The most ardent assailant of the spirit and philosophy of the eighteenth century, the century in which he was born, has this in common with it, that he is destitute of the proper apprehension of history. He would fain ignore the eighteenth century, just as it was fain to ignore the Middle Ages. He is the counterpart of the woman who represented the goddess of reason—he is the man who represents the principle of authority pure and simple, without any historical qualification. And at heart he is as devoid of religious feeling as the century which he attacks in the name of revealed religion.
Hard and cold, with a sarcastic and at times a cruel expression on his countenance, but noble in character and strong of will, he stands at the threshold of the new century like—if not the good, at least the best spirit of the great, universal reaction. There is no possibility of confusing him with the dwarfish figures who during the course of the century have diluted his ideas, taken the sap and strength out of his thoughts, and torn and twisted his doctrines in order to oppress and dissemble under cover of them. Joseph de Maistre was a mind, these others have only been bodies. He was a man without baseness and without hypocrisy, a colonel of the Papal Zouaves aslitterateur, the most soldierlike and the most attractive figure which the reactionary camp of the century has to show.
[1]Du Pape, pp. 160, 174, 383.
[1]Du Pape, pp. 160, 174, 383.
[2]Joseph de Maistre,Considérations sur la France; Lettres et opuscules, i., ii;Correspondance diplomatique, i., ii.;Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, i., ii;Du Pape; De l'Église Gallicane; Examen de la philosophie de Bacon,i., ii.; Margerée,Le Comte J. de Maistre; E. Faguet,Politiques et moralistes du 19me siècle.
[2]Joseph de Maistre,Considérations sur la France; Lettres et opuscules, i., ii;Correspondance diplomatique, i., ii.;Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, i., ii;Du Pape; De l'Église Gallicane; Examen de la philosophie de Bacon,i., ii.; Margerée,Le Comte J. de Maistre; E. Faguet,Politiques et moralistes du 19me siècle.
Side by side with Joseph de Maistre stands Bonald, the famous medieval schoolmaster of the European reaction, a man with the same bent of mind and the same practical aims, but as monotonous as De Maistre is versatile, as conventional as De Maistre is wittily fantastic.
Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, was born in 1754 (the same year as De Maistre) at Monna, in the south of France. He began life as an officer in Louis XV.'s musketeers. During the first stage of the Revolution he favoured liberal ideas, but only for a short time. He married early, and was made chief magistrate of the Department of Aveyron, an appointment which he resigned when Louis XVI. found himself obliged to consent to the subjection of the clergy to the secular laws. In 1791 he emigrated, and joined the army of the Prince of Condé. He wrote hisThéorie du Pouvoirat Heidelberg. The police of the Directory destroyed almost the whole first edition of this book, but a copy which had been sent to Bonaparte luckily reached its destination and made such a favourable impression on the great man that he removed its author's name from the list of exiles. Not unprofitably had Bonald taught that every revolution is begun by the subject but ended by the ruler, that it begins because the authorities have been weak and have yielded, and ends because they have recovered strength. He had shown that all disturbance only serves to strengthen authority, and prophesied that the Revolution, which had begun with the declaration of the rights of man, would end with the declaration of the rights of God. These latter being the very rights which Bonaparte, by means of his Concordat, was now proclaiming, Bonald's position was assured. He remained devotedly attached to the Bourbons, but was content to dream of them in an appointment conferred on him by the Emperor. He was madeconseiller tutélaireof the University, with a salary of 12,000 francs a year for doing nothing. Chateaubriand reviewed his books with reverent admiration. De Maistre wrote to him after the publication of hisRecherches Philosophiques; "Is it conceivable that nature has amused herself by tuning two strings until they are in as perfect harmony with each other as your mind and mine? If certain manuscripts of mine are ever printed, you will find in them almost the same expressions you yourself have used, and yet I certainly have altered nothing." In another letter he expresses himself even more strongly: "I have thought nothing which you have not written, and written nothing which you have not thought." Bonald felt himself flattered by these assertions, though he doubted their truth—and this with good reason, for, similar as are the results arrived at by these comrades-in-arms, there is little resemblance between their mental processes.
