We saw how that period had embarrassed the first pioneers who attempted to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive movement, how lightly they passed over it, how unconvincingly they explained it away.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century the medieval question was posed in such a way that any one who undertook to develop the doctrine of Progress would have to explore it more seriously.  Madame de Stael saw this when she wrote her book on Literature considered in its Relation to Social Institutions (1801).  She was then under the influence of Condorcet and an ardent believer in perfectibility, and the work is an attempt to extend this theory, which she testifies was falling into discredit, to the realm of literature.  She saw that, if man regressed instead of progressing for ten centuries, the case for Progress was gravely compromised, and she sought to show that the Middle Ages contributed to the development of the intellectual faculties and to the expansion of civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an indispensable agent.  This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is an advance on Condorcet and an anticipation of Saint-Simon and Comte.

A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following year from the ranks of reaction.  Chateaubriand’s Genie du Christianisme appeared in 1802, “amidst the ruins of our temples,” as the author afterwards said, when France was issuing from the chaos of her revolution.  It was a declaration of war against the spirit of the eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a barbarous system whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress.  But it was much more than polemic.  Chateaubriand arrayed arguments in support of orthodox dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration, and the rest; but the appeal of the book did not lie in its logic, it lay in the appreciation of Christianity from a new point of view.  He approached it in the spirit of an artist, as an aesthete, not as a philosopher, and so far as he proved anything he proved that Christianity is valuable because it is beautiful, not because it is true.  He aimed at showing that it can “enchanter l’ame aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d’Homere.”  He might call to his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on Dante, Milton, Racine that his case was really based.  The book is an apologia, from the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school.  “Dieu ne defend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui.”

It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should reject the doctrine of perfectibility.  “When man attains the highest point of civilisation,” wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau, “he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude; by civilising his manners, he forges himself chains.  His heart profits at the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his heart.”  And, apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the question of Progress had little interest for the Romantic school.  Victor Hugo, in the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art, revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared that classical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are now spectators of its imposing old age.