The latter part of the eighteenth century had witnessed the birth of a new intellectual ideal in France, essentially different from those associated with the preceding movements of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Neither antiquity nor the Bible were in future to be the court of last instance, but judgment and decision over all things was referred to the individual. This theory, and others laid down by the encyclopedists--the philosophers of the time--reacted equally on all the arts. New theories concerning music were advanced by laymen. Batteaux had already insisted that poetry, music, and the dance were, by very nature, intended to unite; Diderot and Rousseau conceived the idea of the unified work of art. Jean Jaques Rousseau,[9] the intellectual dictator, who laid a rather exaggerated claim to musical knowledge, and the famous satirist, Baron Melchior Grimm, now began a literary tirade against the old musical tragedy of France, which, like the Italian opera, had become paralyzed into mere formulas. Rousseau, who had shortly before written a comic opera, _Le devin du village_ (The Village Seer), in French, now denounced the French language, with delightful inconsistency, as unfit to sing; Grimm in his pamphlet, _Le petit prophète de Boehmisch-Broda_, threatened the French people with dire consequences if they did not abandon French opera for Italian _opera buffa_.[10] This precipitated the widespread controversy between Buffonists and anti-Buffonists, known as the _Guerre des bouffons_, which, in this age of pamphleteers, of theorists, and revolutionary agitators, soon assumed political significance. The conservatives hastened to uphold Rameau and the cause of native art; the revolutionists rallied to the support of the Italians. Marmontel, Favart, and others set themselves to write after the Italian model, ‘Duni brought from Parma his _Ninette à la cour_ and followed it in 1757 with _Le peintre amoureux_; _Monsigny_[11] left his bureau and Philidor[12] his chess table to follow the footsteps of Pergolesi; lastly came Grétry from Rome and killed the old French operatic style with _Le Tableau parlant_ and _Zémire et Azor_!’ The result was the production of a veritable flood of pleasing, delightful operettas dealing with petty love intrigues, mostly of pastoral character, in place of the stale, mythological subjects common to French and Italian opera alike. The new school quickly strengthened its hand and improved its output. Its permanent value lay, of course, in the infusion of new vitality into operatic composition in general, a rejuvenation of the poetic as well as musical technique, the unlocking of a whole treasure of subjects hitherto unused.