Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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function in life. Pr imarily, however, Bonald was not concerned with the

happiness of individual women but with the unity of family and thence

the unity of the social body. His favourite example of the way that the

behaviour of women could either uphold or destroy the social order was

divorce.

Du Divorce, ﬁrst published in 1801, was Bonald’s most widely read work

and provided the main intellectual impetus behind the legislation to ﬁrst

modify and then repeal (in 1814) the French divorce law of 1792 (see

Klinck 1996,pp.105–14). Most of its arguments had already been stated in

outline in the Th

eorie du Pouvoir Politique, where Bonald deplored divorce as

‘disastrous for public morals’ (Bonald 1864, i,p.622). In Du Divorce, Bonald

was determined to refute the idea that divorce was a private or isolated

affair.

How is it possible to treat divorce, which splits up the father, mother and child, without

speaking of society, which unites them? How can one deal with the domestic state of

society or the family, without considering the public or political state which intervenes

in its formation to guarantee stability . . . ? (Bonald 1864, ii,pp.9–10)

Marriage was, for Bonald, not a matter of individual caprice, but (and he

used the phrase knowingly) ‘a truly social contract, the founding act of the

family, whose laws are the foundation of all political legislation’ (Bonald

1864, ii,pp.37–8). Marriage even preceded Christianity; yet it had always

been a religious act as well as a civil one. Bonald insisted that marriage

related to all of the fundamental questions of power and duties (Bonald

1864, ii,p.41).

Divorce, argued Bonald, was of a piece with the democracy that had

reigned ‘for too long in France under various names’ (Bonald 1864, ii,p.41).

Divorce was political because it was directly contradictory to the principles

of hereditary and indissoluble monarchy that Bonald upheld. This extreme

antagonism to divorce was shared by other counter-revolutionaries. In Du

Pape, Maistre praised the papacy for having resolutely maintained ‘the laws

of marriage against all the attacks of all-powerful libertinage’ (quoted in

Lebrun 1965,p.148). This insistence on the marital bond was mirrored

by opponents of the Revolution elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, Justus

oser lamented the efforts of the Aufkl

arung to give illegitimate children

the same rights as legitimate ones and argued that ‘it is unpolitical to give

the unmarried condition the same condition as a married one, since a ﬁrmly

united family is of far greater value to the state than a group of men and

women living in ﬂuctuating free love’ (quoted in Epstein 1966,p.332). In

Counter-revolutionary thought

Berne, Karl Ludwig von Haller argued that one of the best ways to combat

revolution was to ‘protect family relations, this initial germ, this initial model

of all monarchy’ (Haller 1839, i,pp.134–5). Similarly, in Bonald’s theory of

unity, the state and the family must always be in harmony. In cases where

there was order in the state and disorder in the family, one of two things

would happen. Either the state would regulate the family and restore order –

which was Bonald’s hope; or the family would deregulate the state and give

rise to ‘universal materialism’, an untrammelled chaos of selﬁshness and

insubordination.

Bonald’s horror of divorce was consistent with his tripartite conception

of power. In Legislation Primitive, Bonald stated that authority structures

were always trinitarian: God, Jesus, Disciples; Sovereign, Minister, Subjects;

Father, Mother, Child (Bonald 1864, i,pp.1201–20). For Robert Nisbet,

Bonald’s tripartite conception of power was a sign of his pluralist commit-

ment to the social group (Nisbet 1944,p.323). What Nisbet does not say is

that, viewed from the point of view of women, it was not pluralist but pro-

foundly anti-individualist. Bonald deplored French ‘philosophy’ for treating

fathers and mothers as nothing more than ‘males’ and ‘females’, like animals.

