England´s path to democracy was marked by Cromwell´s failed efforts to abolish the Monarchy but that, instead, instituted the Commonwealth. This, coupled with the scientific and later the empirical ideas and philosophies that arouse in what is now known as Great Britain, molded the political landscape of England around the figure of the King and the Parliament, in a pragmatic synthesis that took centuries to develop in relative peace. France, unlike England, went through a successful bourgeois revolution that abruptly eliminated the figure of the King altogether and instituted by force and terror, but also, by need, the rule of the people devoid of any transcendental figure like a King —and there lies the importance of the rationalist philosophies, very much unlike England´s empirical and pragmatic tradition, that centered around France with figures such as Descartes and later the Encyclopedists.
