which their philosophy had
ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary movement lay in
pressing these facts and aspects on the attention, in reopening chambers
of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire had locked and sealed.

The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general change of
attitude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle Ages. A fresh
interest in the great age of the Church was a natural part of the
religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of ardent
Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one knows, of
the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative literature, it
occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated historians. For Guizot,
Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for Chateaubriand and Victor
Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance which Frenchmen of the
previous generation could hardly have comprehended.

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 Chr