Bonald observed that whereas animals had no choice about reproduction,

for humans, reproduction was voluntary. This was what gave it its moral

dimension, and this was what made it so vital that libidinous impulses be

channelled through the order of the family. The members of the family must

never be seen as individuals, but always as relative beings, inextricably tied

to one another. Thus, Bonald refused t o speak of ‘men and women’, prefer-

ring always to speak of ‘mothers and fathers’. There is no mother without

a father, he observed, whereas a woman could exist without a man, an

idea which seems to terrify him (the reviewer of Du Divorce in the Journal

des D

ebats concluded, with some justiﬁcation, that Bonald’s system turned

women into slaves) (Klinck 1996,p.115). The mother in Bonald’s politi-

cal theory, more explicitly even than in Rousseau’s, was the glue holding

the whole of civil society together. She was ‘the middle point’ between the

boundaries of father and child, ‘passive for conceiving, active for producing’,

the pupil of her husband but the teacher of her child (Bonald 1864, ii,pp.45–

6). As the nineteenth century progressed, romantic counter-revolutionaries

would turn the ﬁgure of the mother into a poetic idol. Chateaubriand,

who shared Bonald’s opposition to divorce, heroised the Christian wife as

‘an extraordinary being, mysterious, angelic’ (Chateaubriand 1978a, p. 51).

But for Bonald, the value of the mother is not her poetry but her role in

maintaining power.

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Du Divorce takes to an extreme the motif which had been used by count-

less political thinkers from Montesquieu onwards of woman-as-civiliser –

the idea that women were both shapers and signs of the cur rent state of

civilisation and political order. The motif would be revived in 1803 by the

Vicomte S

egur in his mammoth three-volume history of women and, more

radically, in 1808, by the socialist Charles Fourier in his Theory of the Four

Movements, which made the ‘progressive liberation of women’ the foun-

dation of all social progress. Bonald shared with these others a belief that

the state of women provided a key to reading the political state. Where he

departed – dramatically – from them was in his refusal to assign to women

the slightest individual agency.

Bonald sees the desires of women as a terrible political threat (Bonald

1864, i,p.785). Du Divorce sought to establish the principle that the state

had the power to intervene everywhere. ‘Government’, as he wrote in the

eorie du Pouvoir Politique, ‘can form private morals and public morals’

(Bonald 1864, i,pp.836–43). Bonald effectively eradicates any notion of a

private sphere; in later works, he even suggested that the state should have

the power to decide who can and cannot marry. In place of divorce, Bonald

calls for a return to the old pre-revolutionary law of legal separation –

eparation de corps – but on newer, and much harsher terms (Klinck 1996,

p. 112). In such cases, neither parent would get the children, who would

be taken into custody by public ofﬁcials. All separated wives, even victims

of domestic abuse, would be placed in religious institutions, whereas men

would have no punishment except being excluded from performing public

functions. Why? Because ‘the same disorders are more criminal in women

than in men’ (Bonald 1864, i,p.841). Bonald was quite clear about the

political desirability of institutionalising women who had separated from

their husbands – to ‘make disappear from society the scandal of a being who

is outside of her natural place, of a wife who is no longer under the authority

of her husband, and of a mother who no longer exercises authority over her

children’ (quoted in Klinck 1996,p.113). Such a being, for Bonald, is an

enemy of the state, the equivalent of the man in Rousseau’s Social Contract

who chooses to ‘renounce everything’.

Bonald’s writing on women demonstrates that for all his insistence on

absolute power, his real conception of power was as something fragile. His

politics, like that of so many other counter-revolutionaries, was actually

founded on a precarious, not to say neurotic, balance, which could be

unsettled by something as slight as a woman choosing to leave her husband.

Counter-revolutionary thought

The theme of balance played itself out in a different way in the German

followers of Burke, to whom we will now turn. For these Burkean counter-

revolutionaries, balance – often in the form of the balance between different

estates in society – was the answer to political security.

4 The German Burkeans

The concept of equilibrium or balance was at the heart of the political

thought of Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832), as beﬁts a ﬁgure mainly

remembered now as adviser to Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773–

1859), Austrian chancellor at the time of the Congress of Vienna (Godechot

1972,p.117). Gentz desired equilibrium between states – along the lines of

the Metternichian system of the balance of power – but also equilibrium

within the state itself. When Gentz attacked the French Revolution, it was

as an event that had unsettled political balance, in a ‘bottomless anarchy’

that both disturbed the security of Europe and deformed the equilibrium

of French society itself (Gentz 1977,p.52). Revolutionary dreamers of a

levelling equality had forgotten, Gentz argued, that society must always rest

on a ﬁnely calibrated balance between intelligence, wealth and bir th (Droz

1949,pp.381–5). The only equality which mattered to Gentz – equality

before the law – was secured by protecting rather than attacking the rights

and privileges of corporations and the other bodies which held the nation

together (Reiff 1912,p.47).

