Montesquieu

• 1. Introduction

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  Montesquieu, born Charles Louis de Secondat on the 18th of January 1689, grew up in a château 25 kilometres south of Bordeaux, in southwest France. His father's lineage traced back to Richard de la Pole, a Yorkist claimant to the English crown. His mother died when he was seven years old. Both facts tell you something about this man: he was rooted in old Europe, yet he would spend his life imagining a freer one.

  By the time he died on the 10th of February 1755, Montesquieu had done something no political thinker before him had managed so completely. He had given the world a vocabulary for tyranny, a blueprint for liberty, and a theory of government so durable that it was written into the constitutions of nations not yet born when he published it.

  How did a provincial French judge become the most quoted authority on government in pre-revolutionary America, cited more frequently than any source except the Bible? What drove him to publish his masterwork anonymously, only to see it banned by the Catholic Church within three years? And what does it mean that his ideas about cold climates breeding courage and hot climates breeding indolence still provoke argument today?

• 2. From Bordeaux to the World

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  In 1714, at twenty-five, Montesquieu became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parlement. Two years later, when his uncle the Baron de Montesquieu died in 1716, he inherited a title, a fortune, and the office of président à mortier in that same body, a post he would hold for twelve years.

  Legal life did not fully hold him. In 1721 he published Persian Letters, a satire narrated by two fictional Persian visitors observing Parisian society. The work was an instant classic and was immediately pirated, which in that era was an unambiguous measure of demand.

  In 1726 he sold his office in the parlement, bored with legal routine and drawn toward the intellectual circles of Paris. Two years later, in January 1728, he was elected to the Académie Française despite some resistance. That April, accompanied by Lord Waldegrave, a nephew of his old ally the Duke of Berwick, he set out on a grand tour of Europe.

  His travels took him through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, a brief stretch of Germany, and a year in Italy. At the end of October 1729 he arrived in England, traveling in the company of Lord Chesterfield. At the Horn Tavern Lodge in Westminster he was initiated into Freemasonry. He remained in England until the spring of 1731, absorbing its constitutional arrangements and the political ideas of figures he met there, including Viscount Bolingbroke, whose views would surface later in his analysis of the English system.

• 3. The Study at La Brède

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  When Montesquieu returned from England in 1731 he settled back at La Brède, where outwardly he resembled a country squire. He altered the park in the English fashion, looked into his own genealogy, and reasserted his seignorial rights over the estate.

  Beneath that surface, he was working constantly. His study held a collection of three thousand volumes, a library that ranged across history, geography, law, and natural history. His travels fed his thinking too: the legal customs, climates, and political structures of a dozen different countries had sharpened his sense that no single form of government was universal or inevitable.

  In 1734 he published Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. The book argued that historical events are not driven by chance or by the genius of individual leaders. Caesar and Pompey, in Montesquieu's view, were expressions of a deeper human tendency toward ambition; had they not existed, others would have risen to fill the same role. General causes, moral and physical, move empires forward or drag them under.

  That argument was not a detour from his political philosophy. It was its foundation. Understanding why Rome rose and fell was, for Montesquieu, a way of understanding what any free government must do to avoid the same fate.

• 4. The Spirit of Law

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  In 1748, Montesquieu published The Spirit of Law, De l'esprit des lois, anonymously. Thomas Nugent translated it into English in a 1750 edition, and it reached readers in both Great Britain and the American colonies almost immediately.

  The book proposed something radical for its moment. Montesquieu divided governmental power into three distinct branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. His argument was precise: when any two of these powers rest in the same hands, freedom disappears. If the legislator is also the judge, he wrote, power over the life and liberty of citizens becomes arbitrary. If the judge also commands the executive, he becomes an oppressor.

  He also classified governments into three types, each sustained by a different psychological principle. Republics run on civic virtue. Monarchies depend on honor. Despotisms function through fear. The word despotism itself, which he did more than any other author to establish in the political vocabulary, was not merely descriptive for him. It was a warning.

  In France, many readers welcomed the book with enthusiasm. The Sorbonne did not. In 1751 the Catholic Church placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Montesquieu published a Defense of The Spirit of Law in 1750, even before the Church's formal condemnation.

  Across the Channel and the Atlantic, the reception was different. Britain praised it. And in the American colonies, political leaders read it with the urgency of people who had practical use for it.

• 5. Madison and the American Founders

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  Political scientist Donald Lutz conducted a survey of late eighteenth-century works cited by American political writers. Montesquieu ranked as the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, surpassed as a source only by the Bible.

