Montesquieu

For more information on Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, visit Britannica.com.

View more Literature & Language videos

The French jurist, satirist, and political and social philosopher Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), was the first of the great French men of letters associated with the Enlightenment.

In order to understand the Baron de Montesquieu, one must look back to the age of Louis XIV. During his long reign, Louis XIV had attempted to assert the absolute authority of the Crown over all aspects of French life and to make France supreme in Europe. Although the Grand Monarch achieved success in many of his endeavors, both his attempt to impose cultural and religious unity and his unsuccessful wars provoked sharp reactions that continued throughout the 18th century. It is within this milieu that Montesquieu must be understood.

Charles Louis de Secondat was born on Jan. 18, 1689, at the castle of La Brède near Bordeaux. His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble ancestry, and his mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles Louis was 7, was an heiress who eventually brought the barony of La Brède to the Secondat family. As was customary, the young Montesquieu spent the early years of his life among the peasants in the village of La Brède. The influence of this period remained with Charles Louis, showing itself in his deep attachment to the soil and in his rustic Gascon accent.

In 1700 Charles Louis was sent to the Oratorian Collège de Juilly, at Meaux, where he received a progressive education. Returning to Bordeaux in 1705 to study law, he was admitted to practice before the Bordeaux Parlement in 1708. The next 5 years were spent in Paris, continuing his studies. During this period he developed an intense dislike for the style of life of the capital, which he later expressed in his Persian Letters. In 1715 he married Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, who brought him a large dowry. He was also elected to the Academy of Bordeaux. The following year, on the death of his uncle, Jean Baptiste, he inherited the barony of Montesquieu and the presidency of the Bordeaux Parlement.

Scholarly and Literary Career

Montesquieu had no great enthusiasm for law as a profession. He was much more interested in the spirit that lay behind law, that is, the meaning, development, and variations of established laws and their relationship to customs and history. It is from this interest that his greatest work, The Spirit of the Laws, developed. To free himself in order to continue his scholarly interests, Montesquieu took little concern in the routine of the Bordeaux Parlement and eventually sold his office as president in 1721.

Montesquieu's early works were concerned with what would now be termed biological investigations. From these studies emerged Montesquieu's interest in the effect of environment on men. During this same period Montesquieu devoted a good deal of time to reading highly popular travel literature, including the newly translated Arabian Nights and Morana's Spy of the Great Mogul in the Courts of the Christian Prince. The combination of this reading and Montesquieu's own critical attitude toward contemporary manners led him to write the first of his great works, The Persian Letters.

The Persian Letters (1721) sparkled with wit and satirical irony, but hidden beneath its deft irreverence was a fierce and bitingly critical view of European civilization and manners. The work takes the form of letters to families and friends at home from three Persians traveling in Europe. Their letters are commentaries on what they see in the West. Montesquieu endowed his travelers with the foreign, commonsense understanding necessary to effectively criticize European (French) customs and institutions, yet he also gave to his Persians the foibles and weaknesses necessary to make his readers recognize in them their own weaknesses. All facets of European life were criticized. Louis XIV was "a great magician"; the Pope "an old idol worshiped out of habit"; great nobles achieved their status by sitting on chairs and possessing ancestors, debts, and pensions. Beneath the wit was the message that society endures only on the basis of virtue and justice, which is rooted in the necessity of human cooperation and tolerance.

Although the Letters was published anonymously, it was quickly recognized as the work of Montesquieu and won for him the acclaim of the public and the displeasure of the regent, Cardinal André Fleury, who held up Montesquieu's induction into the French Academy until 1728. In the same year Montesquieu began the first of his extensive tours of Europe, which brought him from Italy to Holland to England (in the last country he was elected to the Royal Society). After his return to Bordeaux in 1731, Montesquieu began his study of the history of Rome. By 1734 he had finished his Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur of Rome and Its Decline. Though less well received than The Persian Letters - Voltaire referred to it as less a book than an ingenious table of contents - the work was less a history than an attempt to get behind history to the general secular causes of events.