Gentz’s initial response to the French Revolution, however, was one of

great enthusiasm (see Patern

o 1993,p.29). Until April 1791, his intellectual

position had been Kantian (following a course of study at the University

of K

onigsberg), something which distinguishes him decisively from Bonald

and Maistre. He espoused ‘the idea of an indeﬁnite perfectibility’, and

defended, in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the concept of natural right against

the conservative thinker Justus M

oser (Droz 1949,p.374). This changed

gradually after he ﬁrst read Burke’s Reﬂections, which he discovered, to his

surprise, he preferred to ‘a hundred insipid panegyrics on the Revolu-

tion’ (Droz 1949,p.374). As the so-called second French Revolution was

unleashed in 1792 with the attack on the Tuileries Palace and the September

Massacres, Gentz became increasingly Burkean. In 1793, the year of the

Terror proper, Gentz published a translation of Burke in which he praised

Burke for his astonishing clairvoyance in having seen in the enthusiasm of

1789 an embryo for the Terror of 1792 (Droz 1949,p.375; Godechot 1972,

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p. 116). In 1794, he followed this up with a translation of Mallet du Pan’s

Consid

erations, which he called the most powerful and profound work ever

published (Godechot 1972,p.117).

The mature position of Gentz vis-

a-vis the Revolution is perhaps most

clearly seen in a later work (published in Philadelphia in 1800 in a translation

by John Quincy Adams, the future US president), comparing the ‘origin

and principles’ of the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

Just before it appeared, Gentz had attacked the belief in the identity of

the two revolutions as ‘one of the most widespread errors of the time’.

Where the American Revolution was moderate, the French Revolution

was violent. Where the American Revolution had clear, precise objectives,

the French Revolution had terrifyingly amorphous aims, which allowed

it to escalate into an ‘offensive frenzy’, a ‘horrible labyrinth’ (Gentz 1977,

pp. 49, 70). Gentz praised the American revolutionaries for their sense

of political balance, quoting with approval the Philadelphia Congress of

1776,whichinsistedthat‘weaskonlyforpeace,libertyandsecurity...we

demand no new rights’ (Gentz 1977,p.45). He contrasted this with the

giddy claims of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The

French ‘were so proud as to think they could bend impossibility itself’

(Gentz 1977,p.69). If only the French Revolution had stayed within

the bounds of law, it could have been legitimate; instead, the ‘usurpers’

‘dethroned the king, suspended the constitution’ and ‘proclaimed a republic’

without ‘so much as a legal pretext’ (Gentz 1977,p.41). Gentz contrasted

the brash novelty of the French Revolution with the measured, empirical

approach of the Americans, giving thanks that the American republic had

taken on ‘the mild, moderate, considerate tone’ of Washington rather than

the ‘wild, extravagant, rhapsodical declamation of a Paine’ (Gentz 1977,

p. 57).

