Montesquieu

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a French magistrate, man of letters and political philosopher of the early Enlightenment (The Enlightenment). His satirical novel Persian Letters (1721), in which two Persian travellers describe Paris to their friends at home, mocked French society, religion and absolutism through the eyes of outsiders. His masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois, 1748), the product of twenty years’ work, sought to explain the laws and institutions of all nations by their relation to forms of government, climate, geography, religion, commerce and customs, founding a comparative science of society. Its account of the English constitution — that liberty is preserved by the separation of powers, legislative, executive and judicial, so that “power checks power” — became a cornerstone of modern constitutionalism, quoted by the authors of the Federalist Papers and embodied in the Constitution of the United States.

Life

Montesquieu was born on 18 January 1689 at the Château de La Brède, near Bordeaux, into a family of the noblesse de robe, the judicial nobility. At his baptism a beggar served as godfather, so that he might always remember his duty to the poor. He studied law at Bordeaux and in Paris, married a wealthy Protestant, Jeanne de Lartigue, and in 1716 inherited from his uncle both the title of baron de Montesquieu and the office of président à mortier in the Parlement of Bordeaux, the regional high court. He was active in the Bordeaux Academy, reading papers on physics, physiology and natural history.

The anonymous Persian Letters (1721) made him famous in Paris; he frequented the salons and was elected to the Académie française in 1728. In 1726 he sold his judicial office, and from 1728 to 1731 travelled through Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and England, where he spent nearly two years, attended debates in Parliament, read the political press, became a Freemason and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Back at La Brède, he wrote Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734) and then laboured on The Spirit of the Laws, published in Geneva in 1748. Nearly blind in his last years, he died in Paris on 10 February 1755.

Persian Letters

The Persian Letters consists of 161 letters exchanged between Usbek and Rica, two Persians travelling in France from 1711 to 1720, and their friends, wives and eunuchs in Usbek’s harem at Isfahan. Through their naïve but penetrating eyes, Montesquieu satirises the French court, the absolute power of Louis XIV (“a great magician” who makes people believe paper is money), the pope (“another magician” who makes people believe three are one), the Jesuits, fashion, the salons, academics and duellists. A Parisian asks Rica, astonished, “But how can one be Persian?” (Comment peut-on être Persan?). The letters also contain a parable of the Troglodytes, a people who destroy themselves through selfishness and then flourish through virtue — and grow weary of it, choosing a king.

Meanwhile, at home, Usbek’s harem, ruled by his eunuchs in his absence, falls into revolt. The novel ends with the suicide of his favourite wife, Roxana, who writes to him: “How could you think I was so credulous as to imagine I was in the world only to adore your caprices?… I have reformed your laws by those of nature.” The despot who reasons enlightenedly about France is himself a tyrant at home — a lesson about despotism, and about the condition of women.

The Spirit of the Laws

The great treatise begins: “Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things.” Every being has its laws — God, the material world, animals, human beings. Human laws are not arbitrary; they should be “adapted in such a manner to the people for whom they are framed that it is a great chance if those of one nation suit another”. The spirit of the laws is their relation to all the conditions of a people: its form of government, its climate, soil and size, its way of life (farmers, hunters, shepherds), its degree of liberty, its religion, its wealth, numbers, commerce, manners and customs.

Three forms of government. Montesquieu distinguished three types, each with its nature (who holds power) and its principle (the passion that makes it work):

• Republics (democratic or aristocratic), in which the people, or part of them, hold power; their principle is virtue — love of the republic and of equality.
• Monarchies, in which one person governs by fixed laws, through intermediate powers (nobility, clergy, parlements); their principle is honour — the ambition of each rank for distinction.
• Despotisms, in which one person governs by his own will and caprice, without law; their principle is fear.

Each form requires its own laws on education, luxury, punishment and the status of women. Despotism — which he associated, with much prejudice, with Asia, and feared in France — is the great enemy.

Liberty and the separation of powers. Book XI defines political liberty not as doing whatever one wants, but as “the right of doing whatever the laws permit”, and, in a citizen, “that tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety”. Liberty exists only in moderate governments, and only where power is not abused; “but constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it… To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.” Describing the constitution of England — “one nation in the world that has for the direct end of its constitution political liberty” — he distinguished three powers: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty… Again, there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.” The legislature should be divided into two houses, one representing the people, the other the nobility, each able to check the other. His account idealised England, but it gave the world a model.

Climate. Books XIV–XVII argue that climate shapes temperament and so laws: in cold climates, people are vigorous, brave and freedom-loving; in hot climates, languid, passionate and more easily subjected to despotism. Wise legislators counteract bad effects of climate rather than giving in to them. The theory, crude and later criticised, launched the study of how environment shapes society.

Commerce. “Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule that wherever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes.” Trade creates mutual dependence and inclines nations to peace. The idea of doux commerce (gentle commerce) influenced Hume and Adam Smith.

Against slavery and cruelty. Montesquieu condemned slavery in an ironic chapter listing the arguments of its defenders — “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians” — opposed torture and cruel punishments, and pleaded for religious toleration, with a moving “humble remonstrance” of a Jewish victim of the Inquisition.

Legacy

The Spirit of the Laws went through twenty-two editions in eighteen months. It was condemned by the Sorbonne and placed on the Index. Its separation of powers was adopted by the framers of the American Constitution — James Madison called Montesquieu “the oracle who is always consulted” — and by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789: “a society in which the separation of powers is not determined has no constitution”). His comparative method makes him, with Ibn Khaldūn, a founder of sociology; Durkheim wrote his Latin thesis on him.

In conversation

• “Power should be a check to power” — the separation of powers.
• “How can one be Persian?” — the outsider’s eye.
• Virtue, honour, fear — the principles of republics, monarchies and despotisms.