A proof of the high estimation in which Bonald was held is to be found in the touching letter in which Napoleon's brother, Louis, King of Holland, entreats him to undertake the education of his eldest son. Louis begins by telling what a complete invalid he himself is, how dearly he loves his son, how imperative it is that this son should be educated by a man, in the fullest acceptation of that word, in order that he too may become one. Then he says: "Although I do not know you personally, my investigations have led me to the conclusion that you are one of the men whom I esteem most highly. Therefore you will pardon me that now, when I have to choose the person to whom I must entrust what is more to me than life, I apply to you. If the happiness which you doubtless enjoy in a peaceful home has not made you indifferent to the service you are capable of rendering—I do not say to me, a single individual, but to a whole nation which is even more deserving than it is unfortunate (and that is saying much)—you will consent to become my son's tutor." And he concludes in the same strain, defending himself against slanders which he imagines may have reached Bonald's ears. With such humility did a king appeal to this man—and in vain; he refused the request.
BONALD
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, buttheconstitution, 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, thetabula 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.
The intention, the mission of tradition, then, is to keep God in the world. Hence every attempt to break with tradition is an attempt at spiritual suicide. And the endeavour to preserve tradition is simply aspiration after the full pulsation of life. A tenacious clinging to the purest spiritual inheritance produces the purest, fullest life. Therefore Bonald clings to the dogmas and to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic church.
In order to vindicate the doctrine of creation and continued creative acts in every domain of nature, he is obliged to prove the same immutability in the universe of which he is the advocate in politics; hence from the year 1800 onwards he is perpetually attacking what was a comparatively new thing in those days, the doctrine of evolution. Like Voltaire before him and Disraeli after him, he makes merry over the idea of man being descended from a fish.
With love and understanding, but with a persistently flattering pen, Bonald describes the government of France under kings like Henry IV. and regents like Richelieu. In his turn attacking the revolutionary assailants of the old monarchy and its nobles, he skilfully argues that the monarchy was not the despotism nor the aristocracy the exclusive caste which their detractors made them out to have been. He shrewdly points out the defects of the succeeding system, with its much boasted liberty for every one, which meant no more than that every one had a right to vote, and warmly defends the advantages of the old order of things, which permitted the rich man to become a nobleman, but set limits to plutocracy by prohibiting the nobleman's working to become rich. He wilfully overlooks the fact that the original advantages of the old monarchy existed at last only on paper, and that under its auspices the most shameful injustice and the basest cupidity grew up and prospered.
In his aversion to the independence of parliaments and courts of justice, to liberty of conscience and liberty of the press, Bonald is doubtless sincere enough, but in his eulogies of the old form of government there is a want of common honesty. As a historian he is ignorant, but not so ignorant as not to know what that government really was.
His writings are now not only antiquated but decayed. Open his long treatises where we will, a faint odour of dust and musty leaves and corruption meets us. The most important chapters in the once famousRecherches Philosophiques(such as those on the origin of speech and writing) read like fragments of some old theological text-book.
As a general rule the shorter treatises and occasional articles of philosophers of Bonald's type retain most freshness. But one can read through the two thick volumes which Bonald published under the title ofMélanges littéraires et politiqueswithout coming upon a single page to which the word "fresh" can be applied. Even such essays as those on the writings of Voltaire, on the Jews, and on tolerance, topics which might have been expected to tempt him to say something strong or bitter—at any rate something which would imprint itself on the memory—are terribly monotonous and colourless. Whether he is disapproving of Voltaire's morality, or maintaining that the Jews ought to be deprived of civic rights, or proving that tolerance is a vice and an impossibility, we have always the same solemn and empty ceremonial, the same application of the formula of cause, means, and effect, the same grave, monotonous tempo—one, two, three; one, two, three. Bonald is unreadable because of the very passionlessness on which he prided himself.
The only one among his books which still attracts readers, and that simply because of its occasional flashes of passionate enthusiasm, is the famousDu Divorce, undoubtedly the most entertaining of them all.
