BONALD
A still more remarkable instance may be adduced of the importance at that time attributed to the influence of a determined upholder of authority of Bonald's calibre. One day Bonald received a note requesting him to call upon Cardinal Maury, an ecclesiastic whose position under the Empire was a very different one from that of the days when he argued in the National Assembly against the civic rights of the Jews. When they were alone, the Cardinal asked Bonald what his answer would be if the Emperor requested him to undertake the education of the King of Rome. For a moment Bonald was silent, astonished by the honour shown him. He then gave, it is said, the discouraging answer: "I confess that, if I ever taught him to rule, it would be in any place but Rome." After the restoration of the monarchy no one did more than Bonald to ensure that Rome and its spirit, the principle of authority, should rule in place of being ruled. All his life long he had opposed the liberty of the press. He attained to the position of its censor.
In 1815 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he sat on the extreme Right. Under Louis XVIII, he was made a member of the Academy and a peer of France, in which latter capacity he obstinately opposed liberty of religion and liberty of the press. In 1830 he retired from public life because it was against his conscience to swear allegiance to the monarchy of July.
Any one taking up Bonald's works directly after De Maistre's will have difficulty in wading through them. For nearly all of them are deadly dull. There are no human beings in his books, nothing but doctrines, and Bonald's doctrines consist of theologico-political propositions, which we are required to accept without proof. One cannot imagine a mind with a more implicit belief in dogmas, that is to say, a mind which more entirely ignores realities and scientific thought. He seems never to have doubted. Never once during his long career as an author does it appear to have entered his mind to question any one of the few simple fundamental principles on which he bases his theories. These principles are to be found in his works in a petrified form—speaking exactly, in the form of triads. Like the scholastics of the Middle Ages before him, like Hegel after him, Bonald thinks in triads, only he thinks without any perception of the two-sidedness of ideas, without flexibility, without inspiration. All relations are by him reduced to the great triad of cause, means, and effect. In the state we have power as the cause, ministers as the means, and subjects as the effect. In the religious world we have the triad—God, Jesus the Mediator, and man. In another acceptation Jesus is himself power, minister, and subject—power by his thought, minister by his word, subject as sacrifice. In the political sense, too, he is power, minister, and subject—power as King of the Jews, minister as priest, subject as the submissive martyr.
In the family, in society, in the state, in the universe, the same tri-unity is demonstrated; and all this is done with the aim of proving the necessity and the truth of monarchy. Monarchy is a true thing because it is founded on the principle by which the world is ordered. The universe is monarchic. Hence revolutionists and republicans, who have dared for the moment to abolish monarchy, have actually been making the bold attempt to overturn the order of the universe. It is not a constitution which they have abolished, but the constitution, for there is only one.
Bonald jeers at the witness of experience, scorns that of history—the lessons of experience are without significance to him who is in possession of the eternal, fundamental principles. Even natural history he will have nothing to do with, because in it he perceives the idea of evolution, which is of the evil one.
There is no such thing as historical evolution; there is historical tradition, and it is to this we must cling. For by means of tradition we reach God. In the chain of blind men which we call humanity only the first blind man requires a staff, and this staff is the commandment of God, which is transmitted by tradition.
The eighteenth century had placed more faith than any of its precursors in man's conscious capacity of invention and production. Rousseau maintained that it was man who invented and founded society. Bonald contests this theory. Man, he says, has invented nothing; he no more invented the family or society than he invented speech or writing. He was in the beginning the blank page, the tabula rasa, of which Condillac and the Sensationalists romanced—this blank page has not been filled with the impressions of the senses, but with the direct instructions of God.
For God was not merely the creator "in the beginning"; he continues to create to this very day. He founded society, and founded it that it might preserve his words and his thoughts. But this it can only do by preserving tradition unbroken.