Gentz’s antagonism to ‘wild’ democracy was mirrored by other German

thinkers with rather different intellectual backgrounds. In contrast to Gentz’s

Prussian, Kantian bildung, Ernest Brandes and August-Guillaume Rehberg

(who inﬂuenced the German Historical School of Law) were both Han-

overians and Anglophiles. Together with A. L. Schl

ozer and L. T. Spittler,

two professors at the University of G

ottingen, they made up the ‘Hanoverian

school’ of ‘moderate-to-conservative Aufkl

arer’ who gradually rejected t he

French Revolution (see Beiser 1992,ch.12). Much has been written, from

Marx onwards, of the ‘absence of a German political tradition’ in the eight-

eenth century (see, for example, Reiss 1955,p.2). The thought of Brandes

and Rehberg bears this out, to the extent that their political concerns seem

Counter-revolutionary thought

to have been shaped more by England and France than by Germany. In 1789,

Rehberg began a deep study of the British constitution under the guidance

of Brandes at the University of G

ottingen (Droz 1949,pp.360ff.). At

ﬁrst, the Hanoverians welcomed the Revolution. ‘How wonderful’, wrote

Schl

ozer in 1789, that France had ‘thrown off the yoke of tyranny’, sweeping

aside old feudal abuses (Beiser 1992,p.30). However, when it became clear

that the French would not adopt a British-style constitutional monarchy,

the Hanoverians became much more critical. Rehberg saw the Revolution

as an attempt to apply Kantian reason without the necessary supplement of

a Humean sense of History (Beiser 1992,p.305). Brandes had met Burke

in England in 1785 and both he and Rehberg were inﬂuenced by Burke’s

ideas. Brandes lamented that very few members of the French National

Assembly had been to England. He bemoaned the eclipse of Montesquieu

in French opinion by a ‘Rousseauist-amer icano-economist’ clique (Droz

1949,p.355). Like Burke, Brandes identiﬁed in the French Revolution the

unfortunate consequences of rationalist doctrines and a belief in indeﬁnite

human progress. Rehberg, too, disliked the Revolution’s utopian neglect of

experience and accused the National Assembly of destroying the executive

power, creating a dictatorship of the legislative.

In addition to Burke, Rehberg and Brandes were able t o draw on older

traditions within German thought to make their attacks on the Revolution.

In contrast to Gentz’s cosmopolitanism, Rehberg and Brandes favoured

prejudice and the particularity of a nation, sentiments which long before

1789 had already been expressed by Herder with his Volksgeist and Justus

oser (1720–94) with his Patriotic Fantasies. Brandes argued that the French

constitution of 1791 was so ‘inadequate to the real needs of the country, that

one can in no way tell if it was made for the French or for every other people

of the world’ (quoted in Droz 1949,pp.359–60), words which echoed

Maistre’s dry comment that he had met ‘Frenchmen, Italians, Russians,

etc.’, but he had never met Man in general (Maistre 1994,p.53). Brandes

linked the ‘French anarchy’ with the French love of abstraction, observing

that the German respect for tradition was greater; there was no need for

Brissot or Condorcet in Germany, Brandes loftily remarked.

This anti-abstract tradition of thought had a deep effect on the dom-

inant political ideas of the next generation in Germany. Both the ‘revolt

against reason’ of the more conservative German romantics and the His-

torical School of Law of Savigny provided a continuum with the Burkean

antagonism towards system-building. What uniﬁed these thinkers was their

defence of history and the state against novelty and the individual. Some of

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these themes are very clearly expressed in a lecture given by the romantic

Adam M

uller, a close friend of Gentz, on 22 November 1808:

Do not all unfortunate errors of the French revolution coincide with the illusion that

the individual could really step out of the social contract, that he could overthrow and

destroy from outside anything that does not please him, that the individual could protest

against the work of thousands of years, that he need recognise none of the institutions

he encounters, in brief, it is the illusion that there really exists a ﬁxed point outside

the state which anyone can reach and from which anyone can mark new paths for the

great body politic, from which he can transform an old body into a completely new

one, and can outline for the state in place of the old imperfect, but well tried consti-

tution, a new one which will be perfect at least for the next fortnight. (Lougee 1959,

p. 634)

This ‘illusion’, for M

uller, as for every thinker we have so far considered,

whether in France or Germany, was contingent on two other ‘errors’ that

haunted counter-revolutionary thought: the doctrine of popular sovereignty

and the idea of the social contract.

5 The attack on popular sovereignty and the social contract

Whatever else it may have been – Catholic or Protestant, secular or

theocrat, Anglophile or Anglophobe, for or against intermediary bodies,

moderate or extreme – counter-revolutionary thought of the 1790swas

always profoundly anti-democratic.

