The intellectual origins of the mission civilisatrice can be traced back the Christian tradition dating from the Middle Ages. European thinkers had naturalized social change by using the development metaphor. In the eighteenth century, history became to be seen as an unilinear unending inevitable process of social evolutionism with the European nations running ahead.[1] Racists saw the "backward" nations as intrinsically incapable, but the more "progressive" thinkers like the Marquis de Condorcet postulated a holy duty to help those peoples "which, to civilize themselves, wait only to receive the means from us, to find brothers among Europeans and to become their friends and disciples".[2]