Rousseau's social theories were also violently attacked. It is not difficult to understand how Rousseau, with the society of his own day before his eyes, should arrive at the conclusion that it would be quite possible to do without a society at all; but this mistaken idea, in combination with the fanciful one of a lost, happy, natural condition, led him to formulate such a proposition as: "Man is born good, and society corrupts him," and to give utterance to the comic paradox, which reappears in all the polemical works of the Restoration period, pierced with refutations as a pin-cushion is with pins: "The man who thinks is a degenerate animal." Such utterances lent themselves to attack. In the ardour of his impeachment of society, Rousseau permits himself to say: "Society is not a consequence of the nature of man. Everything that has not its origin in the nature of things has disadvantages, and civil society has most of all." "Society!" cries Bonald, not without eloquence; "as if society consisted of the walls of our houses or the ramparts of our towns! as if there were not, wherever a human being is born, a father, a mother, a child, a language, heaven, earth, God, and society!" The doctrine he instils into his contemporaries is that the earliest society was a family, and that in the family authority is not elective, but a result of the nature of things. To the doctrine that society is the result of a voluntary agreement, of a contract, he opposes his doctrine that society is enforced (_obligée_), is the production of a power--whether it be the power of persuasion or of arms. To the theory that power, that authority, originally received the law from the people he opposes his theory that there can be no people before there is a power. To the revolutionary principle that society is _fraternity and equality_ he opposes the principle of patriarchal absolutism, that society is _paternity and dependence_. Power belongs to God, and is communicated by Him. Here again the argument of historical actuality proves extraordinarily convincing, and the author seizes the opportunity to deduce, as it were surreptitiously, the doctrine of the one and only lawful sovereignty, sovereignty by the grace of God, from our respect for history and reality.