It begins with a long jeremiad on the sad condition of the world since authority was overthrown. Modern philosophy, which originated in Greece, among that people who remained children to the end, and who ever sought wisdom by other paths than those of reason (sic!), began by atheistically or deistically (!) denying God. Now, Hume and Condillac, with their doctrine that all our knowledge is derived from the impressions of the senses, have turned man, who is "a reasonable being, served by his organs," into an animal pure and simple, an ordinary product of nature. The universal dissolving tendency has penetrated into family life, and instead of the old relation between parents and children—authority and submission—we have the spirit of revolt in the young hearts and ideas of equality in the young brains; the children regard themselves as the equals of their parents, actually permitting themselves to address them as "thou"; the parents, conscious of their own weakness, no longer dare to assert their authority, but try to become their children's "friends" or "confidants"—only too frequently their accomplices.
The enervated conception of life is imaged in an equally enervated conception of death. It has been proposed to preserve the ashes of the departed in glass or porcelain urns, and, horrible to relate! a mother has actually been permitted by the authorities to burn the corpse of her daughter in heathen fashion. There has been universal agitation for the abolition of capital punishment, that precious institution,ce premier moyen de conservation de la société, and in some countries it is already abolished. Governments have had attacks of "the sudden madness which goes by the name of philanthropy." The so-called natural sciences ("so-called" is amusing), which ought really to be styled the material sciences, because they treat of the material world alone, have ousted the higher, the intellectual sciences, beginning with that of metaphysics, so renowned in days of old. In poetry noble tragedy has had to make way for the light and humorous style. In fiction, which so clearly mirrors the spirit of an age, love used always to be sacrificed to duty. Now the reverse is the case; and it is Rousseau who has written the novel "which more than any other has misled the imagination and corrupted the hearts of women," namely,La nouvelle Héloïse. The principle of authority has been overthrown even in the art of gardening: "The rural uncultivatedness of the English garden has taken the place of the symmetrical splendour of the art of Le Nôtre."
In view of all this endeavour to dissolve society, Bonald makes his attempt to save it. It is a special institution which he aims at rescuing. Society is founded upon marriage, stands or falls with that. The Revolution has made divorce lawful. But where divorce is possible, marriage no longer exists. Therefore every possible effort must be made to procure the repeal of the law of divorce. The effort was made, and was only too successful.
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 firstcause; in the man who executes God's will, themeans, or minister, or mediator; and in the order of things which goes by the name of society, theeffectwhich 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 hisThéorie 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 motheragainst 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 ofDu 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."
The relation of man and woman in marriage is simply this: Man is power (le pouvoir), woman is duty (le devoir). Does not Holy Scripture itself call man woman's head (or reason), woman man's helpmeet (or minister), and signify that the child is the subject by perpetually inculcating obedience as its duty?
Woman resembles man as man resembles God. Man is created in the image of God, but is not because of this his equal. Woman is made of the flesh and blood of man, but is his inferior. Bonald's theory chimes in with Milton's: "He for God only, she for God in him." (Paradise Lost, Book IV.) He says: "The society of the family is a society to which the man contributes the protecting power of strength, the woman the necessities of weakness; hele pouvoir, shele devoir." Thus does the French philosopher caricature the doctrine of St. Paul, which, in its day, was a great and noble advance in the direction of the emancipation of woman.
What, then, is Bonald's definition of marriage? Marriage is the engagement entered into by two persons of opposite sexes to found a society—the society which is called a family. It is this engagement which distinguishes marriage from every other species of cohabitation of man and woman. Bonald refers with the utmost indignation to Condorcet's witty saying, that if men have any duty towards the beings who do not yet exist, it cannot be that of endowing them with existence. "Indeed it is!" he exclaims. "Marriage exists for the express purpose of continuing the race." But we are not therefore to conclude, maintains Bonald, that a childless marriage, that is to say, a marriage which appears to have failed in accomplishing its purpose, may be dissolved; for, by annulling the first marriage in order to legalise a second, the production of children in the first is made impossible, without their production in the second being positively ensured. Though a husband and wife have no children, there is always a possibility that children may come; and since marriage is only instituted for the sake of the possible children, the fact that they as yet have none is no reason for annulling it. To Bonald marriage is the possible society, to which the family, as the real society, corresponds. "The object of marriage" he teaches, "is not the happiness of the wedded pair." What, then, is its object? "Marriage" he answers, "exists for the sake of society." In marriage religion and the state see only the duties which it imposes.
