ABSTRACT
The spread of Gartesianism into European culture from Holland and France in the last third of the seventeenth century occasioned everywhere a deep and acrimonious crisis, placing the protagonists of the mechanical philosophy at loggerheads with the guardians of the old order. In France Cartesianism spread through literary salons and in certain religious orders, the university and the state being violently opposed to it. Whereas in Holland it was propagated from the start in the universities (though not without considerable internal resistance),1 only towards the end of the seventeenth century was Cartesian philosophy taught at the University of Paris and then with theological reservations concerning Descartes' assimilation of space and matter.2
