With love and understanding, but with a persistently flattering pen, Bonald describes the government of France under kings like Henry IV. and regents like Richelieu. In his turn attacking the revolutionary assailants of the old monarchy and its nobles, he skilfully argues that the monarchy was not the despotism nor the aristocracy the exclusive caste which their detractors made them out to have been. He shrewdly points out the defects of the succeeding system, with its much boasted liberty for every one, which meant no more than that every one had a right to vote, and warmly defends the advantages of the old order of things, which permitted the rich man to become a nobleman, but set limits to plutocracy by prohibiting the nobleman's working to become rich. He wilfully overlooks the fact that the original advantages of the old monarchy existed at last only on paper, and that under its auspices the most shameful injustice and the basest cupidity grew up and prospered.
In his aversion to the independence of parliaments and courts of justice, to liberty of conscience and liberty of the press, Bonald is doubtless sincere enough, but in his eulogies of the old form of government there is a want of common honesty. As a historian he is ignorant, but not so ignorant as not to know what that government really was.
His writings are now not only antiquated but decayed. Open his long treatises where we will, a faint odour of dust and musty leaves and corruption meets us. The most important chapters in the once famous _Recherches Philosophiques_ (such as those on the origin of speech and writing) read like fragments of some old theological text-book.
As a general rule the shorter treatises and occasional articles of philosophers of Bonald's type retain most freshness. But one can read through the two thick volumes which Bonald published under the title of _Mélanges littéraires et politiques_ without coming upon a single page to which the word "fresh" can be applied. Even such essays as those on the writings of Voltaire, on the Jews, and on tolerance, topics which might have been expected to tempt him to say something strong or bitter--at any rate something which would imprint itself on the memory--are terribly monotonous and colourless. Whether he is disapproving of Voltaire's morality, or maintaining that the Jews ought to be deprived of civic rights, or proving that tolerance is a vice and an impossibility, we have always the same solemn and empty ceremonial, the same application of the formula of cause, means, and effect, the same grave, monotonous tempo--one, two, three; one, two, three. Bonald is unreadable because of the very passionlessness on which he prided himself.
