By F. Roger Devlin | 3 Comments | 
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Louis de Bonald, On Divorce, Part II
The Vicomte de Bonald, 1754 - 1840
Read Part 1 here.
Divorce
The reader may be forgiven for wondering why the foregoing matters are discussed at length in a treatise called On Divorce. Today we are inclined to view marriage as a “personal matter.” But it is not. Most obviously, it also concerns the interests of the children it produces:
Public power is the guarantor of the commitment of the two spouses to form a society; for public power always represents the absent person in the family: the child before birth, the father after death. The contract formed between three persons cannot be broken by two, to the prejudice of the third, the weakest one in the society. (176)
It also concerns the larger society, since the family is its fundamental element.
As Bonald says, “no question is simpler in its principles or more fertile in its consequences, since by itself [divorce] raises all the fundamental questions for society concerning power and duty.” (38)
Bonald’s treatise was occasioned by the proposal of a new Civil Code which allowed divorce on various grounds. Arguing against the permission, he referred to his threefold division of societies: primitive or patriarchal, perfect or natural, and deviant or unnatural. The law of polygamy, as well as the Mosaic permission to repudiate wives, are imperfect laws permissible to a primitive society:
[They] can be tolerated in that state of society which precedes any public establishment and is called the patriarchal state; because the multiplication of the species, which polygamy encourages at this age of society alone, may be appropriate to a small tribe which is trying to raise itself to the strength and dignity of a nation. (79)
Polygamy is imperfect because it creates conflicting interests within the family; but it does not separate children from their parents.
Similarly, the law of repudiation is harsh, since it punishes a woman for the fault of nature (childlessness). But it is not unnatural, since it leaves exclusively in man the essential attribute of power, the right to judge the woman; it is always an act of jurisdiction even when it is not an act of justice. The power vested in the man is, indeed, excessive and despotic; but in this respect it merely resembles public authority in its earliest stage.
The permission of repudiation has less dangerous consequences among a nascent people than it would for us. The family lived a rural life, isolated from other families, occupied with healthy work; repudiation was seldom used except in cases of infertility.
In a more advanced state of society, “communication of the sexes becomes more frequent through the proximity of families, and less innocent through the taste for pleasure and the progress of the arts, which follows that of wealth” (79). Under these circumstances, repudiation is certain to be abused. Among the Jews of a later age, for example, one famous rabbi taught that a man could repudiate his wife for having burned the soup; another because he found one more beautiful, or even without any pretext at all (82).
“Among Christian peoples,” says Bonald, “marriage makes woman, not a being equal to man, but a helper (or minister) similar to him.” (108) The purpose of the union is not merely the production of children (for which marital indissolubility is unnecessary), but for their proper conservation—what sociobiologists term “high-investment parenting.” For society does not consist of those who are born, but of those who subsist.
“The law of indissoluble monogamy is perfect,” declared Bonald; “its opponents themselves acknowledge this, since they only criticize its perfection.” (The legislators had alleged that indissolubility laid too great a burden on weak human nature.) He even quotes Christ’s injunction “be ye perfect!” (96).
It is not difficulties which must be opposed to man’s desires, for difficulties only enflame them, but the impossibility of satisfying them altogether. (185)
Laws must be more severe in proportion as society is more advanced and man looser. Thus the grown man has duties to fulfill which are far broader and involve a whole different level of obligation than those to which the child is subject. (129)
Like many writers of our own time, Bonald notes that divorce can be especially hard on women:
Out of everything [the wife] brought into the [domestic] society, she can only, in the case of dissolution, recover her money. And is it not supremely unjust that the woman, having entered the family with youth and fertility, may leave it with sterility and old age; and that, belonging only to the domestic state, she should be put out of the family to which she gave existence, at the time in life when nature denies her the ability to begin another one?
But unlike many of our contemporaries, Bonald was perfectly cognizant “that most divorces are provoked by women; which proves that they are weaker or more impassioned, not that they are more unhappy” (106). He even calls indissolubility a way of protecting women from their own inconstancy, a privilege feminists have rarely demanded for their constituency. He also notes that the plurality of men is “more contrary to nature” than the plurality of women practiced by primitives (119). (The sociobiologist would say that polyandry does not contribute to the evolutionary fitness of the species.) Finally, allowing women to divorce the father of their children overturns the natural pattern of authority within the family; it makes wives the judges or tyrants of their husbands.