According to Montesquieu, Rome achieved greatness because of the martial virtues of its citizens and the flexibility of its institutions, which could be modified to correct political and social abuses. Rome's failure to maintain these characteristics once it acquired an empire marked the beginning of its decline. The development of imperial despotism, epicurean tastes, and the rejection of commerce only hastened the decline of Roman grandeur. Montesquieu's history may not have been scientific in the modern sense, but despite the criticism leveled against it, it was his search for general causal factors that helped to lay the basis for the secularization of historical studies.

The Spirit of the Laws

Fourteen years after his study of Rome, Montesquieu brought his search for the general laws active in society and history to its completion in his greatest work. Published in 1748, The Spirit of the Laws was not an analysis of law but an investigation of the environmental and social relationships that lie behind the laws of civilized society. Combining the traditions of customary law with those of the modern theories of natural law, Montesquieu redefined law as "the necessary relationships which derive from the nature of things." Laws, and their most basic political expression, government, thus became a relative relationship between a people's physical environment and their social needs and traditions. Although the basic substance of laws - "reason in action" - remained generally the same under all circumstances, their concrete expression varies according to time and place. Laws "must be adapted to each peoples."

Montesquieu's work was an attempt to study the process of adaptation. Thus, the diversity of laws was viewed as natural and desirable. The best legislator was one who pragmatically adjusted law to the physical and social conditions confronting him. Within this framework Montesquieu defined the basic types of government, identified the dominant virtues associated with each, and stated his most widely known concept of the balance of powers as the best means of establishing and preserving liberty.

An aspect of The Spirit of the Laws that has often been overlooked by its commentators is its role in the controversy over the legal rights of the autonomous groups in France following the death of Louis XIV. The last five books are an analysis of medieval French history, designed to prove that, to protect the liberties of the nation and the inviolability of the law, autonomous judicial bodies - the parlements of France - possessed independent or "intermediary" powers to thwart the natural despotic tendencies of an absolute monarchy. This aspect of the work helped to lay the basis of the 18th-century movement for constitutionalism, which culminated in the Revolution of 1789. In this sense, Montesquieu's most fundamental thesis may be viewed as an attempt to indicate the necessity of judicial review. The Spirit of the Laws was immediately acclaimed as one of the great works of French literature.

Following the completion of his work, Montesquieu, who was going blind, went into semiretirement at La Brède. He died on Feb. 10, 1755, during a trip to Paris.

Further Reading

The best biography is Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (1961). Montesquieu's thought is discussed in Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951); John P. Plamenatz, Man and Society: Political and Social Theory, vol. 2 (1963); and W. G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory (1963).

(1689-1755) French political philosopher, historian, and novelist, often seen as one of the founders of sociology. As feudal landowner, magistrate, and president of the Parlement of Bordeaux, he was a complete member of the ancien régime establishment, but his extreme relativism cast doubt on all absolutes, not only the doctrines of the Church but even those of the French Enlightenment to which he belonged.

Montesquieu saw human beings as fundamentally insecure. They have neither the certainty of instinct without any capacity for choice as have other animals, nor the certainty of perfect knowledge as has God. Individuals must accept the influence of their environment—perhaps Montesquieu's best known idea is the effect of climate—but as societies develop, more choices can be made although human beings must always use their limited reason with care.

In his best political work, L'Esprit des lois (usually translated as The spirit of the laws, 1748), Montesquieu divided political systems between despotism based on fear, republics based on virtue, and monarchies based on honour. Despotism is unnatural, whereas other political systems are natural. Which should be adopted depends upon particular circumstances.

In the modern world, Montesquieu preferred monarchy. One ideal form was the pre-modern French system, with the Church, the military aristocracy, and the legal aristocracy as three groups able to restrain the monarch and each other because of their independent moral or social positions. The other was the English system, which added the new commercial spirit to the monarchical principle of honour. This permitted the development of liberty in its modern form, as a sphere of life for each individual free from collective interference, as opposed to the ancient form, typical of the republic, which involved the direct exercise of power through participation by the citizen class, but excluded modern liberty.

Montesquieu argued that English government, unlike French, was characterized by a working separation of powers. Whether or not this was true, it deeply influenced the framers of the US Constitution.

