human
[1706] Even during the first period of reaction after the restoration numerous editions of Volney's Ruines and of the Abrégé [1707] of Dupuis's Origine de tous les Cultes served to maintain among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by such historiography as that of Renan's Vie de Jésus. And there were other forces, over and above freemasonry, which in France and other Latin countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-clerical. The would-be social reconstructor Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was an independent and non-Christian though not an anti-clerical theist, and his system may have counted for something as organizing the secular spirit among the workers in the period of the monarchic and Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to Christianity inasmuch as he believed in a divine Providence; but like Owen he had an unbounded and heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility; and he claimed to have discovered the