Many of those who lived through the turbulent period sparked off by the revolution in Paris in 1789 such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in England, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in Germany and Madame de Staël (1766–1817) in France, concurred in their different ways that what was at work was the action of human reason, in a progressive direction – that had been subverted by reaction – and that the new century would renew the progress promised by the initial event.