There is nothing neutral about philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth century in France. Traditionalists such as Joseph de Maistre see a ‘fight to the death between Christianity and the spirit of philosophy [le philosophisme]’; they hold Enlightenment philosophes responsible for the ‘satanic’ events of the French Revolution and consider philosophy a dissolving force that threatens the social fabric, rendering the establishment of enduring social or political institutions impossible. On their view divine providence governs human history; God will restore order and counter-revolution will return the French, chastened and purified, to the values and institutions of the past. This is the perspective Stendhal so vividly represented in Le Rouge et le noir when Julien Sorel finds himself implicated in a conspiracy of the Ultras. It never quite disappears. Monarchists still have a strong voice when the Third Republic is finally established after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870.

At the turn of the century, however, others believe that there can be no return to the past. If philosophy precipitated the Revolution that evolved into the Terror, the remedy for revolutionary violence is to be found ‘in the very source of the evil/suffering [du mal], in philosophy’. One can only look to the future and since, at this post-revolutionary juncture, ‘the future has no precursor’, it will be necessary for men and women to invent it.