— Carl Slevin

Montesquieu, Charlesde Secondat, baron de (1689-1755). Political philosopher, historian, and novelist, remembered above all for his magnum opus, De l'esprit des lois, but also highly regarded as a master of French prose.

Montesquieu was a member of the military and legal nobility of the Bordeaux region. His rank was important to him; indeed, much of his political writing is devoted to a defence of the privileges and functions of his caste. Born at the Château de la Brède, in a prosperous wine-growing region, he was educated at the Oratorian college of Juilly and at the law faculties of Bordeaux and Paris. In 1715 he married Jeanne Lartigue, a rich Protestant, who subsequently looked after the estate and the family during her husband's frequent and prolonged absences. In 1716 he inherited a fortune, together with the office of président à mortier in the Parlement de Bordeaux—he exercised his legal functions until resigning in 1725 to devote himself to travel, study, and writing.

As a young lawyer in Bordeaux he was an assiduous member of the local academy, writing numerous papers for it. Some are devoted to moral or political topics, but many are on scientific subjects, and it was in a scientific spirit that he later studied law, politics, and society. His first major publication was the Lettres persanes (1721), the success of which made him a fashionable figure in Paris. Between 1722 and 1728 he frequented various Paris salons, and in particular the Club de l'Entresol, where politics was high on the agenda; for admission, he wrote a Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate, a critique of tyranny and heroic individualism, and one of a number of pieces in which a Roman subject allows him to discuss general political issues. At about the same time he composed essays on such topics as natural law and moral obligation. His involvement in fashionable society is reflected in some lightweight but sometimes subtle fictional writings: Le Temple de Gnide (1725) is a rather wearisome pseudo-Greek pastoral whose aim is to give ‘une peinture poétique de la volupté’; the Voyage de Paphos (1727) is similar. In 1727, against the opposition of the prime minister Fleury, Montesquieu was elected to the Académie Française.

The years 1728 to 1731 were devoted to European travel, taking in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland, and culminating with a two-year stay in England, which greatly influenced his political views. He was a keen observer: his travel journals, particularly those written in Italy, show a powerful desire to document all aspects of the places he visited. These writings were an essential preparation for his master-work De l'esprit des lois, to which he devoted himself whole-heartedly on his return to France. He divided his time between La Brède and Paris, reading voraciously and taking copious notes (some of which were subsequently published under the titles Geographica and Spicilège).

The first fruit of his studies was the Considérationssur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734). At about this time he also wrote further short works of fiction, the most interesting being the posthumously published Histoire véritable, a picaresque tale of metempsychosis, covering many lands and many centuries, in which he exploited the satirical vein of the Lettres persanes. In 1748, after years of assiduous work that more or less cost him his sight, he published De l'esprit des lois. The work was controversial; it was attacked by Jesuits and Jansenists alike, and in 1750 Montesquieu published a Défense de l'Esprit des lois. In 1752 it was placed on the Index. In the last years of his life he was a revered figure among the younger philosophes. His last work, the Essai sur le goût, figures as the article ‘Goût’ in the Encyclopédie, and D'Alembert's Éloge de Montesquieu was placed at the head of vol. 5 of that work. Diderot is said to have been the only man of letters at his funeral.

Montesquieu seems to have been at home in the world, where he occupied a privileged place. Although many of his writings are bitterly critical of his society and the way it was developing, his writing is never tragic. In religious matters he avoided controversy, but was apparently a deist rather than a convinced Christian. The richly interesting collection of jottings known as Mes pensées, which contains the first draft of many thoughts that were developed in his published works, also offers a self-portrait, in which he speaks of his naturally happy disposition: ‘Je m'éveille le matin avec une joie secrète; je vois la lumière avec une espèce de ravissement. Tout le jour je suis content.’

His influence on following generations was immense; he has been variously called the father of liberalism, the father of constitutions, and the founder of social science. His conservative attachment to the stability of the existing hierarchy was married to a desire for moderate reform. In many ways, he was the archetypal champion of Enlightenment, his aspiration being towards unblinkered clarity of vision and understanding. This meant getting outside himself—the Lettres persanes is made of many voices, and stresses the relativity of cultural values. His stance as a writer is customarily one of detached curiosity; in De l'esprit des lois this all-accepting scrutiny of the way things are plays fascinatingly against his committed view as to how they should be.