But if marriage exists only for the sake of society, what, we eagerly ask, is the aim of society? True to his theological dogma, that society by preserving its tradition,i.e.itself, preserves nothing less than God, Bonald answers (as indeed he must) with the empty formula:The aim of society is its own preservation.[2]
Not a word does he waste upon the vain supposition that institutions exist for man's sake; not a thought does he bestow on human happiness, on the development of the race, or the evolution of human greatness.
The one and only vital consideration being the production and welfare of children, polygamy, the putting away of a wife, and divorce seem to Bonald all equally reprehensible. He remarks that the introduction of divorce and the introduction of polygamy seem to follow naturally one on the other, seeing that Luther (this story appears in every single book of our period), who permitted divorce, also, though in all secrecy, countenanced the bigamy of the Landgrave of Hesse. Bonald declares that he sees no difference between the polygamy which consists in having several wives at the same time and that which consists in having them one after the other; he forgets that he hereby pronounces a second marriage, after the death of husband or wife, to be as culpable as marriage after divorce. Everywhere, he declares, where divorce is legal, and where, consequently, a woman is entitled to see in every man a possible husband, the women are devoid of chastity, or at any rate of modesty. He instances England as an example—England. He compares the state of matters in that country, where in given cases divorce is permitted, with the conditions prevailing among certain savage races, where the husband obliges his wife's lover, when he catches himin flagranti delicto, to pay for a pig, which the three roast and eat in company. England, with its comparatively liberal institutions, is Bonald's and Lamennais' scapegoat. Lamennais says of England that nowhere else is there to be found a population as blunted, as destitute of the sense of morality, of higher ideas, of everything that elevates the mind and ennobles human life.[3]
All this is exaggeration, and of a most untruthful and illogical kind. But there is both logic and truth in what gives these details their significance, namely, Bonald's conception of the close connection between the question of divorce and the whole political question. He sees that a republic ordemocracy(the Republic is so obnoxious to him that he will not even use the word) inevitably leads to the loosening of the marriage tie.
He writes: "In 1792 divorce was legalised. No one was surprised, for this was one of the inevitable and long-foreseen consequences of the process of demolition carried on at that time with such ardour; but now, when our desire is to re-build, now, divorce entering as a principle into the edifice of society, shakes that edifice to its very foundations. Divorce was in harmony with the democracy which has too long ruled in France under different names and forms. In domestic as well as in public affairs power was delivered over to the passions ofthe subjects; there was disorder in the family and disorder in the state; there was similarity and harmony between the two disorders. But it is plain to every one that divorce is directly at variance with the spirit of the hereditary and indissoluble monarchy. If we retain divorce, we have order in the state and disorder in the family—indissolubility here, dissolubility there, hence no harmony. On that side to which man is inclined to bend, the law must prop him up; in our days it must forbid disorganised natures disorganisation, as in olden days it forbade half-savage barbarians cruel and bloody vengeance."
Thus Bonald succeeds in resting his theory of marriage upon his fundamental principle of sovereignty by the grace of God. The conclusion he arrives at is that divorce ought to be unconditionally prohibited, and that simple separation without permission to marry again is a sufficient remedy for the ills arising from unfortunate marriages. When his theories became laws, the marriage laws of France, they produced a state of matters in that country which excited the ridicule of the whole world—a state of matters which, for example, made it impossible for a young girl whose bridegroom ran off with her dowry on the wedding day ever to marry again or have lawful offspring. In the case of incendiaries and murderers the law permitted the plea of extenuating circumstances; they might be set at liberty after behaving well for a certain number of years; but, according to Bonald's doctrine and the laws of France, the deserted, victimised young girl had not the same hope of liberty that was extended to the girl who had burned a whole family in their beds or murdered her own father.
