The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, And Anthropology in France, 1876–1936 by Jennifer Michael Hecht was published in 2003 by Columbia University Press.
The book argues that this strange scientific pact, and anthropology itself, which the group's members helped to develop, had its genesis in aggressive, evangelical atheism.
It illustrates how anthropology grew in the context of an impassioned struggle between the forces of tradition, especially the Catholic faith, and those of a more freethinking modernism, and posits that it became for many a secular religion.
Among the figures discussed are novelist Émile Zola, statesman Leon Gambetta, American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
[4] The End of the Soul received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for 2004 from Phi Beta Kappa society as a book that "is an important contribution to knowledge, serious scholarship with a broad pertinence to the human condition.