France, Spain, England, Germany and the Netherland, were overrun with blood, shed either through the War of Religion or in consequence of the Inquisition, in the proceedings of which the governments of the different states interfered to further their political interests though seldom on the side of mercy. In Italy there was no struggle; men do not face death or torture without passionate convictions; and while other races, young as they were, had such strong convictions the country which had reaped too easy and too rich a harvest between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, had given all that her assimilation of ancient wisdom could give, and at the end of her career she sat exhausted on the wayside to watch the young ones at play, as a connoisseur watches a boxing-match and takes all the hints which may be useful to him. Metaphysics could not flourish under such circumstances, as virility is the first requisite for original thinking, so Italian scholars stood on the watch taking law and thought from abroad. CHAPTER IV THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN FRANCE The history of France from the advent of Louis XI to that of Louis XIV displays in its development constructive tendencies so definite and constant that its edifice, at once harmonious and imposing, seems the realisation of an architectural scheme perfectly in keeping with the genius of France. Everything tended to that unification of the country, to that union of the provinces the necessary consequence of which must be the centralisation of administration and the concentration of political power in the hands of the sovereign. The idea of absolute monarchy has never been conceived and realised in exactly the same way as in France. M. Jacques Bainville is fully justified in holding that the kings of France made it their main duty to concentrate all their efforts on identifying themselves and their dynasty with the development and consolidation of the unification of the country. But it has yet to be shown what is really the origin of a conception of political reality that so far seems to be unique. Monarchy was indeed just as absolute in Spain and in Austria. But in both countries it remained comparatively feudal. So that the _bourgeois_ origin ascribed by M. Bainville to the Capetian Monarchy, its intimate relations with the Middle Class amounting to a sort of mutual league against the great feudal lords, is sufficient to endow it with the modern character that attracts the student, eager to penetrate to the living core of the life of political institutions. It could not, however, account for the rationality of its development, for the harmony and beauty of its historical features. In the last half of the sixteenth and all through the seventeenth century France and her monarchy are endowed with a beauty that exercises a permanent fascination. It would be true to say that the part played by France at that time in the civilisation of the world was to a large degree æsthetic.