From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of Janos Kis

Language and Order: De Bonald’s Theory of Language as a Paradigm of Traditionalist Political Philosophy

Language and Order: De Bonald’s Theory of Language as a Paradigm of Traditionalist Political Philosophy MÁRIA LUDASSY Louis-Ambroise de Bonald (1754–1840) was a highly influential ideologist of the French Restauration who combined the most traditionalist elements available at the time, a Tomistic account of natural law, ultramontane Catholicism and intransigent royalism, to construct his traditionalist political philosophy. His style was certainly no equal to Burke’s or de Maistre’s pre-romantic diatribes, poetic imagery and rhetoric feats. De Bonald’s thoroughly pre-modern political theory remains, however, modern in one single respect. He adapted the philosophy of language he had learnt from Herder and Humboldt during the years of emigration for the purposes of his philosophy of history and society. By doing so, he introduced a new argument or indeed an entirely new type of argument into the area of anti-liberalism and the critique of individualism and human rights. His first work (the full title was: Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile, démontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire), which appeared in 1796, a year after Joseph de Maistre’s Considerations on France and Edmund Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace, was met with unexpected success. The book originally written to cater to the tastes of the ultra-royalists, i.e., the ultras in emigration , found its way to Bonaparte during his Italian campaign. The young general greatly admired the work. In fact, his former liberal philosopher friends and supporters (the “Ideologists,” i.e., Destutt de Tracy, Volney, Cabanis) attributed the anti-liberal and authoritarian turn of Bonaparte, who was soon to become the First Consul, to the impact of this very book. Unlike other royalist ultras, de Bonald did not have to wait until the Restauration to be permitted to return home. During the years of the Empire he was appointed as the head of French higher education which enabled him to spread his authori- 28 Mária Ludassy tarian views. His motto was Non est potestas nisi a Deo, i.e., here is no power but from God. The problem of language is mentioned in two key passages of the Théorie’s argumentation against individual liberties. At this point, however, the problem of language is not yet presented as the paradigm of individual submission, only as a criticism of the “natural” norm advocated by Enlightenment thinkers and as part of the objections to humanist universalism and the rhetoric of “general humanity .” De Bonald attacks the theory of a state of nature and of natural rights with arguments similar to those advanced in Burke’s Reflections : returning to a “pure” natural norm would amount to abandoning (or violently destroying) all historical and social achievements and civilizatory developments. In other words, the slogan of “back to nature!” only takes us back to barbarism. This is illustrated, among others, by the decline of French due to revolutionary egalitarianism including the obligatory use of the informal voice and the spread of vulgarity which many tried to disguise as a democratic feature: “Language itself has sensed the imminent approach of the revolution. In vain have some good writers tried to fight the decline the original cause of which was exposed to us in time. French, Fénelon’s, Racine’s, Bossuet’s and Buffon’s language; a language simple but without vulgarity, noble but never grandeloquent, well-sounding and never exhaustible, never imprecise, careful but never stilted, metaphorical but never affected, this true expressive vehicle of perfected nature has become raw, uneducated, court, wild, exaggerating. This is because, as they say, language was to become as reasoned, spirited, forceful and picturesque as nature herself” (Théorie, part 1, book 1, ch. 11). While, according to de Bonald, the norm of nature amounts to an annihilation of civilizatory achievements, the hybris of the faith in the self-perfecting capacity of men symbolizes the Fall of revolting humanity. The individual is venturing on the greatest imaginable blasphemy when striving for the divine knowledge of the distinction between Good and Evil, when besieging the Heavens with his intellectual work and when seeking to divinize humankind (the clearest manifestation of which is the declaration of human rights). But the vain belief in the infinite potential of self-perfectioning is met with divine retribution ever since the Babelian chaos of languages. “Today as always I emphasize that,” so writes de Bonald “the multiplicity of [3.143.0.157] Project MUSE (2024...