The scheme for a code of civil law prepared by the Convention contained the following clauses:—
In the matter of marriage men are free to act as they please, that is to say, marriage comes under the category of matters of conscience.
It is the formation of an alliance in which man and woman stand on an equal footing.
The contracting parties are free to determine the conditions of their union.
Husband and wife have or exercise equal rights as regards the disposal of their property.
Divorce is permissible if desired by both or by one of the spouses.
The law forbids any limitation of the right of divorce.
It appears that the great liberty in the matter of divorce thus suddenly bestowed was, like all suddenly acquired liberty, abused at first. Both men and women, without bestowing much thought on their children, recklessly gave way to ephemeral passions which had neither the justification nor the dignity of true love. Corresponding phenomena are to be found throughout all history, wherever fetters have been broken. But for those who, like Bonald, had no faith in liberty and believed in no disciplining power except that of restraint, what occurred sufficiently proved the necessity of returning to the old order of things.
The ideal marriage (an ideal which will never be lost sight of and which is sometimes realised) is, of course, that in which the two united human beings love each other till death, nay, with a love that lasts beyond death. But this ideal marriage is the result of a rare, fortunate choice, not of compulsory laws.
For such laws the children formed the natural pretext. Bonald propounds his doctrine of the rights of the child in the following effective, admirably expressed proposition: "As the contract of marriage concerns three persons, the father, the mother, and the child, it cannot be annulled because two agree in desiring that it should be. Since the child is under age, society defends its cause against its parents, and as the child's advocate protests against the dissolubility of marriage." This argument premises, in the first place, that the continuance of the marriage at all costs is what is undoubtedly best for the child, a premise which is distinctly open to doubt. In the second place, it presupposes the welfare of the child to be the one vital and all-important matter, a presupposition which only adherents of the principle of authority can be expected to accept without proof. And lastly, it takes account only of the children born in wedlock, regarding the others as non-existent, though it is well known that one of the saddest results of the traditional order of things is that not all children are born with equal claims upon their parents, nor, consequently, upon society. Bonald's social order, in which the welfare of the child is declared to be of supreme importance, has in our day led to more than 2,800,000 French men and women being born as illegitimate children, in an undeserved inferiority to their parents which is more strongly insisted on in France than in other countries.
But, absurd in many of its details as Bonald's theory is, it is valuable, nay, precious, as being in all its main features a consistent application of the principle of authority in the domain of the family. Bonald has, what semi-liberals never have, a keen perception of the connection between the political and the social principles of the Revolution. He is not able, like those whose very essence is foolish inconsistency, to separate the former from the latter, and to overlook the fact that the traditional theory of marriage, which is still in part the accepted one, is most intimately connected with the traditional theory of the state, which is now generally rejected.
The connection becomes obvious whenever the matter is discussed. The American slave-owners defended themselves against the accusations of the abolitionists by declaring that the relations existing between slaves and their masters were in no respect vitally different from those existing in the family and in marriage. We see, too, that quite as much has been said and written against the permissibility of divorce in any case whatever as would be said and written to-day against a proposal to increase the facility of divorce, or, indeed, against any change in the received conception of what makes the union of man and woman desirable.
