ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with certain aspects of the process of change taking place in seventeenth-century France. It focuses on the fifty or sixty years in the middle of the seventeenth century because they mark most clearly the transformation from a world rooted in the ways of thought of scholasticism to a world that already displays the critical attitudes of the Enlightenment. The book examines the ethical and ideological patterns of the years up to 1648 and the ways in which Le Grand Conde; was identified with them. It explains the period of the Fronde and Condes rebellion, showing that a major factor in the immediate political conflict was the underlying and sometimes only dimly appreciated differences in the concept of human nature and its associated values.
