Edgar Jean Louis Quinet was born in 1803 and made his name translating and arguing with German philosophy before taking a chair in Paris in 1842. He used it, with his friend Jules Michelet, for a sustained public attack on the Jesuits and on papal authority — the lectures behind Des Jésuites (1843) and L’Ultramontanisme (1844), the second of which reached New York in English in 1845 carrying the sentence on this page. He was driven out of France after Napoleon III’s coup, spent the Second Empire in exile, returned after Sedan, and was elected a deputy to the National Assembly. He died in 1875.