His manner of writing conveys all of this wonderfully well. It is generally reasonable, and sometimes eloquent in a traditional way, but its hallmark is a cool brevity, often witty, and capable of delivering a sharp shock. Later writers such as Flaubert, and particularly Stendhal, greatly admired the ‘style coupé’ of passages such as this, from the Considérations: ‘quelques soldats entrèrent dans le palais, pour piller: ils trouvèrent, dans un lieu obscur, un homme tremblant de peur; c'était Claude: ils le saluèrent empereur.’

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• J. Starobinski, Montesquieu par lui-même (1951)
• R. Shackleton, Montesquieu (1961)
• J. Shklar, Montesquieu (1987)

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de (1689-1755) Born in Bordeaux as a member of the aristocracy, Montesquieu acquired an intense admiration of the English revolution of 1688, and the associated ideals, voiced particularly in Locke, of toleration, freedom, and government by constitution. In his version, however, this means a strengthening of the ancient privileges of the aristocracy against the encroaching power of the French monarchy. Montesquieu's own life, which included marriage apparently for a fortune, social climbing, and a rather unaristocratic avarice, somewhat reflects the self-serving appearance of this doctrine. His masterpiece, De l'esprit des lois (1748, trs. as On the Spirit of the Laws), introduced a positivist note into the discussion of the laws of nations, hitherto the provenance of various kinds of theological and rationalistic deductions. Montesquieu relates the system of law of different countries to external accidents, such as those of geography and trade; for this he was hailed by Durkheim as a founder of modern sociology (although similar connections had been made by Jean Bodin, 1530-96). In religious matters Montesquieu maintained a vague and tolerant deism, but his alleged deathbed conversion to Catholicism, attested by an opportunistic Irish Jesuit, was widely publicized.

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de (shärl lwē də səkôNdä' bärôN' də lä brĕd ā də môNtĕskyü'), 1689-1755, French jurist and political philosopher. He was councillor (1714) of the parlement of Bordeaux and its president (1716-28) after the death of an uncle, whom he succeeded in both title and office. He gained a seat in the French Academy in 1728. His Persian Letters (1721) brought him immediate fame. In these letters, supposedly written by Persian travelers in Europe and by their friends, he satirized and criticized French insititutions. In 1734 he produced a scientific historical study of the rise and fall of Rome, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. His greatest work, The Spirit of Laws (1748), is a comparative study of three types of government-republic, monarchy, and despotism-and shows John Locke's influence on Montesquieu. Its main theories are that climate and circumstances determine the form of governments and that the powers of government should be separated and balanced in order to guarantee the freedom of the individual. Written with brilliance of style, it had great historical importance and influenced the formation of the American Constitution.

Bibliography

See biography by R. Shackleton (1961); studies by J. R. Loy (1968), M. Hulliung (1977), and T. L. Pangle (1989).

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat De (1689–1755), parlementary judge, historian, and political philosopher. Montesquieu was born on 18 January 1689 at La Brède, near Bordeaux. His earliest education was with a local schoolmaster; in 1700 he was sent to an Oratorian institution near Paris emphasizing the classics. Between 1705 and 1708 he studied law at the University of Bordeaux, receiving a license in law and becoming an advocate at the Parlement of Bordeaux. From 1709 until 1713 he resided in Paris, attending meetings of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Inscriptions, compiling notebooks on Roman law, and becoming acquainted with such luminaries as Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and Nicolas Fréret.

Following the death of his father in 1713, he returned to La Brède to take charge of the family estates. In 1715 he married Jeanne de Lartigue, a wealthy Huguenot from a nearby village who bore him a son and two daughters and ably managed his estates during his many trips to Paris. In 1716 he inherited from his uncle the office of président à mortier (deputy president) in the Parlement of Bordeaux. For ten years he served in the Chambre de la Tournelle, the criminal section of this regional court, prior to selling his office in 1726 to procure more time for his literary and philosophical pursuits.

