Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (1689–1755)

Montesquieu, one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, was famous in his own century both in France and in foreign lands, from Russia to the American colonies. Later generations of French philosophes took for granted his concern to reform the criminal laws, to replace the Inquisition with a reign of tolerance, and to repudiate the vicious conquests of the Spaniards in the Americas. They also accepted his finding that Protestant, commercial, and constitutionalist England and Holland represented all the best possibilities of Europe; whereas Catholic, economically backward, and politically absolutist Portugal and Spain represented the worst of the Western world and constituted a warning to the French.

Although the findings and specific reforms proposed by Montesquieu were repeated by many another figure of the French Enlightenment, his work in certain respects remained unique in the circles of the most advanced thinkers. In his efforts to think systematically about politics and to do so by employing the comparative method, he stands virtually alone in his age. Other thinkers sharing his commitments resorted to the universalizing language of natural rights when they ventured into the realm of political philosophy. Or, like Voltaire, they tied their thoughts about politics to a succession of specific issues, each essay bearing so indelibly the imprint of specific time and place that there was no room for theory in their writings. Finally, as is true of Diderot or D’Alembert, many of the philosophes were slow to recognize what Montesquieu knew from the outset, that if Enlightenment does not extend to politics it is futile.

Steeped in Montaigne’s scepticism, Montesquieu found that in the absence of absolutes there were good reasons to appreciate the ‘more than/less than’ and ‘better than/worse than’ judgments of comparative analysis. In his notebooks he commented that the flaw of most philosophers had been to ignore that the terms beautiful, good, noble, grand, and perfect are ‘relative to the beings who use them’. Only one absolute existed for Montesquieu and that was the evil of despotism, which must be avoided at all costs.

Montesquieu wrote three great works, each teaching lessons about despotism and freedom,The Persian Letters (1721), the Considerations of the Grandeur of the Romans and the Cause of Their Decline (1734), and The Spirit of the Laws (1748).

1 The Persian Letters

A year before his death Montesquieu wrote a new preface to The Persian Letters (first published in 1721). Looking back, he recommended that the letters be read not individually but in their interconnections, since they are held together by a ‘chain’. The letters form ‘a kind of novel’; they tell a story and that story is the meaning of the book. Hence he repeatedly refused requests to add new letters, because more letters would signify less meaning.

As the story begins we learn that Usbek, a Persian, is travelling in the West with his countrymen Rica and Rhedi. The letters we read are exchanges among these tourists or between them and the persons they have left behind; many of the letters are the correspondence of Usbek with his wives or with the eunuchs who govern the household in his name during his absence. Between the first letter and the last, some nine years pass, during which the Persians learn much about Europe. The more they understand a foreign culture, the more they gain insight into their own as well. One cannot imagine a more entertaining or convincing argument for the comparative method than that which Montesquieu sets forth by example in The Persian Letters.

As Montesquieu indicated in 1754, his strategy was to portray the ‘genesis and development’ of the ideas of the Persians. Initially the Oriental visitors comprehend little of what they observe, so their earliest commentaries afford Montesquieu ample opportunity to satirize Western ways, as when Rica naïvely writes that the Pope is a magician who has the king believing that three are one and that bread is not bread, wine not wine. Eventually the Persians become so familiar with Western mores, customs, science and philosophy that the ‘otherness’ of Europe fades into their pasts. At the same time, however, their native Persia seems ever more foreign and even hideous from the standpoint of their transformed beliefs. When he first stepped foot on European soil in Italy Usbek sensed, ‘even in the most insignificant of details, something that I feel and cannot express’. Later he and his comrades come to realize that it is freedom they have encountered in their new environment, and that for them to utter the word ‘freedom’ in reference to the West is inevitably to speak of ‘despotism’ when designating their own country.

Virtually alone in his circle, Montesquieu recognized that to hold enlightened beliefs is not necessarily to be a tolerant person. Who could be more of a philosophe than Usbek, author of the most intellectually sophisticated of the Persian letters? And who could have better intentions than this same Usbek who dared to carry truth to the court of the Persian king, in consequence of which his days would have been numbered had he not found an excuse to visit foreign countries? Yet Usbek, after writing a series of letters diagnosing the malady of Oriental despotism, turns around and demands that his eunuchs initiate a reign of terror against his wives.

Jealousy is Usbek’s undoing, a jealousy that must not be mistaken for the reverse side of love, because, as Usbek admits in an unguarded moment, he is incapable of loving his wives. In Persia women are the property of men; and although a man may fear losing his woman, exactly as he is disturbed by the loss of any of his prized possessions, it is impossible for him to love a creature who by the very nature of the mores and laws is not fully a human being. Near the end of the novel Usbek, provoked to hear of growing disorder in his seraglio, decides to return to Persia in order to reclaim his possessions, and in the meantime he deputizes the chief eunuch to rule his wives by fear and terror.

Far from an island of peace and contentment, the Persian family is a replication in miniature of the most insidious characteristics of the surrounding society and polity. Where Oriental despotism reigns, the family, too, is despotic. It is the curse of arbitrary power that it infects all human relationships, affairs of the heart no less than affairs of state.

