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102 charter of 1814 had definitely incorporated in the national tradition, the Parliamentary system, Napoleonic legislation, and the Church established by the Concordat; war had given an irrevocable judgment whose preambles, as Proudhon said, had been dated from Valmy, from Jemmapes, and from fifty other battlefields, and whose conclusions had been received at Saint-Ouen by Louis XVIII. Protected by the prestige of the wars of liberty, the new institutions had become inviolable, and the ideology which was built up to explain them became a faith which seemed for a long time to have for the French the value which the revelation of Jesus has for the Catholics.

From time to time eloquent writers have thought that they could set up a current of reaction against these doctrines, and the Church had hopes that it might get the better of what it called the error of liberalism. A long period of admiration for medieval art and of contempt for the period of Voltaire seemed to threaten the new ideology with ruin; but all these attempts to return to the past left no trace except in literary history. There were times when those in power governed in the least liberal manner, but the principles of the modern régime were never seriously threatened. This fact could not be explained by the power of reason and by some law of progress; its cause lies simply in the epic of the wars