Early Writings and Travels

From an early age Montesquieu displayed the interests of a polymath. In addition to numerous youthful scientific papers, his early writings included essays on Cicero's politics and philosophy, on the problem of the French national debt, on political uses of religion in ancient Rome, on the obligations of citizenship and morality, on the decline of Spanish wealth, and on the respective roles of chance and determinism in the unfolding of history. His first published work, Lettres persanes (1721; Persian letters), was a brilliant excursion into comparative politics, juxtaposing the laws and customs of Islamic and Christian societies. Considered by many the point of origin of the French Enlightenment, this early work presented satirical portraits of French and Persian manners, customs, and religion amidst significant philosophical observations on such diverse subjects as justice, divorce, slavery, despotism, punishment, demography, English liberty, religious liberty, and principles of government.

In 1728 Montesquieu embarked on a lengthy tour of Europe and England. Prior to his departure, he had been favorably disposed toward republics. After reacting negatively to the aristocratic republics of Italy and Holland, however, and after observing English politics for eighteen months, he returned to France in 1731 with renewed appreciation for the potential for achieving liberty in properly structured monarchies, whether based on a combination of monarchical and republican elements, as in the English system, or, as in France, constructed on feudal components and with intermediary and corporate bodies whose presence moderates absolutism.

Roman History

In 1734 Montesquieu published a philosophical account of the causes of Roman greatness and decline, replacing Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's (1627–1704) providential explanation of an ordered concatenation of events with a secular philosophy of history stressing underlying general causes that produced predictable patterns. Montesquieu was critical of the Romans for employing a combination of force and fraud to achieve their goals, and his account of Rome can be read as an attack on Machiavellian tactics in both domestic and international contexts—thus setting the scene for his later pronouncement in Book XXI, chapter 20 of De l'esprit des lois (1748; The spirit of the laws) that Machiavellianism was waning, since bold strokes of political authority interfere with the economic interests on which power is based. Although he did not find Roman history on the whole an edifying spectacle, Montesquieu drew many lessons from it, including the importance of a balance of powers, the contributions of party conflict to political liberty, the benefits of strengthening patriotism with religious sentiment, and the connection between democracy and small republics that avoid imperial conquest.

The Spirit of the Laws

Montesquieu's reputation hinges most substantially on The Spirit of the Laws. As Émile Durkheim and Raymond Aron have emphasized, Montesquieu's viewpoint contributed to an emerging social science perspective exploring the interconnection between all of the complex variables that shape laws, customs, religion, manners, and mentalities. While he by no means discarded the natural law perspective, which stressed an ordered universe, subject to laws embodying transcendent standards of justice, Montesquieu nonetheless introduced sociological perspectives into the study of positive laws. His stress on the influence on human development of laws, customs, religion, education, maxims of government, and modes of subsistence, combined with his interest in such physical influences as climate and topography, inaugurated a new epoch in the study of society from anthropological and climatological perspectives and influenced numerous later theorists.

The Spirit of the Laws also contributed to recurring disputes regarding France's ancient constitution. For centuries theorists had debated the historical lineage of the respective components of the French constitution, with the legitimacy of absolutism hanging in the balance. The key question was whether the early Frankish monarchy had been absolute—having peacefully inherited the Roman Empire—or whether, following an early Frankish conquest of Gaul, the Frankish kings beginning with Clovis had been elected by noblemen, who kept a close watch on the exercise of monarchical powers. François Hotman contended in his Franco-gallia (1573) that the French monarchy had always been elective and restrained by a powerful aristocracy. Numerous absolutist theorists of the same century, however, including Jean Ferrault, Charles Du Moulin, and Charles de Grassaille, contended that both the parlements and the Estates-General of France represented illegitimate constraints on an originally absolutist monarchy.

Montesquieu supported the Germanic nobiliary thesis rather than the Roman royalist thesis concerning the origins of the French monarchy. Unlike Hotman and other proponents of a revived Estates-General, however, he believed that the Parlement of Paris functioned as the key bridle on absolutism through its right to register the king's edicts before they became law. His arguments in The Spirit of the Laws provided support for the parlementaires during their numerous clashes with Louis XV (ruled 1715–1774) and Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1793) in the decades leading up to the French Revolution—until both the parlements and the crown were extinguished during a period of intense republican fervor.

