Victorian society, however emphatic its hostility to French Naturalism, was not unanimous in its disapproval. Indeed, many of the bitterest critics softened their reproaches as the century advanced. Robert Buchanan, for example, not only modified his earlier position in later years, but became a staunch defender of Zola. In 1877 he had aligned himself with the forces of virtue and goodness as embodied in the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the aim of which was to save the land from the blasphemers Rabelais, Boccaccio, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Zola, Ibsen, Wagner, George Moore, and many others.