In this province, as in every other, the principle of authority has as its opponent the principle of free thought—in various forms. If we leave the socialistic theories (which we shall consider later in connection with the Saint-Simonists) altogether out of the question, we find authority confronted in the matter under discussion by free thought in the shape of the principle of individualism, as developed by English, French, and American thinkers. The code of laws drafted by the Convention, from which extracts have been given above, is based on this principle, the fundamental idea of which is that it is not, as is generally maintained, the family, but the individual human being who is the main pillar of society, and that this individual is sovereign. The doctrine of the sovereignty of God, as proclaimed by the devotees of hereditary autocracy, and the ambiguous doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, as proclaimed by the revolutionary worshippers of the majority, are superseded by the doctrine ofthe sovereignty of the individual(an expression first employed by the American writer Samuel Warren, from whom it was borrowed by John Stuart Mill).[4]Sovereignty of the individual ensures, as the phrase implies, the absolute liberty of every human being—prohibits any man's usurping any authority or control whatever over other men. The adherents of this doctrine say:Eithertutelage for every one,i.e.censorship of the press, a regular police-spy system, passports, tariffs, prohibition of divorce, laws regulating the intercourse of the sexes—the whole system of arbitrary restriction of the freedom of the individual,orthe sovereignty of the individual,i.e.liberty of the press, liberty of speech, liberty to travel, free-trade, liberty of research, and liberty in the relations of the sexes. From their standpoint the only possible vindication of a law which restricts the liberty of the individual is that the provisional compulsory order of things is merely the speediest means of arriving at a more perfect order of things with more complete liberty—for liberty is the ideal of individualism. The thinkers of this school regard the interference of the state in matters of the affections as unwarranted; they maintain that the legal tie which keeps two beings of opposite sexes united iseither superfluous—when it is their own wish to remain united,or revolting—when it is not their wish. They hold that society acts most criminally towards a married couple, one of whom detests the other, if it obliges them to remain together and bring children into being, the fruit of the desire of the one and the loathing of the other. They consider it revolting that society should compel a woman against her will to bear a child to a drunkard, a child which from its birth possesses its father's depraved instincts and lusts. And they consider it equally terrible that a man's whole life should be sacrificed to a connection which reduces him to despair. They take as much thought of the children yet unborn as Bonald does of those already in existence. They do not, like him, see in the fact that it is possible for a woman to become a mother against her will a proof of the imperfection of woman, but a proof of the uncivilised condition of society. Clearly perceiving the interdependence of all the different provinces of human life, they maintain it to be most improbable that one alone of these provinces should be, by means of tradition, absolutely rightly ordered, seeing that the ordering of all the others has been found to be altogether wrong and has consequently been completely changed in the course of the last hundred years. Such is the line of argument most frequently employed by writers of this school.[5]In this case, as in many others, it is doubtful if pure liberalism points out the right way of arriving at the desired end. The principle is stated here simply as being the direct opposite of that of authority. What is undoubtedly desirable, in this as in every other case, is absolute liberty of investigation. If a thinker in a Catholic country expresses his opinion freely on the subject of the mass, or any other of the prescribed rites and practices of the church, he is, as a rule, dubbed a scorner of religion in general, if not an atheist. For the orthodox Catholic believes that "religion" consists in, or at least can only exist in combination with, certain ecclesiastical traditions and customs with which in his consciousness it has always been associated. It never occurs to him that the assailant of these customs may have a far nobler and purer conception of religion than himself. He has observed that those whom he has hitherto found wanting in respect for the ordinances of religion have been disorderly, immoral men, capable of all kinds of foolish actions. From this he too quickly draws a general conclusion; his intellect is not sufficiently developed to enable him to distinguish between the different types of assailants; he confuses the earnest thinker and champion of a higher truth with the common rabble of graceless scoffers—confuses his superior with his inferiors.
The very same thing happens in the matter of the traditional conception of the proper relation of the sexes. The rules and regulations of this relation in a given country at a given time are no more marriage than Catholicism in Spain in the eighteenth century is religion. Some men are below the standard presupposed by the institution of marriage as it exists, some are above it, whilst the majority in civilised countries exactly come up to it, bring public opinion into harmony with their views, and, confounding the two groups of those who think otherwise, hold them up together to public scorn.
The same idea which leads to the assertion of the principle of authority in religion and in the state leads to its assertion in the matter of the relation of the sexes.
The mistake as regards religion consists in the supposition that the church, because its mission for centuries has been to ennoble, is of essential importance in the production of nobler feelings and thoughts—the supposition that love of truth is not natural to man, increasing with his general development, but must be communicated to him and kept up in him by the perpetual agency of bishops, priests, churches, church councils, &c.