Montesquieu's Legacy

The Spirit of the Laws was the most authoritative political treatise of its day. Montesquieu altered the language of politics by replacing the ancient political classification distinguishing between governments of the one, the few, and the many with a new typology contrasting moderate and despotic forms of government and identifying republics, monarchies, and despotisms as the main types. Moreover, his selection of political virtue (defined as self-sacrificing, patriotic attachment to the needs of one's country) as the principle of republican government reverberated through both American and French political developments of the late eighteenth century. In America "virtue" was extolled by nearly all the patriots opposing a monarchy they considered corrupt, whereas in France Maximilien Robespierre adopted Montesquieu's language of virtue only to debase it by linking patriotic self-sacrifice with terror, claiming that both are necessary when forging a republic during revolutionary times.

Montesquieu bestowed lavish attention on republics within his governmental typology, but he was no republican by conviction—and certainly no democrat. He had a low opinion of the political abilities of the masses. Moreover, he considered democracy suited only to the extremely small city-states of classical antiquity. Like James Madison in America, he formed a negative opinion of the unstable democratic states of Greek antiquity, whose tendency to produce unmanageable factional strife had often led to the rise of dictators who could quell disturbances. Only monarchical constitutions, Montesquieu concluded, were well suited for governance of the large states of the modern world.

The Spirit of the Laws contributed significantly to the humanitarian legacy of the Enlightenment since Montesquieu employed devastating satire to ridicule such evils as slavery, disproportionate punishments, religious intolerance, and despotism. Above all, Montesquieu is remembered as a defender of political and civil liberty. Central to that goal, he concluded, is the division of governmental powers between executive, legislative, and judicial authorities to ensure that no one individual or group monopolizes power. Also central to the achievement of liberty is the presence of an independent judiciary enforcing a criminal code that punishes only offenses that threaten actual harm to others.

Montesquieu remained a hero to advocates of constitutional monarchy during the early phases of the French Revolution, but he lost favor as radical elements turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for inspiration. The depiction of the English government in Book XI, chapter 6 of The Spirit of the Laws as a mixed constitution combining monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements became the classic view taken over by William Blackstone in his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769). In America the framers of the constitution were so enamored of Montesquieu's depiction of the need to separate executive, legislative, and judicial powers that they made him the most quoted author during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and divided the American government into three separate branches, each one empowered to check the others. Following the collapse of Communism in the late twentieth century and the French reassessment of the terror phase of their Revolution during the bicentennial of 1989, Europeans have shown a renewed interest in the liberal constitutionalism of Montesquieu, whose work stands as a timeless contribution to our understanding of political and civil liberty.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de. Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. Translated by David Lowenthal. New York, 1965. Translation of Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734).

——. The Persian Letters. Translated and edited by George R. Healy. Indianapolis, 1964. Translation of Lettres persanes (1721).

——. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. New York, 1989. Translation of De l'esprit des lois (1748).

Secondary Sources

Aron, Raymond. Main Currents in Sociological Thought. Translated by Richard Howard and Helen Weaver. 2 vols. New York, 1965.

Carrithers, David W., Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe, eds. Montesquieu's Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of Laws. Lanham, Md., 2001.

Carrithers, David W., and Patrick Coleman, eds. Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity. Oxford, 2002.

Courtney, C. P. Montesquieu and Burke. Oxford, 1963.

Durkheim, Émile. Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1965.

Ford, Franklin L. Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV. Cambridge, Mass., 1953.

Krause, Sharon R. Liberalism with Honor. Cambridge, Mass., 2002.

Pangle, Thomas L. Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws. Chicago, 1973.

Shackleton, Robert. Montesquieu: A Critical Biography. Oxford, 1961.

Shklar, Judith N. Montesquieu. Oxford and New York, 1987.

Waddicor, Mark H. Montesquieu and the Philosophy of Natural Law. The Hague, 1970.

