Croce e la Francia

The article deals with the relationship between Croce and French culture. It discusses the thesis on the main modern philosophical line, the Cartesian one, in comparison with the Vichian one; the historiographic judgments on the French Revolution and on the following revolutions in nineteenth-century France; the positions taken by Croce towards the Enlightenment and some philosophers such as Rousseau and Bergson, politicians such as Sorel and writers such as Corneille, Flaubert, Baudelaire. The interpretation sustained here is that Croce’s confrontation with French culture, although not comparable to that with German culture, is dense with implications that are reflected in the overall identity of Croce’s philosophy.