Modern philosophy, above all in Italy, understands art as the expression of the life of mind. Hence, a battle, a treaty of peace, a law, a form of government, can be considered an artistic masterpiece just as well as a poem or a monument. Now between the coronation of Henry IV and that of Louis XIV the monarchy of France perfectly expresses all that is positive and, therefore, historically constructive in the life of the country. Its spiritual and practical forces meet in the king’s person and receive thereby their historical realisation. “_L’Etat c’est moi_,” says Louis XIV. “_Cogito ergo sum_,” says Descartes. The self-assertion of the king identifying the whole of political reality with his empirical person is not without affinity with the import of the Cartesian assumption in which the criterion of certitude, the root of all reality, was identified with the individual act of thinking. The self-assertion spontaneously coming on the lips of the Sovereign and that coming out of the meditation of the philosopher is one and the same thing. It is the consequence of sixteen centuries of Christianity, and in their mathematical conciseness the two formulas are the best proclamation of the genius of France in all its clear, simple and luminous logic. They are, however, at the same time a revelation of what is weak in that genius. To be so clear, so luminous and so simple, French philosophy was bound to be abstract and radical. The radicalness of mind common to the Jacobins and to the more modern anti-clericals and democrats caused the elimination of the feudal class as a factor in political life, a fact which was bound to carry in its trail the political revolution of the eighteenth and the economic one of the nineteenth century. When a government reduces a class to political non-existence the part formerly discharged by that class must be entrusted to another, which is bound to claim in exchange for the support offered to the government in the struggle against the class displaced the privileges previously granted to its rival for services rendered to the state.