In his 2002 Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France 
, Ivan Strenski examined the setting for French Enlightenment conceptions of sacrifice. He argued “that a lart portion of the Catholic assumptions about the nature of sacrifice were in their turn equally well assumed by a host of French thinkers, ranging all the way from Durkheim, Hubert and Mauss to Alfred Loisy, or later to the likes of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, as well as Rene Girard, Paul Claudel, Marguerite Yourcenar. Even in de-Christianizing, the French Revolution and its epigones traded on the Catholic discourse of sacrifice. Indeed, this discourse seemed durable enough to make it possible to speak of ‘sacrifice’ as having its own history.”
And, as Strenski emphasizes, largely a Catholic history.
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