Victor Hugo, in the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art, revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared that classical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are now spectators of its imposing old age.
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.