The corresponding mistake in the matter of the mutual relations of man and woman lies in the belief that human beings do not by nature love order and refinement in this relation, and love it the more the more highly developed and consequently refined they are, that men do not instinctively love their children and protect their children's mother, but that all these qualities and virtues must be first manufactured, then preserved in the human soul by the aid of legislation—although the requisite laws are, strangely enough, only produced by the combined action of all those persons who, taken separately, are supposed to be devoid of the qualities and virtues in question. Entirely the opposite of this is the real truth; it is only their love of these same virtues and blessings which induces men patiently to submit to all the artificial arrangements and compulsory rules under which they groan. They submit because it has been impressed on them from their childhood that such institutions as the existing ones are the only guarantee for the maintenance of the virtues and benefits they so highly prize.
One result of this state of matters is the repression or complete prevention of all unprejudiced inquiry into the nature and working of the human soul; men are trained to accept unquestioningly as truth everything that bears the warrant of tradition or authority, and the opponents of the principle of authority are accused of desiring and favouring immorality.
If a man set himself seriously to ascertain what in our day is the most degrading and stultifying of all the principles that exist upon this earth, he could not avoid arriving at the conclusion that the principle of authority is the one most deserving of this unenviable distinction.
The principle of authority consistently applied produces such axioms as: Marriage exists for the sake of society, and the object of society is to preserve itself, or—the same thing differently put: Marriage in its traditional form is sacred, because it is indispensable to the preservation of pure morality. And in what does pure morality consist? In the preservation of marriage in its traditional form.
There is no progress possible on these lines. We go round in a ring without moving from the spot.
But if, on the contrary, the opponents of the principle of authority insist: The object of society is the greatest happiness of its members, and the object of marriage the welfare of the family, we are left free to find out what this welfare and this greatest happiness are. And if they further say: "Moral purity consists in that species of relation between beings of opposite sexes which conduces most to their development and mutual happiness, taking the farthest off as well as the immediate results of the union into consideration," this definition, supposing it to be accepted or put to the test of experiment, leaves such freedom for thorough and scientific investigation into all that concerns the health of the body, of the soul, and of society as has never before been known.
Order and refinement! These were the watchwords of the champions of the principle of authority. By all means let us have order and refinement—but what men have had to learn, and what they will learn even though it should take them centuries, is that order and refinement are the work of science or natural development, and never are or can be the work of arbitrary legislation, or of a criminal code and a public opinion founded upon tradition and authority. There is no real ordering, no real order of society but that which is the result of scientific insight into the nature of man. All societies—the society called the family as well as that called the state—exist, not for their own sake, but for the sake of men, for the purpose of enabling each individual composing them to attain certain great aims and great benefits. Such aims and benefits are personal development, moral purity, the education of the young, the protection of women.
If these objects can only be attained in the manner indicated by the principle of authority, then of course liberty, in so many other domains regarded as a blessing, is in these domains to be regarded as a curse, and is to be attacked and exterminated. But if they canpossiblybe attained in other ways, possibly be attainedbetterin other ways (and such a possibility is difficult to disprove), if, finally, the measure of attainment arrived at in the traditional manner is hardly worth taking into account, then absolutely free inquiry, without regard to human or superhuman authority, is man's bounden duty. In a century such as that in which we live the principle of authority, as the principle which prevents all free inquiry, is the worst, the most stupid, and the most degrading that can be imagined, and stands self-condemned. The man who, by deriding or forbidding free investigation into any social question whatsoever, prevents, as he undoubtedly does, the suggestion of hypotheses and the trying of practical experiments which might prove to be of value to his fellow-men, is a criminal, for whom, if there were equity and justice upon earth, no punishment would be considered too severe. It unfortunately happens that the majority of educated men are criminals of this class, so that the prospect of having them punished is very slight.
Bonald was such a criminal; but in his outward circumstances we can find no trace of the pursuit of an avenging Nemesis. He lived to the age of eighty-six, and was all his life one of the most influential and respected men of his period. He died in 1840, full of days and of honour.