—DAVID W. CARRITHERS

baron de la Brède et de Charles-Louis de Secondat

Montesquieu was born January 18, 1689, in La Br;agede, France, just outside of Bordeaux, to an aristocratic family with considerable landholdings. As a young man, he studied Latin, French, history, and the law before graduating from the University of Bordeaux in 1708. In 1715 he married Jeanne Lartigue, whose family brought him substantial wealth, and a year later his uncle died and left him his title and his property, making Montesquieu extremely rich. While his wife remained in La Br;agede managing his estate, Montesquieu traveled and enjoyed the social and intellectual life of Paris, attending fashionable salons and meeting with leading thinkers in the areas of politics and literature. He also served as president á mortier, or justice, of the Bordeaux parlement, an office he inherited from his uncle.

In 1728 Montesquieu left Paris for a three-year trip through Europe. Montesquieu closely examined the people and cultures of the countries he visited, paying particular attention to England, where he was intrigued by the level of political and religious freedom the people there enjoyed, as well as the country's bustling mercantile economy. He remained in England for eighteen months. During this time he was introduced into the most prestigious intellectual and social circles, was admitted to court, was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and attended several sessions of Parliament. Montesquieu's experience in England was critical in shaping his political philosophies because it proved to him that a society could combine the rule of law with political freedom.

After returning home in May 1731, Montesquieu spent the next fifteen years working on his masterpiece, De l'Esprit des lois (literally On the Spirit of the Laws, but usually translated as The Spirit of the Laws). In this immense and loosely connected work, containing more than six hundred chapters grouped into thirty-one books, Montesquieu combined a lifetime of thoughts and personal observations concerning governments, laws, and human nature. His topics ranged from detailed analyses of ancient history to the effects of climate on national character. By closely examining a wide variety of societies through time and across cultures, Montesquieu sought to identify the basic principles underlying how laws work, how they evolve, and how they differ from country to country and culture to culture.

The Spirit of the Laws was published in 1748 in Geneva. It was a huge and immediate success; by the end of 1749, twenty-two other editions, including many translations, had reached all over Europe and across the ocean to the North American colonies. The work also generated considerable controversy, particularly with church authorities. They objected to Montesquieu's intellectual approach, which was grounded in the then radical notion that laws were not divinely inspired or handed down by ancient lawgivers such as Moses but evolved naturally out of everything that influences life in a country, including traditions, habits, history, religion, economics, and climate. Laws, Montesquieu believed, could be rationally studied and then adjusted to increase liberty for all. He responded to criticisms of his work in 1750 with Defense de l'Esprit des lois, but the Catholic Church nevertheless put The Spirit of the Laws on the church's Index in 1751, which meant that Catholics were forbidden to read it. Despite this official censure, Montesquieu was named director of the Academie Française in 1753.

On January 29, 1755, Montesquieu became ill with what appears to have been influenza, and his health quickly deteriorated. His sickness generated much attention; many people viewed it as symbolic of the great conflict between established religion and the forces of reason and enlightenment that marked the eighteenth century. During his illness Montesquieu's house was filled with friends monitoring his condition, including messengers from the king. Montesquieu died on February 10, 1755, and was buried in the parish church of Saint-Sulpice.

As was the case in Europe, Montesquieu was a leading intellectual figure in the American colonies, and The Spirit of the Laws was a standard subject of close study for young American scholars. Figures show that Montesquieu's works, particularly The Spirit of the Laws, were widely disseminated through American booksellers and libraries, and Montesquieu's ideas were frequently discussed in newspapers and journals. Montesquieu's works were found in the personal libraries of nearly all of the country's founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Different elements of the theories Montesquieu outlined in The Spirit of the Laws were popular in America at different times, varying with political conditions and developments. In general, however, the most influential portions of the work were chapters 3 and 6 of book XI, in which Montesquieu analyzed the English constitution, a discussion that heavily influenced the separation of powers later enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. In his analysis Montesquieu outlined the basic principle of the English constitution, which was—and still is—not an actual document but an unwritten consensus regarding the proper rules of governing based on such historical documents as the Magna Charta, the body of common law, court decisions, precedents, and tradition.

