=The Situation in France in the Enlightenment.= The historian of the French Enlightenment has to take account of the reign of two kings; that of Louis XIV (1643–1715); and that of Louis XV (1715–1774). Together they cover the long period of one hundred and thirty-one years. The reign of Louis XV marks the actual development of the Enlightenment, while that of Louis XIV contains the causes. The long reign of seventy-two years of Louis XIV had been an absolute, arbitrary, and personal government. It had been an age unsurpassed in literature and eloquence, but also an age in which all those subjects that did not redound to the glory of the church were suppressed. It had been the age of Molière, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, and Fénelon; an age when art was encouraged, but also an age in which political and philosophical originality would not presume to breathe. Between Descartes’ death in 1650 and the death of Louis XIV in 1715, one finds a single philosopher, Pierre Bayle, and he had to leave France. The Newtonian physics was not accepted in France until 1732――forty-five years after its publication in England. Upon the death of Louis XIV the artistic glories of his reign lost all their value for the nation. In their place was set the problem of the material misery of the nation, which had been caused by the long wars and the extravagance of paternal government. The reign of Louis XV seethes with the struggle of social forces. It is a period in which the individual is striving to gain his rights under the institutions that have so long repressed him. The development of the French Enlightenment is identical with the struggle for political liberty. In no other period of history――except perhaps the Age of Pericles――is the history of philosophic thought so intimately connected with political history. The fifty-nine years of the reign of Louis XV are filled with exciting events which interest both the philosopher and the historian. The French Enlightenment is the “reaction against that protective and interfering spirit which reached its zenith under Louis XIV.” With Louis XV the magnificence and the utility of ecclesiastical and political absolutism could not be maintained. For the hierarchy of the church was unable longer to keep up its claim of independence and morality; and the State was rapidly exhausting its power by exhausting its financial resources. Each event in the history of France in the eighteenth century had therefore two aspects――each led to the Revolution, and each was a step in the development of the Enlightenment of the individual. The pioneers in the movement could not have been conscious of the end to which their criticism would lead; but to us looking back upon the century the result seems inevitable. A comparison with the situation in England is interesting. While in England the political and ecclesiastical institutions were so elastic that they could without disintegrating absorb the movement of the