It is, thus, upon that revolting and tragic arrangement of nature which permits a woman to become a mother against her will that Bonald bases the difference in rank of the sexes. He says, moreover (_Du Divorce_, fifth edition, p. 71): "In this gradation of their relationship is to be found the solution of the question of divorce," namely, that it ought not to be allowed.
If Bonald's mad theory, like many another equally mad, had simply remained a theory, which no one dreamt of putting into practice, there would be nothing to resent. But it was upon the principles proclaimed in his work that the laws of marriage and divorce which held good in France for the next seventy years were based![1] Immediately after the restoration of the Bourbons (twelve years after the publication of _Du Divorce_) Bonald's influence was so irresistible that the lethargic, religiously disposed National Assembly abolished divorce by an overwhelming majority--236 to 11 votes.
It may be said, proceeds Bonald, writing of education, that the father is the power which, through the mother as minister or means, performs the reproductive and maintaining acts, which have the child as object or "subject."
The relation of man and woman in marriage is simply this: Man is power (_le pouvoir_), woman is duty (_le devoir_). Does not Holy Scripture itself call man woman's head (or reason), woman man's helpmeet (or minister), and signify that the child is the subject by perpetually inculcating obedience as its duty?
Woman resembles man as man resembles God. Man is created in the image of God, but is not because of this his equal. Woman is made of the flesh and blood of man, but is his inferior. Bonald's theory chimes in with Milton's: "He for God only, she for God in him." (_Paradise Lost_, Book IV.) He says: "The society of the family is a society to which the man contributes the protecting power of strength, the woman the necessities of weakness; he _le pouvoir_, she _le devoir_." Thus does the French philosopher caricature the doctrine of St. Paul, which, in its day, was a great and noble advance in the direction of the emancipation of woman.
What, then, is Bonald's definition of marriage? Marriage is the engagement entered into by two persons of opposite sexes to found a society--the society which is called a family. It is this engagement which distinguishes marriage from every other species of cohabitation of man and woman. Bonald refers with the utmost indignation to Condorcet's witty saying, that if men have any duty towards the beings who do not yet exist, it cannot be that of endowing them with existence. "Indeed it is!" he exclaims. "Marriage exists for the express purpose of continuing the race." But we are not therefore to conclude, maintains Bonald, that a childless marriage, that is to say, a marriage which appears to have failed in accomplishing its purpose, may be dissolved; for, by annulling the first marriage in order to legalise a second, the production of children in the first is made impossible, without their production in the second being positively ensured. Though a husband and wife have no children, there is always a possibility that children may come; and since marriage is only instituted for the sake of the possible children, the fact that they as yet have none is no reason for annulling it. To Bonald marriage is the possible society, to which the family, as the real society, corresponds. "_The object of marriage_" he teaches, "_is not the happiness of the wedded pair._" What, then, is its object? "_Marriage_" he answers, "_exists for the sake of society._" In marriage religion and the state see only the duties which it imposes.