various personalities of Marx, the material dialectic is surely the distinctive hallmark of Marx’s sociological theories. Indeed the meeting of Marx with Engels in Paris in the 1840’s, when the two young men read popular positivist circulars is the origin of class conflict as a theory. It was Saint-Simon’s secretary Augustin Thierry, who was called the “father of class struggle in French historiography” by Engels. The German emigre also read Balzac while in Paris. Thierry’s own history of classes and it’s content was not one French noblemen would have been unfamiliar with. Bonald makes a mention about the communes being Gallic, then Roman before the race which gave them their freedom, an obvious reference to the Franks. And of course we have Boulainvilliers, from whom I suspect Thierry took the concept. Jacques Barzun detailed this trope’s origin in his history of class, in the essay, The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and Their Social and Political Implications(1932). Thierry’s earlier work, Les Martyrs presents a class conflict between the Christians and the entrenched interests in the Roman Empire. Stylistically a work mirroring Chateaubriand, it clearly evoked Saint-Simon’s utopian social gospel message, which had been expressed as the true material aim of Christianity by the utopian. This greatly aided Marxian inquiry into history, as it provided a mythos of struggle and emancipation stretching back to the times of the gospel. The shift from moral concern caused by poverty to the creation of a dialectic involving distributional struggle cannot be traced to Scotism save by weak genealogical arguments. Even if the kingdom of pure realised human justice in Socialist ideology may indeed be traced back to the perceived breakdown of the transcendental relation between man and God arising from the literary impact of the doctrine of univocity of being, can anybody deny that the occasionalist solution was used by Bonald for anti-modern ends? And can we dismiss the excellent La Reforme Sociale(1864) by Frederic Le Play? Once again, social fact was used to critique the ideals that had animated the Revolution in support of familial organisation at the base of an integral society.
Bonald, retired from politics after the Revolution of 1830. He had fallen out with lifelong penpal, Chateaubriand with regards to the freedom of the press. "Absolute liberty of the press is a tax upon those who read, it is demanded only by those who write", thought Bonald. The power of the chambre introuvable, the returning emigres and Bourbonist landowners who dominated the Chamber of Deputies in 1814 had waned, and the Parisian bourgeoisie had found a compromise candidate between the Bonapartist scion in Vienna and Republicanism in Louis-Philippe of Orleans. The longest governing prime minister of Restoration, Joseph de Villelle had argued in 1817 against the freedom of the press as it was a major fuel for partisanship against better judgement of representatives. Indeed the July Ordinances of 1830 decreed by Charles X curbed the power of the press and disenfranchised the bourgeois. It was the agitation of syndicated presses such as the repressed Le Nationale which triggered the Revolutionary activity. Louis De Bonald, perhaps exasperated by the course which France had taken upon the accession of the liberal Orleans monarch, retired to his childhood estate in La Monna, passing away on the 23rd of November 1840. He was survived by two sons, Victor who wrote a biography of his father which was praised by Le Play, and Louis Jacques, who became Archbishop of Lyons and a Cardinal.
