High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Pierre-Simon Ballanche (4 August 1776 ? 12 June 1847) was a French writer and counterrevolutionary philosopher, who elaborated a theology of progress that possessed considerable influence in French literary circles in the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was the ninth member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1842.Born in Lyon, Ballanche was seventeen when his imagination was marked for life by the horrors of the French Revolution. In 1793, the city's royalist revolt against the authority of the revolutionary Convention ended with guillotining or summary execution of about 700 people. This, and an unhappy love affair early in life, left him with an abidingly tragic view of life as sanctified suffering, a view that he embodied in his works, of which the best known was an unfinished multi-part work entitled Essais de palingénésie sociale ("Essays on Social Palingenesis").