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As Rousseau had placed sovereign power in the will of the people, Bonald placed it in that of God, as it is manifested to man through language and revelation, and of this revelation he regarded the Catholic church as the interpreter.
De Bonald was of much heavier calibre. He really thought, while Chateaubriand only felt, and the Législation Primitive and the Pensées sur Divers Sujets contain much that an enemy of the school will find it worth while to read, in spite of an artificial, and, if a foreigner may judge, a detestable style.
M. de Bonald was, like M. de Maistre, a prophet of the past, one of those men whose ideas were of bygone days, and to whom we bow with veneration, as we see them seated on the threshold of futurity; they will not pass onward, but tarry to listen to the sublime lament of all that dies in the human mind.
In consequence of these first verses of mine, which were but one feeble strophe of the perpetual hymn of my heart, she requested me to write an ode for her, which she would address as a tribute of admiration, and as a specimen of my talents, to one of the men of her Paris acquaintance, for whom she felt the greatest respect and attachment, M. de Bonald.
"From the Gospel to the Contrat Social," says De Bonald, "it is books that have made revolutions." Indeed, a great book is often a greater thing than a great battle. Even works of fiction have occasionally exercised immense power on society. Bear in mind that it is not all we eat that nourishes, but what we digest.
"Suppose that we take the virtuous representatives of the Right?" suggested Lousteau. "We might say that M. de Bonald has sweaty feet." "Let us begin a series of sketches of Ministerialist orators," suggested Hector Merlin. "You do that, youngster; you know them; they are your own party," said Lousteau; "you could indulge any little private grudges of your own.
"It is not a little remarkable," says the editor of the American Christian Union, "that whilst the Bishop of Lucon was engaged in extolling the miracles of La Salette, the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyons, Dr. Bonald, 'Primate of all the Gauls, addressed a circular to all the priests in his diocese, in which he cautions them against apocryphal miracles!
He became unnaturally dreamy; he read Pascal, and Bossuet's sublime "History of Species"; he read Bonald, he read Saint-Augustine; he determined also to read the works of Swedenborg, and the late Saint-Martin, which the mysterious stranger had mentioned to him.
Forces, which the eighteenth century had underrated or endeavoured to suppress, emerged in a new shape, and it seemed for a while as if the new century might definitely turn its back on its predecessor. There was an intellectual rehabilitation of Catholicism, which will always be associated with the names of four thinkers of exceptional talent, Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.
Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre, Lamennais firmly held the dogma of an original golden age and the degradation of man, and denounced the whole trend of progressive thought from Bacon to Condorcet. Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of German literature.
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