In his Historical Memoirs of the Life of Suard, published in Paris in 1820, Dominique-Joseph Garat referred to the arguments aroused in Paris in the 1760s by the publication of Cesare Beccaria's Of Crimes and Punishments. He recalled how Suard – one of the most active intermediaries between the Paris of the Encyclopedists and the other European centres of the Enlightenment – dwelt particularly on the impact of the final part of the Milanese philosopher's famous treatise, chapter 41 of the French translation by Morellet. ‘This chapter, which Suard re-read in the last days of his life, seemed to possess the prescience of an oracle and Suard, an admirer of the Scottish philosophical school, almost preferred it to Ferguson's History of Civil Society, a work remarkable for its merit and utility.’ Beccaria's chapter was a dense and compact sketch of the history of human society from the age of ‘primitive peoples’ to the ‘formation of large societies’, from the age of faith to the dawn of reason. So tragic and arduous had this passage been that there was good reason to regret all that man had had to abandon in order to make it possible. Particularly ‘difficult and terrible’ had been the passage from the age of error to the age of reason: ‘entire generations' had been sacrificed for the sake of the happiness of those destined to make the sorrowful but necessary transition from the darkness of ignorance to the light of philosophy, from the age of tyranny to the dawn of liberty.’