it concisely. From the body of Bénichou's writing, however, emerges a vision of humanity with deep-rooted needs both for belief and a social doctrine of legitimation capable of enlisting the support of society generally. In France, the Roman Catholic Church traditionally fulfilled this role, but a "new spiritual power [was] born in the eighteenth century from the disrepute of the old Church" (ibid., p. 331). It was the rise of this "philosophic faith" (which Bénichou also calls the "faith of the eighteenth century," the "modern faith," the "new faith," "philosophical humanism," and the "secular faith") that initiated the crisis of modernity. Bénichou and the problem of modernity For Bénichou, then, the problem of modernity is essentially that of belief. Romanticism is "the vast prologue or first important act of a longer history that continues in our own time" (The Consecration of the Writer, p. 9), or, intellectually, as "the general debate, which still goes on, between the freedom of thought and expression [la liberté critique] and dogma" (Le Temps des prophètes, p. 11). Historically, this debate first emerges in earnest in the 16th century. The key to the drama, in Bénichou's view, is the weakening of the West's traditional "spiritual power." Modernity appears as an extended period of conflict among various efforts to redefine what such a power might be in the future. Independent writers have, in these circumstances, offered a social location for a secular version of "spiritual authority"—the pouvoir spiritual laïque of the subtitle to Le Sacre de l'écrivain. Historians who ignore this issue in favor of dimensions that are exclusively social, economic, or political are missing something essential, in Bénichou's view. "The Romantic period, in the final analysis, corresponds to an enormous effort to give a corrected edition of the system of the Enlightenment that would be free of the unfortunate aspects that the Terror had caused to stand out so strikingly," Bénichou said in a late interview ("Parcours de l'écrivain," Le Débat (Mar.-Apr. 1989), p. 25). But consensus on the role of the writer was short-lived. Already shaken in the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830, after 1848 the poet-thinker ceased to be a credible spiritual authority in the eyes of bourgeois society. In France, the Church resumed its status as the official spiritual power. Modern conservatism began to emerge, as "the eighteenth century begins to be the object of a vast intellectual disapproval" (ibid.,