Let us hear what Bonald's theory is.
He maintains (as usual) that a properly developed reasoning faculty reduces all relations to the triad of ideas—cause, means, and effect—the most universally applicable which reason can evolve. These ideas lie at the foundation of every judgment, and form the basis of all social order. Every society consists of three distinct personages, who may be termed the social personages. Reason perceives in God, who wills, the first cause; in the man who executes God's will, the means, or minister, or mediator; and in the order of things which goes by the name of society, the effect which is produced by the will of God and the action of man. But the reason which argues thus exists, in Bonald's opinion, only in conjunction with the Catholic religion. He says: "Religion, which places God at the head of society, gives man an exalted idea of his own dignity and a strong feeling of independence, whilst philosophy, which assigns the highest place to man himself, is always grovelling at the feet of some idol or other—in Asia at Mahomet's, in Europe at Luther's, Rousseau's, or Voltaire's." (Du Divorce, 42.)
We observe that Bonald calmly classes Luther with anti-Christians like Mahomet and Voltaire. All the Catholic authors of the period do this, and also insist on the affinity between Protestantism and immorality. When De Maistre is discoursing on the Reformation he asserts with the utmost gravity that one half of Europe changed its religion in order that a dissolute monk might be enabled to marry a nun. In his Théorie du Pouvoir (ii. 305) Bonald writes: "A choleric, sensual monk reformed religion in Germany; a voluptuous, cruel king reformed it in England.... It is significant that the Reformation was supported in Germany by the Landgrave of Hesse, who was desirous to marry Margarethe von Saale whilst his first wife still lived; in England by Henry VIII, who wished to divorce Katharine of Arragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn; and in France by Margaret of Navarre, a princess of more than doubtful morals. Divorce was the ruin of the West as polygamy had been of the East." In his Essay on English Literature (Œuvres, vi. 75) Chateaubriand, touching on Luther's marriage, writes: "He married for two reasons—to show a good example, and to deliver himself from temptation. The man who has transgressed laws always tries to draw his weak brethren after him, that he may shield himself behind numbers; he flatters himself that the acquiescence of many will lead men to believe in the propriety and rectitude of acts which were often only the result of accident or passion. Sacred vows were doubly violated—Luther married a nun."
These violent outbursts against Luther and Lutheranism are explained by the fact that the French reactionaries, like the German Romanticists, clearly perceived that the modern intellectual tendency of which they were so much afraid was the inevitable result of Protestantism. Lamennais, for example, writes (Essai sur l'indifférence): "It is now acknowledged that the church and its dogmas rest upon authority, as upon an impregnable rock. Hence it is that the adherents of all the different sects, who disagree upon every other point, unite in the attempt to undermine this main pillar of all truth. Lutheran, Socinian, Deist, Atheist, are the names which mark the gradual development of the one doctrine; one and all with unflagging perseverance pursue their particular plan of attack on authority."
Reason, then, Catholic reason, the alone genuine, sees everywhere (according to Bonald) the three social personages—power, minister, and subject. In the different domains of society they receive different names. In the religious world they are called God, priest, and flock; in the political, king, aristocracy or official class, subjects or people; in domestic life, father, mother, and child.
The reader who is not yet familiar with Bonald's mode of thought is likely to be taken aback by this last idea; but Bonald is so perfectly serious in his identification of the father with power, the mother with the minister, and the child with the subject, that he actually, as a rule, employs the designations father, mother, and child in place of the others; because, he says, they apply to animals as well as to man, whereas power, minister, and subject apply exclusively to thinking beings. Besides, he elsewhere says, we must do our utmost to spiritualise man and his relations in view of the attempts that are made to degrade them.
He introduces his theory with his customary formulæ. Man and woman, he says, both exist; but their manner of existence is not the same. They are like each other, but not equals. The union of the sexes is the object of the difference between them. The production of a human being is the object of their union. The father is strong, the child weak; the father active, the child inactive. The mother forms the connecting link. How so? The father, says Bonald, is a conscious being, and cannot become a father except with his own will; the mother, on the contrary, may, even with full consciousness, become a mother against her will (hence inactively). The child neither wills to be born nor is conscious of being born.
It is, thus, upon that revolting and tragic arrangement of nature which permits a woman to become a mother against her will that Bonald bases the difference in rank of the sexes. He says, moreover (Du Divorce, fifth edition, p. 71): "In this gradation of their relationship is to be found the solution of the question of divorce," namely, that it ought not to be allowed.
If Bonald's mad theory, like many another equally mad, had simply remained a theory, which no one dreamt of putting into practice, there would be nothing to resent. But it was upon the principles proclaimed in his work that the laws of marriage and divorce which held good in France for the next seventy years were based![1] Immediately after the restoration of the Bourbons (twelve years after the publication of Du Divorce) Bonald's influence was so irresistible that the lethargic, religiously disposed National Assembly abolished divorce by an overwhelming majority—236 to 11 votes.
It may be said, proceeds Bonald, writing of education, that the father is the power which, through the mother as minister or means, performs the reproductive and maintaining acts, which have the child as object or "subject."