Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald (2 October 1754 — 23 November 1840) was a French counter-revolutionary[2] philosopher and politician.

De Bonald was at first supportive of the French Revolution and its initial decentralizing tendencies, and hoped the nobility would recover powers lost during the centralization of the 17th century.

[8][10] Fearing that his position as a former public official would make him the target of reprisals, he emigrated with his two eldest sons – leaving behind his wife, mother, and his remaining children – in October 1791 and joined the army of the Prince of Condé.

There he wrote his first important work, the highly conservative Theorie du Pouvoir Politique et Religieux dans la Societe Civile Demontree par le Raisonnement et l'Histoire (3 vols., 1796; new ed., Paris, 1854, 2 vols.

He moved within literary and political circles, and would make the acquittance of writers such as La Harpe, Lacretelle, and, most importantly, François-René de Chateaubriand.

He would strike up a long correspondence and friendship with the conservative Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre, however the two would never meet.

He was made a member of the Royal Council for Public Instruction,[13] and in 1816 was appointed to the French Academy by Louis XVIII.

A member of the Ultra-royalist faction (also known as "Ultras"), his speeches were extremely conservative and he vigorously sought to undo the legislation passed in the wake of the Revolution.

[8] He sought strong protections for the traditional family and in 1815 successfully argued for the repeal of laws passed during the Revolution permitting divorce, which afterwards remained illegal in France until 1884.

Both de Bonald and Chateaubriand frequented the salon of Juliette Récamier, who drew from the leading literary and political circles of her day.

1817 saw the publication of his Thoughts on Various Subjects, and his Observations on Madame de Staël's Considerations on the Principle Events of the French Revolution in the following year.

[8] In 1822, de Bonald was made Minister of State, and in the following year, he was raised to the peerage by Louis XVIII, a dignity which he had lost by refusing to take the required oath in 1803.

This entitled de Bonald to sit in the Chamber of Peers, the upper house of the French Parliament during the Bourbon Restoration.

In 1826, the Prime Minister and leader of the Ultras, Joseph de Villèle, introduced a bill reestablishing the law of primogeniture, at least for owners of large estates, unless they chose otherwise.

[10] The government tried to manage popular outrage by attempting to pass a bill in December of that year curtailing the press, having largely withdrawn censorship in 1824.

At the heart of his political thought was the idea that the family was the basis of society and that institutions should work to protect it in its traditional form.

Shaped by Tacitus and his condemnations of Roman decadence, Bonald felt that economic liberalism and unrestrained wealth would undermine the Christian character of the French people, and would lead men to become less generous and more self-centered.

[18] Bonald was one of the leading writers of the theocratic or traditionalist school,[19][20] which included Maistre, Lamennais, Ballanche and Ferdinand d'Eckstein.

From this he deduces the existence of God, the divine origin and consequent supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures, and the infallibility of the Catholic Church.

[23] Bonald called for the reversal of Jewish emancipation and endorsed new discriminatory measures, such as a distinctive mark which Jews would be forced to wear to identify them in public.

Bonald's writings exercised a great deal of influence over conservative and French Catholic thought throughout the 19th century.

Bonald's influence carried on throughout the counter-revolutionary tradition in the writings of Spanish conservative Juan Donoso Cortés, Italian philosopher Monaldo Leopardi and the ultramontane French journalist Louis Veuillot.