In the 1990s Stephen Holmes cate-

gorised Maistre as ‘antiliberal’. But as Holmes himself recognises, this is

an anachronistic label (the word ‘liberalism’ did not come into common

usage until around 1821) (Holmes 1993,p.5). It is also problematic, given

that Holmes includes Montesquieu on the side of the ‘liberals’ against the

‘antiliberals’, when, as we have seen, Montesquieu was in fact an important

source for counter-revolutionary ideas. Calling Maistre and other counter-

revolutionaries ‘antiliberal’ – like calling them ‘fascist’ – is, in any case, less

accurate than calling them anti-democratic. Maistre himself referred to his

‘antidemocratic ideas’ (Lucas 1989,p.107). Even those on the pragmatic

end of the counter-revolutionary spectrum, such as Gentz and Mallet du

Pan (who approved Pope’s dictum that ‘For forms of government, let fools

contest’), were hostile to any claims of the sovereignty of the people, which

6 This observation is made by Goldstein 1988,p.7, though he does not extend his discussion to German

political thought.

Counter-revolutionary thought

Gentz, in 1809 called ‘the wildest, most wicked, most dangerous of all

chimeras’.

How could popular sovereignty be dangerous and chimerical at the same

time? For counter-revolutionaries, it was dangerous precisely because it was

chimerical. As the Jesuit Abb

e Barruel expressed it in his Question Nationale

sur l’Autorit

e et sur les Droits du Peuple in 1791, the sovereignty of the people

was a ‘negation’ of sovereignty (Goldstein 1988,pp.21–35). The sovereign,

he feared, ‘will be mutilated, cut into millions of pieces, if, in order to

conceive of the unity of these powers, it is also necessary to conceive of

their being divided among each citizen among the people as a whole’. If

government was to be for the people, it could not possibly be by the people

because sovereignty required authority which required superiority and ‘I

am not superior to myself’, insisted Barruel (quoted in Goldstein 1988,

p. 26). In speeches to the National Assembly in 1791–2, Deputy Maury

and Deputy Mounier repeatedly insisted that ‘the sovereignty that comes

from the people can never return to the people’ (quoted in Goldstein 1988,

pp. 61–2).

The counter-revolutionary antagonism to popular sovereignty partly

derived from a contemptuous view of ‘the people’ as a rabble. As Rehberg

had it, the French Revolution was a monstrous event because it justiﬁed

itself as representing the sovereign people, when in reality the people was ‘an

uneducated and apathetic multitude’ (quoted in Droz 1949,p.363). It was

a common counter-revolutionary trope to denigrate the people as childish.

As Chateaubriand said, ‘The people are children; give them a rattle without

explaining the cause of the noise it makes and they will break it in order

to ﬁnd out’ (quoted in Goldstein 1988,p.89). Or, as Maistre quipped, ‘the

people’ when considered as part of the government was ‘always childish,

always foolish and always absent’ (Maistre 1994,p.35 note).

But if the counter-revolutionary dislike of popular sovereignty was partly

prejudice, it was prejudice underpinned by theory. For Maistre, the very

notion that sovereignty had ever resided in the people was questionable. In

his

Etude sur la Souverainet

e,hewrote:

The people is sovereign, they say; and of whom? Of itself, apparently. The people

is therefore subject. Surely there is something vague here, if not an actual mistake,

because the people which commands is not the people which obeys. It is thus enough

to state the general proposition: ‘The people is sovereign’, to feel that it requires a

commentary. (Maistre 1870,p.177)

7 Quoted in Reiff 1912,p.47;fromAus dem Nachlasse.

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Maistre himself, needless to say, supplied this commentary: ‘The people is a

sovereign which cannot exercise sovereignty’ (Maistre 1870,p.178). Bonald

agreed. ‘Despite their pretended sovereignty, the people do not have any

morerighttodepartfromthepoliticalconstitution...than...tostrayfrom

the unity of God’ (quoted in Goldstein 1988,p.50). He used the preface

to his Th

eorie to show that popular sovereignty was nonsensical and not

supported by history.

