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.