In France its light played round institutions which were too deeply rooted in absolutism and privilege to be capable of substantial modification.

Deism was comparatively impotent against the Church of England, first, because it was an intellectual movement, and not a social one; second, because the constitutional doctrines of the church were flexible.

Deism in the hands of its French propagators became connected with social liberalism, because the Catholic church in those days was identified with all the ideas of repression.

And the tendencies of deism in France grew more violently destructive, not only because religious superstition was grosser, but because that superstition was incorporated in a strong and inexpansible social structure.
"It would be a mistake," wrote that sagacious and well-informed observer, D'Argenson, so early as 1753, "to attribute the loss of religion in France to the English philosophy, which has not gained more than a hundred philosophers or so in Paris, instead of setting it down to the hatred against the priests, which goes to the very last extreme.
All minds are turning to discontent and disobedience, and everything is on the high road to a great revolution, both in religion and in government.

And it will be a very different thing to that rude Reformation, a medley of superstition and freedom, which came to us from Germany in the sixteenth century! As our nation and our century are enlightened in so very different a fashion, they will go whither they ought to go; they will banish every priest, all priesthood, all revelation, all mystery." This, however, only represents the destructive side of the vast change which D'Argenson then foresaw, six-and-thirty years before its consummation.