Pierre-Simon Ballanche

Pierre-Simon Ballanche (Lyon, 1776 – 1847) was a French writer and counterrevolutionary thinker whose theology of progress carried considerable weight in literary circles at the start of the nineteenth century. To understand him, one has to keep in mind both the Revolution that shaped his youth and the Christian tradition he hoped to renew.

The Revolution marked him early. In 1793 Lyon's royalist revolt against the Convention ended with the execution of about 700 people, and that experience, together with an unhappy early love affair, left him with a tragic sense of life as suffering that could still mean something. He worked for some years as a printer, and in 1802 he published Du sentiment considéré dans son rapport avec la littérature, written in the vein of Chateaubriand's Génie du christianisme. Later he met Julie Récamier and became a regular at her salon in Paris.

His major project, never completed, was Essais de palingénésie sociale. He pictured history as a series of regenerations in which humanity passes through a fall from an original perfection, a period of trial, and a final return to perfection. For Ballanche, language was a direct gift from God and the origin of society was tied to it, which led him to a poetics of the symbol that helped shape early Romanticism. He argued that the Revolution had a providential meaning and that some forms of authority could fall without becoming contemptible. His legacy sits uneasily between progressive and counterrevolutionary camps, and he never managed the reconciliation he hoped to achieve.