Bonald notes that separation remains perfectly legal even where marriage is indissoluble: “the separation of goods and bodies (a mensa et a toro) remedies all the disorders of the disunion of hearts: reason is satisfied with it. It is the passions which go further and demand the capacity to form new bonds” (177-78).
To allow divorce on the grounds of adultery is to propose adultery as a means to divorce; such a law makes “change the cure for inconstancy [and] pleasure the restraint on voluptuousness” (197). It also encourages false accusations of adultery. And it creates analogous incentives for abandonment, cruelty, or false accusations of mistreatment, wherever these are named as permissible grounds.
[Divorce] takes all authority from the father, all dignity from the mother, all security from the child, and transforms domestic society into a struggle between strength and weakness; [it] constitutes the family as a temporary lease, where the inconstancy of the human heart stipulates its passions, and which ends where new passions begin. (38)
The reader may wonder: was this book really written in 1801?
Bonald did not succeed in persuading the Empire’s legislators; the Civil Code was ratified, including the provisions for legal divorce. But after the Bourbon Restoration, he would be given a second chance.
F. Roger Devlin
F. Roger Devlin, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and the author of Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2004).
In Considerations on France (Cambridge University Press)* on pg. 58 I find this footnote:
It would seem that women’s proclivities run contrary to every notion of ethereal innocence that Christians and feminists demand we accept.
* Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series.
In his critique of Madame de Stael, Bonald wrote that “the constitution of a people is its mode of existence” — i.e., the way a people organizes the individual foundations of its way of life is basic to the way it organizes its collective existence. In this sense, Bonald anticipates the feminist claim that “the personal is political” — but given his larger understanding of the transcendental influence of society and history, he sees this relationship as validating traditional arrangements, rather than the feminist validation of individual whim. As you suggest, it’s not coincidental that the dissolution of traditional structures, including those that govern race relations, is rooted in the dissolution of traditional sexual, familial, and marital conventions.
Very nice essay.
Bonald succeeds well when he talks about traditions, but he was beaten already in his own time concerning his theorizing about governing. The successors of French physiocrats showed that ruler of the state can’t be compared to a father and head of family. Father has personal, protective and close relationship to all members of family, and he can supervise them most of the time. He gives orders and advice directly to the family members.
The ruler of the state has no personal relationship to the overwhelming majority of subjects. They are unknown to him and represented by numbers and statistics in his decisions, a population manipulated with the help of scientific knowledge. The ruler gives orders through middlemen, but also creates environments (incentives, obstacles, taxes, propaganda, encouragements, artificial situations, rituals and formulas connected to power, adjusting import and export, etc.) which look a lot like a natural environment in society, but it is power that is built on top of manipulated natural tendencies of population (Notice: population, not people).
When “elites” practice this distant and inhuman numerical manipulation long time over many generations, they lose increasingly the emotional and practical connection to their own people. People, e.g. European Americans, become inhuman and unimportant numbers, and anything can be done to them, as long as the “elites” can get away with it. “Human rights” and other similar ideological rubbish are created to ensure the functioning of the global market commercial system and to give people the illusion of human value. Only real human value in the present system is reserved to the highest power and money “elites.” According to their power and wishes, everything human, like European mother holding her child in her arms, is reduced to monetary valuation. In liberal society everybody is worthless compared to cosmopolitan multibillionaires.
Pro-Europeans often make the mistake of espousing any ideology from history, that seemed to be extremely for Europeans. This leads too often to choosing some dictatorial and/or extreme ideology. We could expand our search for every governing system that has existed, regardless what their position was towards Europeans. We could then assemble an enduring and good system that is suitable particularly to European mentality. Also I think that ensuring European continuity should be a personal, practical and independent task of community networks, not a distant and more corruptible state etc. elites. Suitable task for elites is to create good environments to Europeans.