Louis de Bonald was a provincial nobleman who emigrated in 1791, wrote his first and most systematic book in exile in Heidelberg, returned, and became under the Restoration a deputy, a peer, and the chief theorist of the ultra-royalists — sponsoring the law that abolished divorce and serving on the censorship commission.
His Theory of Political and Religious Power of 1796 was ordered destroyed by the Directory, which is a reasonable measure of how directly it attacked the Revolution's premises. Bonald's argument is that the eighteenth century inverted the true order. It began with the individual, endowed him with rights and reason, and derived society from his consent. But the individual capable of consenting is a product, not a starting point: he thinks in a language he did not invent, holds concepts he received, and exists within relations that formed him. Society is prior to its members in the order of being.
His proof is language, and it is the argument that gives him a claim on the history of social thought. Thought requires language; language cannot have been invented, because inventing it would require the very thought it makes possible; therefore language was given, and with it the fundamental truths it carries. Man thinks his speech before he speaks his thought. Whatever one makes of the theology, the structure — that the individual is constituted by a social inheritance he did not choose and cannot get behind — is the core intuition of later sociology, and Comte, who admired him, and Durkheim after him both worked from it.
The politics that follow are uncompromising. Every society is constituted by a triad of power, minister and subject, appearing as God, priest and believer in religion, king, nobility and people in the state, father, mother and child in the family; these are natural forms rather than arrangements, and any constitution that departs from them is a construction that will fail. Monarchy, hereditary aristocracy and an established church are not preferences but the shape society takes when it is not being deformed.
He is the most rigorous of the counter-revolutionaries and the least attractive: where Burke argued from prudence and de Maistre from providence and violence, Bonald argued from a system, and followed it wherever it went.