Having abandoned the seminary and the Church, Renan worked for his university degrees. The events of 1848-49 inspired his young heart with great enthusiasm, under the influence of which he wrote his _Avenir de la Science_. This book was not published, however, until 1890, when he had lost his early hopes and illusions. In 1849 he went away upon a mission to Italy. “The reaction of 1850-51 and the _coup d’état_ instilled into me a pessimism of which I am not yet cured,” so he wrote in the preface to his _Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques_.[11] Some years after the _coup d’état_ he published a volume of essays (_Essais de Morale et de Critique_), and he showed his acquaintance with Arabic philosophy by an excellent treatise on _Averroes et l’Averroisme_ (1859). The following year he visited Syria and, in 1861, was appointed Professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France. He then began his monumental work on _Les Origines du Christianisme_, of which the first volume, _La Vie de Jésus_, appeared in 1863. Its importance for religious thought we shall consider in our last chapter; here it must suffice to observe its immediate consequences. These were terrific onslaughts from the clergy upon its author, which, although they brought the attention of his countrymen and of the world upon Renan, resulted in the Imperial Government suspending his tenure of the chair. After the fall of the Empire, however, he returned to it, and under the Third Republic became Director of the Collège de France. [11] Published only in 1895. The preface referred to is dated 1871.