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The ideological import of the notion of barbarity, which, with its flexible meaning, could lend itself to many uses in eighteenth-century debates can be gauged thanks to the Traité historique et dogmatique de la vraie religion (1780) and Dictionnaire de théologie (1784-1785), published in abbé Bergier’s Encyclopédie méthodique. If Bergier at first agreed with the same definition of barbarity inherited from Antiquity as his philosophical antagonists, it is clear that in the apologist’s mind, the Barbarians were non-believers whereas, for philosophers, because of the bad treatment inflicted to those people named “savages” they were the Europeans themselves. And above all the two camps were opposed in their conception of the future: in spite of this history, the philosophers do not doubt the final triumph of reason over barbarities, while Christians nourish the hope that the progress of Christianity will one day enable the triumph of good over evil represented by barbarity, whether it be Northern barbarians in the Middle Ages or latterday Enlightenment philosophers in the modern age.