Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, the French publicist and philosopher, was born in the château of Le Monna, near Millau (Aveyron). He emigrated in 1791, during the Revolution, to Heidelberg, moving later to Constance, and joined the circle of royalist writers who in 1796 published a number of books attacking the Revolutionary Party and defending the monarchy. His own contribution to the propaganda was his famous Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux (3 vols., Constance, 1796), the first of a long series of volumes expressing the ultramontane position, the political supremacy of the papacy, absolute monarchy, and traditionalism.

The basic premise of Bonald, as far as his philosophy was concerned, was the identity of thought and language. Against the usual eighteenth-century idea that language was a human invention, he revived Jean-Jacques Rousseau's argument that since an invention...