The publication of Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus in 1863 is rightly regarded as a key moment in French history. The book served as an important symbol of science and free thought in the battles over the Republic and laïcité, and presented a thesis that characterized French scientific philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century. Jesus, for Renan, transcended his own culture, rejecting all social constraints in the pursuit of a unique ideal of the kingdom of God, becoming in the process the first true individualist in history. Critics ridiculed his arguments, but it was typical of the Romanticism of the French positivists. Renan's philosophy was rooted not in empiricism, but in an essentially pantheistic metaphysics, prizing the realization of God within oneself as the highest ethical achievement. This was an innovation of the highest importance in France, where a traditionalist, but post-Christian theism had marked social thought since the Revolution. Renan and his generation, notably Taine, dispensed with the traditionalist religious dualism that typified the social outlook of Tocqueville, Michelet, and their contemporaries. Far from articulating a materialist dead end in the history of ideas, their Romantic individualism was critical to later developments in European thought, including aestheticism and irrationalism.