Despite a few intervals, the French Revolution has continued up to the present, and still survives. The role of Napoleon was not confined to overturning the world, changing the map of Europe, and remaking the exploits of Alexander. The new rights of the people, created by the Revolution and established by its institutions, have exercised a profound influence. The military work of the conqueror was soon dissolved, but the revolutionary principles which he contributed to propagate have survived him. The various restorations which followed the Empire caused men at first to become somewhat forgetful of the principles of the Revolution. For fifty years this propagation was far from rapid. One might almost have supposed that the people had forgotten them. Only a small number of theorists maintained their influence. Heirs to the ``simplicist'' spirit of the Jacobins, believing, like them, that societies can be remade from top to bottom by the laws, and persuaded that the Empire had only interrupted the task of revolution, they wished to resume it. While waiting until they could recommence, they attempted to spread the principles of the Revolution by means of their writings. Faithful imitators of the men of the Revolution, they never stopped to ask if their schemes for reform were in conformity with human nature. They too were erecting a chimerical society for an ideal man, and were persuaded that the application of their dreams would regenerate the human species. Deprived of all constructive power, the theorists of all the ages have always been very ready to destroy. Napoleon at St. Helena stated that ``if there existed a monarchy of granite the idealists and theorists would manage to reduce it to powder.'' Among the galaxy of dreamers such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc, Quinet, &c., we find that only Auguste Comte understood that a transformation of manners and ideas must precede political reorganisation. Far from favouring the diffusion of democratic ideas, the projects of reform of the theorists of this period merely impeded their progress. Communistic Socialism, which several of them professed would restore the Revolution, finally alarmed the bourgeoisie and even the working-classes. We have already seen that the fear of their ideas was one of the principal causes of the restoration of the Empire. If none of the chimerical lucubrations of the writers of the first half of the nineteenth century deserve to be discussed, it is none the less interesting to examine them in order to observe the part played by religious and moral ideas which to-day are regarded with contempt. Persuaded that a new society could not, any more than the societies of old, be built up without religious and moral beliefs, the reformers were always endeavouring to found such beliefs.