In France the effective vitality of the democracy has been very much lowered by certain flaws in the integrity of French national life.

France is strong where England is weak and is weak where England is strong; and this divergence of development is by no means accidental.
Just because they were the first countries to become effectively nationalized, their action and reaction have been constant and have served at once to develop and distinguish their national temperaments.
The English invasions accelerated the growth of the French royal power and weakened domestic resistance to its ambitions.

The English revolutions of the seventeenth century made the Bourbons more than ever determined to consolidate the royal despotism and to stamp out Protestantism.

The excesses of the French royal despotism brought as a consequence the excesses of the Revolutionary democracy.

The Reign of Terror in its turn made Englishmen more than ever suspicious of the application of rational political ideas to the fabric of English society.