Abstract
It was Léon Daudet who called Renan "the god of the Third Republic". How did Renan, who had long been a supporter of a constitutional monarchy, come to call himself a "morrow's republican" in 1878, after the May 16th victory that had converted him? No doubt because Renan, as Albert Thibaudet puts it, is "the man whose conscience provided the stage for a religious drama" that was France's own, right up to the "warlike inauguration" of the great man's statue in Tréguier in 1903, in the presence of Émile Combes. Renan's Drames philosophiques , from Caliban to L'Abbesse de Jouarre, written in his office at the Collège de France, best illustrate this late conversion.
