Pierre-Simon Ballanche

In works like Antigone (1814), Essais sur les institutions sociales ("Essay on Social Institutions", 1818), Le Vieillard et le jeune homme ("The Old Man and the Youth", 1819), L'Homme sans nom ("The Man without a Name", 1820) and Élégie ("Elegy", 1820), he developed the idea that the French Revolution was endowed with a divine significance.

But unlike religious thinkers who conferred upon the Church the task of interpreting this significance, Ballanche developed a theory of language.

The idea of this "great work" germinated in him in the 1820s, and he announced what was intended to be a vast philosophico-poetic epic of the past, present and future in its opening volume, Prolégomènes, published in 1827.

The first volume dealt with Greece in Orphée ("Orpheus", 1829), and the second, never finished, with the Roman Republic in Formule générale de l'histoire de tous les peuples appliquée à l'histoire du peuple romain ("General Formula of the History of All Peoples Applied to the History of the Roman People"), fragments of which were published in reviews from 1829 to 1834.

In a sense, his thought is a secular version of Fall and Redemption, adapted to a theological progressivism – an "optimistic theory of original sin and its consequences", in the words of Paul Bénichou, who has written extensively on Ballanche's historical importance in Le Sacre de l'écrivain (1973), Le Temps des prophètes (1977) and "Le Grand Œuvre de Ballanche", Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France (Sept.-Oct. 1975), collected in Variétés critiques (1996).

But this was not to be: his view of the social order as supernatural in character was not intelligible (or not acceptable) to those on the left, and his willingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of radical change did not endear him to those on the right.