From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had wished to blot out the Middle Ages.  The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre, and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the English constitution was hardly less offensive to their minds than the Revolution which De Maistre denounced as “satanic.”  Advocates as they were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed, however, to the advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval institutions on the notice of the world but also by their perception that society had been treated in the eighteenth century in too mechanical a way, that institutions grow, that the conception of individual men divested of their life in society is a misleading abstraction.  They put this in extravagant and untenable forms, but there was a large measure of truth in their criticism, which did its part in helping the nineteenth century to revise and transcend the results of eighteenth century speculation.

In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the doctrine of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress, to gain the upper-hand again.  Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre, Lamennais firmly held the dogma of an original golden age and the degradation of man, and denounced the whole trend of progressive thought from Bacon to Condorcet.  These writers were unconsciously helping Condorcet’s doctrine to assume a new and less questionable shape. [Footnote:  Bonald indeed in his treatise De pouvoir adopted the idea of development and applied it to religion (as Newman did afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the Reformation as a retrograde movement.]

3.

Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of German literature.  In the intellectual commerce between the two countries in the age of Frederick the Great, France had been exclusively the giver, Germany the recipient.  It was due, above all, to Madame de Stael that the tide began to flow the other way.  Among the writers of the Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first in critical talent and intellectual breadth.  Her study of the Revolution showed a more dispassionate appreciation of that convulsion than any of her contemporaries were capable of forming.  But her chef-d’oeuvre is her study of Germany, De l’Allemagne, [Footnote:  A.D. 1813.] which revealed the existence of a world of art and thought, unsuspected by the French public.  Within the next twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel were exerting their influence at Paris.  She did in France what Coleridge was doing in England for the knowledge of German thought.