These violent outbursts against Luther and Lutheranism are explained by the fact that the French reactionaries, like the German Romanticists, clearly perceived that the modern intellectual tendency of which they were so much afraid was the inevitable result of Protestantism. Lamennais, for example, writes (_Essai sur l'indifférence_): "It is now acknowledged that the church and its dogmas rest upon authority, as upon an impregnable rock. Hence it is that the adherents of all the different sects, who disagree upon every other point, unite in the attempt to undermine this main pillar of all truth. Lutheran, Socinian, Deist, Atheist, are the names which mark the gradual development of the one doctrine; one and all with unflagging perseverance pursue their particular plan of attack on authority."
Reason, then, Catholic reason, the alone genuine, sees everywhere (according to Bonald) the three social personages--power, minister, and subject. In the different domains of society they receive different names. In the religious world they are called God, priest, and flock; in the political, king, aristocracy or official class, subjects or people; in domestic life, father, mother, and child.
The reader who is not yet familiar with Bonald's mode of thought is likely to be taken aback by this last idea; but Bonald is so perfectly serious in his identification of the father with power, the mother with the minister, and the child with the subject, that he actually, as a rule, employs the designations father, mother, and child in place of the others; because, he says, they apply to animals as well as to man, whereas power, minister, and subject apply exclusively to thinking beings. Besides, he elsewhere says, we must do our utmost to spiritualise man and his relations in view of the attempts that are made to degrade them.
He introduces his theory with his customary formulæ. Man and woman, he says, both exist; but their manner of existence is not the same. They are like each other, but not equals. The union of the sexes is the object of the difference between them. The production of a human being is the object of their union. The father is strong, the child weak; the father active, the child inactive. The mother forms the connecting link. How so? The father, says Bonald, is a conscious being, and cannot become a father except with his own will; the mother, on the contrary, may, even with full consciousness, become a mother _against her will_ (hence inactively). The child neither wills to be born nor is conscious of being born.