On the French Philosophy of History of the Restoration Period: Pierre-Simon Ballanche

Abstract

The article analyzes Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s doctrine about the driving forces and directionality of history. The representative of early French Romanticism attached great importance to the feeling, which was understood as connecting element of wisdom, morality, and art. Feeling also inclines a person to religious faith, which should serve as a key to understanding of history. Distinguishing moral and intellectual aspects of human nature, Ballanche sees in their mutual mismatch the specificity of the modern stage of history. It is the gap between the moral and intellectual that explains the events of the French Revolution, considered by Ballance as the first significant anti-religious movement. Calling for reconciliation of all warring parties, he proposed to turn to ancient traditions. Ballanche divided history into three big stages. The first was the triumph of polytheism, the second was characterized by the spread of Christianity, the third will be marked by the liberation of thinking. These stages are interconnected, flow one into another, all the main discoveries of mankind retain their importance for them. At the heart of Ballanche’s theory of “social palingenesis,” there are ideas about the periodic revival, the restoration of society, the transformation of its dilapidated forms. But for him, morality, inseparable from religion, is always the core of the social organism. Society is constantly changing but never dying. Criticizing Enlightenment ideas, Ballanche rejected both the theory of social contract and the conception of popular sovereignty. He saw a political future in the prevalence of the principle of constitutional monarchy. He attached special importance to the doctrine of human solidarity, which he considered topical in the nearterm political prospects. In Ballanche’s theory, conservative elements are connected to the idea of progress, and his philosophy of history provides valuable evidence of the sentiments that were characteristic of French intellectual culture of the first decades of the 19th century.