Men who have been honoured with the title of political metaphysicians and in whom all

the metaphysics is the obscurity of a false mind, and all politics the desire of a corrupted

heart, have put forward that sovereignty resides in the people. This is a general or

abstract proposition; but when one wants to ﬁnd the application in history, one ﬁnds

that the people has never been and never can be a sovereign: because where would be

the subjects when the people is sovereign? If one wishes that sovereignty resides in the

people, in the sense that it has the right to make laws, it turns out that the people has

never made laws anywhere, that it is even impossible that the people should make laws,

that it has never done it, and that it can never do otherwise than adopt the laws made by

a man called for this reason legislator: moreover, to adopt laws made by a man is to obey

him; and to obey is not to be sovereign but subject, and perhaps slave. Finally, if one

pretends that sovereignty resides in the people, in this sense that the people delegates

the exercise of it in naming those who will fulﬁl the various functions, it turns out that

the people does not nominate anyone ...but that a convened number of individuals,

convened to be called people, individually nominates whoever seems good to them, in

observing certain public or secret conventions . . . However, these conventions are not

truths; because human conventions are contingent. (Bonald 1843, i,p.18)

As this suggests, the counter-revolutionary opposition to democracy was

linked to an opposition to the concept of an original contract, and to

the related discourse of natural rights. Here, the counter-revolutionaries

took up where Hume had left off in his essay ‘Of the Original Contract’

(Hume 1994b; see also Bong ie 1965). Hume had objected that the ‘original

contract’ was an unrealistic proposition, since the kind of primitive human

beings who existed in the putative ‘state of nature’ must have been incapable

of the kind of reﬂection and choice needed to make a contract. The original

contract, observed Hume, was ‘not writ on parchment, nor yet on leaves

or barks of trees’ (Hume 1994b, p. 188).

Rehberg, similarly, attacked contract theory as utopian, complaining that

it was based on a misreading of both history and human nature: individuals

in society were simply never free and equal in the way that advocates of

a social contract supposed they were (Droz 1949,p.363). Maistre called

the social contract a theory ‘in opposition to the facts’ of history (Maistre

1870,p.47). ‘There never has been a state of nature in Rousseau’s sense,

Counter-revolutionary thought

because there never has been a moment where human art did not exist’

(Maistre 1870,p.470). Or, as Calonne insisted, in terms reminiscent of

Bentham, no matter how many ‘pompous labels of eternal, inalienable and

imprescriptable’ are attached to rights, men still did not have them in the

days when they ‘wandered without law’ (quoted in Goldstein 1988,p.112).

There were no rights without positive laws, no laws without society and no

society without government.

Karl Ludwig von Haller, a Bernese professor of constitutional law (and

one of Hegel’s most important intellectual adversaries) who wrote the mam-

moth Restauration der Staatswissenschaft oder Theorie des Naturich-geselligen

Zustandes, der Chimare des Kunstlich-Burgerlichen Entgegengesetzt (1816–34),

based his entire political science on the rejection of social contract theory.

He discarded not only Siey

es, Locke and Rousseau but also Montesquieu,

Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf, announcing a ‘restoration of political sci-

ence’ to echo the restoration of European monarchies. The effect of the

social contract, argued Haller, was to render all current states illegitimate.

The baneful effects of this ‘false philosophy’ were being seen in the revolu-

tions in Greece, Spain and Portugal. Politics, Haller insisted, was not artiﬁcal,

but both divine and natural; as was the family (Haller shared Bonald’s views

on the divine origin of marriage); as was monarchy (Haller 1824–75, ii,

pp. 22, 209). The social contract attributed legislative power to the people;

but for Haller law was nothing else than ‘the will of the prince’, in whose

person force and judgement were united. The state was founded not on a

social contract but on a series of particular private-law relationships – what

Haller called the ‘patrimonial state’. While rejecting natural rights, Haller

upheld male proper ty and inheritance rights, speaking of the ‘eternal’ qual-

ity of primogeniture (Haller 1824–75, ii,pp.65ff.). States were cemented

by fathers passing on to sons, whether a property-owner to his successor

or a king to a prince. Haller treated the idea of an original contract as an

attack on paternal authority.

Not all counter-revolutionaries were equally extreme in their attitude

to contract theory and rights. For Calonne, and for Mallet du Pan, the

belief that individual natural rights were specious did not entail a rejection

of the individual per se. For the more traditionalist counter-revolutionaries,

however, it did. The belief in natural rights, they argued, was a mistake

with devastating consequences for the body politic, as the Revolution, they

believed, had shown. For Bonald, there was no such thing as an individual,

only social beings all tied, ﬁrst to their families and then to the power of the

state. Adam M

uller denounced the state of nature as ‘the unhappy doctrine