ABSTRACT
The writing of On Divorce can be dated with some precision. The proposed Civil Code to which Bonald refers in the work was formally presented by a commission of the Council of State on 24 Thermidor, Year VIII and published in the Year IX. Since On Divorce was published in 1801, and references to the proposed Civil Code occur throughout the work and are integral to the text, it is likely that Bonald began writing On Divorce in the fall of 1800 at the earliest. With the second edition, Bonald evidently felt the work had assumed its definitive form, and the subsequent editions—of 1818, 1839, and 1847 —simply reprint the second edition, with insignificant typographical variants. The 1864 text of On Divorce in the third edition of Bonald's Oeuvres, published by the abbe Migne, is more ambitious, though not always reliable. Most of the translation falls into two categories: translation of Latin citations; identification of French and Latin works cited.