  After the Revolution, his influence deepened rather than faded. James Madison of Virginia, who earned the title "Father of the Constitution," returned repeatedly to Montesquieu's analysis of separated powers. The phrase that guided Madison was Montesquieu's own: government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another.

  The Constitution Madison helped draft embedded that principle structurally. The three branches, the checks and balances, the resistance to any single branch accumulating unchecked authority: all of it carried Montesquieu's fingerprints.

  Catherine the Great of Russia also drew on The Spirit of Law when she wrote her Nakaz, the Instruction she prepared for the Legislative Assembly she had formed to reform Russian law. She acknowledged borrowing heavily from Montesquieu, though she discarded or modified any passages that conflicted with Russia's absolutist system. That combination, enthusiastic borrowing alongside selective censorship, was its own demonstration of Montesquieu's point about the relationship between rulers and the rule of law.

• 6. Climate, Character, and Controversy

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  François-Ignace d'Espiard de La Borde published his Essai sur le génie et le caractère des nations in Brussels in 1743, five years before The Spirit of Law appeared. D'Espiard advanced a climate theory very close to the one Montesquieu would make famous, and d'Espiard republished his work in 1752 under the title Esprit des nations. The proximity of the two titles has not escaped scholars.

  Montesquieu's version of climate theory, as laid out in The Spirit of Law and hinted at in Persian Letters, held that cold climates tighten the body's fibers, producing strength, courage, and resilience. Hot climates relax the body, generating emotional volatility and indecisiveness. Temperate climates, France being his example, produced the balanced temperament suited to stable institutions.

  He extended the argument to geography. Fertile, flat terrain was easy to conquer and tended to produce monarchy or despotism. Harsh or barren land bred industriousness and republican virtues, because people who had to struggle for survival developed independence.

  Montesquieu himself acknowledged that laws and customs could counterbalance or redirect these environmental pressures. He was not arguing that geography was destiny; he was arguing that it created tendencies that wise legislators needed to understand and account for.

  Earlier thinkers, including Hippocrates in On Airs, Waters, Places, Herodotus in The Histories, and Tacitus in Germania, had explored similar territory. Montesquieu admired Tacitus especially. His own contribution was bringing these ideas, synthesized and applied to comparative political analysis, before a wide European readership.

• 7. Anthropology Before the Word

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  French political anthropologist Georges Balandier called Montesquieu "the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social anthropology." Social anthropologist D. F. Pocock described The Spirit of Law as "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions."

  Émile Durkheim, as David W. Carrithers noted, went further still: Durkheim argued that Montesquieu's recognition of the interrelatedness of social phenomena was the moment social science itself came into being.

  Montesquieu had identified governing principles that matched forms of government to their social foundations. Virtue, honor, and fear were not moral preferences but structural requirements: remove the animating principle from any system, and the system collapsed. This was a sociological argument dressed in political philosophy's clothing.

  John Maynard Keynes, addressing French readers in his General Theory, named Montesquieu "the real French equivalent of Adam Smith, the greatest of your economists, head and shoulders above the physiocrats in penetration, clear-headedness and good sense." That comparison reached across economics, philosophy, and social theory at once, which is roughly the range Montesquieu himself had claimed.

  His advocacy extended to slavery, which he attacked in The Spirit of Law by arguing that all humans are born equal and that slavery is inherently wrong. To make the point, he constructed a satirical hypothetical list of pro-slavery arguments, presenting them without endorsement, including the sardonic claim that sugar would become too expensive without enslaved labor.

• 8. Afterlife in Towers and Prizes

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  Montesquieu was buried in the Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris after dying from a fever on the 10th of February 1755. He had gone to Paris at the end of 1754, troubled by cataracts and afraid of losing his sight, before illness overtook him.

  Between 1981 and 1994 his portrait appeared on the 200 French franc note. Since 1989 the French Association of Historians of Political Ideas has awarded the annual Montesquieu prize for the best French-language thesis on the history of political thought.

  On Europe Day 2007, the Montesquieu Institute opened in The Hague, the Netherlands, dedicated to research on parliamentary history and the political culture of the European Union and its member states.

  A tower bearing his name was completed in Luxembourg in 2008 as part of the headquarters of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Until 2019 it stood, alongside its sister tower named for Comenius, as the tallest building in the country. The tower houses the court's translation services, which gives it an appropriately Montesquieu-like function: the work of making laws and ideas intelligible across languages and borders.

  A critical edition of his complete works is being published by the Société Montesquieu, planned to span 22 volumes, with all but five having appeared as of February 2022.