Le Play to the Council of State, the legislative assembly of the Second French Empire, where his official duties included overseeing numerous industries. He was made commissioner general of the Exhibition of 1867, senator of the empire and Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. At the prompting of the Emperor, Le Play published his recommendations for improving French society in his work Social Reform in France (1864). Initially an atheist, Le Play gradually became convinced of the need for religion. In the essay he defended Christianity against Darwinism, scepticism, and racialism. After the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, he founded and directed the Unions of Social Peace, an organization composed of study circles of leading men dedicated to healing France's political and social divisions. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1879, three years before his death. Thought Le Play's essay, Social Reform in France, expounds the basis of his thinking and provides his recommendations to heal the divisions within French society. Le Play situated himself within the French Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolutionary tradition by criticising many of the social trends that were the result of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Le Play was critical of the Enlightenment idea that man was by nature good, and that moral progress inevitably followed from material progress. He also opposed theories of political and racial determinism. He believed that societies, like human beings, are truly free, and that a society that uses its capacities to overcome the human propensity for evil would flourish and those that did not would decay. He looked to the past to glean examples of how this could be done, and he especially held up the Middle Ages as the exemplar for social relations. For this reason he opposed the French Revolution's uncritical rejection of the past, especially France's Christian past. Le Play also believed strong families played a key role in the health of a society, and he placed particular emphasis on the role of mothers and women. Social Reform in France makes two key points about the family: the first is that social progress is tied to support for homeownership and family inheritance. Like Louis de Bonald before him, Le Play opposed partitive inheritance and held the agricultural family as the ideal. His second key point was that women are the driving force of social and moral progress in any society. Legacy