According to Montesquieu, although England did not have the perfect system of government, it was the best system to be found in modern Europe because it allowed for the greatest degree of liberty, which Montesquieu defined as the right "to do what one should want to do, and not being forced to do what one should not want to do." For Montesquieu, liberty was, essentially, the right to be left alone.

This type of liberty, Montesquieu argued, was only possible under a government specifically constituted to protect citizens from the oppression of their rulers and the aggressions of each other, while allowing for the representation of a wide range of popular interests. For citizens to maintain their liberty against the encroachment of oppressive rulers, a government had to be composed of separate and balanced powers that would check and moderate each other, thus leaving the people a maximum degree of freedom under the laws.

To Montesquieu, England most closely approximated this model because its government divided the three main functions of government—the legislative, the executive, and the judicial—into three separate branches: the Parliament, the monarch, and the courts. The powers of these branches were so intertwined that the branches needed each other to operate and also served to moderate each other's actions. For example, the king or queen could veto parliamentary legislation, but the monarch's actions were limited by Parliament's power of the purse. Because no single branch was able to dominate the other branches or the populace at large, the people were left with a large degree of political freedom. Because the branches had to operate together, their forces counterbalanced each other and resulted in a guarantee of freedom and a bulwark against political tyranny. Although Montesquieu did not present the English system as the perfect model for democratic government, he did praise it for being the only government in modern Europe constituted for the specific purpose of maximizing political liberty.

Montesquieu's description of the basic principles of the English constitution and his emphasis on political liberty held great appeal for the English colonists in North America, particularly beginning in the 1760s when those colonists were chafing under taxes and restrictions imposed by Parliament that they thought undermined their constitutional rights. Montesquieu was frequently quoted in newspapers, pamphlets, and speeches as colonists protested the oppressive powers of Parliament and defended their right to political liberty. His description of the English constitution became a model against which the colonists contrasted what they saw as the injustice and corruption of the actual English government.

After the Revolutionary War ended, Montesquieu again became a principal authority as political leaders set about to create a constitution for the new United States of America. Most of the architects of the Constitution were thoroughly acquainted with Montesquieu's ideas, and at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, The Spirit of the Laws was frequently cited as delegates attempted to lay down the principles for a government that would maximize political liberty while also maintaining the rule of law. The Framers followed many of Montesquieu's maxims, including his insistence upon a separation of powers and his belief that a country's laws must not be imposed from above but conform to the genius, or nature, of the citizens of that country.

Montesquieu's arguments were also used in the debates over the ratification of the Constitution that followed the Constitutional Convention. He was cited with particular frequency in The Federalist Papers, which were written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to argue in favor of the new Constitution. The writers cited Montesquieu at length in defense of the wisdom of confederating the states into a single republic and of creating a government based upon a separation of powers. Although other scholars had also written on the separation of powers principle, Montesquieu was most closely associated with it, as James Madison noted in The Federalist, no.47: "The oracle who is always consulted and cited on this subject, is the celebrated Montesquieu. If he be not the author of this invaluable precept in the science of politics, he has the merit at least of displaying and recommending it most effectually to the attention of mankind." Montesquieu's arguments were also frequently used in the debates over the Constitution at the individual state conventions. Both proponents and opponents of the new Constitution respected him as a political authority, and both used his writings to bolster their arguments.

After the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, Montesquieu continued to remain an authority on the creation of laws and the rule of government. The Spirit of the Laws continued to be taught at colleges and universities, and leaders of both political parties, the Republicans and the Federalists, used his arguments to advance their own. Montesquieu's only significant detractor was Thomas Jefferson, who believed, along with friends involved in the impending revolution in France, that Montesquieu was too enamored with England and its constitution. After the French Revolution and the radical changes it wrought, Montesquieu's writings came to seem dated and less relevant, and they gradually faded from the political debates. Even so, his work continues to exert a lasting influence on the laws of the United States through the Constitution that was so significantly shaped by his ideas.

Quotes:

"Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half."

"There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window."

"Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free."

"Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones."

"If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides."

"It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires."

See more famous quotes by Charles De Montesquieu

See words rhyming with "Montesquieu."