He had been Vicar-General of the diocese of Agen and Director of the Carmelite Nuns in France when he was made Bishop of Clermont, in 1776.
On the eve of the French Revolution, as he was warning his diocesans against the license of the press, he predicted that visitations of God were coming.
He went as one of the deputies of the clergy to the Estates-General of 1789.
To Target, who spoke of the "God of peace," he replied that the God of peace was also the God of order and justice.
From his prison Louis XVI sent for his opinion as to whether he should receive Paschal Communion.
In reply, he was sympathetic, but advised the monarch to abstain "for having sanctioned decrees destructive of religion".
Bonal was alluding chiefly to the civil constitution of the clergy.
Having declined to take the loyalty oath to the constitution, he was compelled to leave his diocese and country.
He passed to Flanders and later to Holland, was captured and sentenced to deportation by the French, but succeeded in making his escape and spent the last years of his life in various cities of Germany.
Image extracted from page 513 of volume 4 of Histoire de l'administration civile dans la province d'Auvergne et le département du Puy-de-Dôme, by BONNEFOY, Georges. Original held and digitised by the British Library. Copied from Flickr.
Note: The colours, contrast and appearance of these illustrations are unlikely to be true to life. They are derived from scanned images that have been enhanced for machine interpretation and have been altered from their originals.
This file is from the Mechanical Curator collection, a set of over 1 million images scanned from out-of-copyright books and released to Flickr Commons by the British Library.