Self-deception is a recurring theme in the novel. Usbek has come to know Oriental despotism for what it is, but he lacks the strength to apply the lessons he has learned to his personal relations. The wives are even more determined to avoid the truth. Slaves by the laws of their country, they prefer to regard themselves as enslaved by their love of Usbek. Only the eunuchs stand outside the web of self-deception; they, in order to feel less diminished by castration, dominate the women by self-consciously manipulating oppressive Persian notions of virtue.

The story ends with the suicide of Roxane, the one woman who mattered to Usbek. By holding herself aloof and refusing to be treated as property, she aroused Usbek’s ardour. During his absence Roxane avenges herself by taking a lover and dies by her own hand rather than submit to Usbek’s despotic rule. Her act proves a truth Usbek himself had enunciated, that under despotism everyone loses, the despot as well as his long-suffering subjects. It was Usbek who proclaimed that systematic injustice is self-destructive, little realizing that he would one day demonstrate his point at his own expense.

2 The Romans

Montesquieu’s monograph on the Romans, Considerations of the Grandeur of the Romans and the Cause of Their Decline (1734), usually figures in modern scholarship as a warming up exercise for the causal reasoning found in his magnum opus, The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Such an interpretation is not incorrect but it is wanting in so far as it permits his third book to define the meaning of his second, as if his Considerations on the Romans had no significance in its own right. One might do better to see his second major publication as a variation on the theme of his first book. Previously he had argued that because of its internal injustice Oriental despotism is inherently self-destructive. Now he adds that the ancient Roman republic, though sometimes reasonably just internally, destroyed itself through the unrelenting external injustice of its foreign policy.

Montesquieu’s Romans knew ‘not even the justice of brigands’. After inflicting military defeat upon a prince, they exacted excessive war reparations that left him with no choice but to collect exorbitant taxes – ‘a new kind of tyranny that forced the prince to oppress his subjects and lose their love’. Similarly, the Romans destroyed Carthage, ‘saying they had promised to save the people but not the city itself’. Whenever possible the Romans fostered factional strife so as to weaken and eventually conquer foreign cities. ‘If princes of the same blood were disputing the crown, the Romans sometimes declared them both kings. If one of them was under age, they decided in his favour’. A city that lost its battle with Rome inevitably found itself compelled to fight with Rome to subdue another people, after which the Romans stripped their erstwhile allies of their remaining freedoms. These practices of the Romans were ‘in no way just particular actions occurring by chance; these were ever-constant principles’.

If nothing could sound more Machiavellian than Montesquieu’s Romans, that is because his account of ancient history is taken directly from the great Florentine’s Discourses on Livy (see Machiavelli, N.). Why not follow the lead of Machiavelli in turning the Roman senators into the most Machiavellian of ruling classes if to do so is the best way to discredit power-politics? Each Roman conquest, Montesquieu insisted, brought Rome that much closer to the day when the republic would perish, and Rome would begin to terrorize itself in much the same manner as it had long terrorized other city-states.

The more Rome expanded, the less it could sustain the integrity of its republican way of life. Civic mindedness yielded to civic neglect; private pursuits replaced public concerns. Frugality gave way to luxury and ostentation when returning soldiers carried plunder and foreign mores back to Rome. Removed from Rome for ever longer campaigns, soldiers no longer identified with their city but rather with their commander who offered them riches in return for their assistance in elevating him to political power.

Faced with evidence that the ruthlessness of the senators had added the name of Rome itself to the list of republics undone by Roman imperialism, Machiavelli hastened to place the blame on fortuna, which eventually undoes even the best laid plans. Montesquieu countered by denying that chance had anything to do with the demise of the republic. What was at work, he insisted, was nothing less than the operation of causal necessity. Any republic which grows beyond a certain point necessarily undermines its civic culture. Since the republic had to perish, it was only a question of how, and by whom, it was to be overthrown.

It is not chance that rules the world…There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every [regime], elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground.

(Considerations on the Romans, chaps 11, 18)

Montesquieu’s objective in the Considerations was to set forth a causal argument that eliminated not just fortuna from historical explanation but Providence as well. Bishop Bossuet had preceded Montesquieu both in accepting Machiavelli’s reading of Roman history and also in drawing the conclusion that the Roman republic destroyed itself by the systematic injustice of its foreign policy. Dedicated to vindicating the Christian view of history, Bossuet in the Discourse on Universal History (1681) deliberately set out to expunge pagan fortuna from the historical record. To that end he announced that ‘the true science of history’ was one in which the investigator identified the underlying causes which account for the revolutions of empires. Those causes turn out to be much the same as the ones cited later by Montesquieu, especially the decline of civic life and the demise of the large, frugal, agrarian middle class which, as Aristotle noted, was the backbone of a popular republic.

When Montesquieu approached Roman history he found that Bossuet had prepared the way for his Considerations. Specifically, the good bishop had driven fortuna off the historical stage and effectively pleaded the case for causal reasoning. All Montesquieu had to do to arrive at a historical science fit for the Enlightenment was to bracket off Providence as an unnecessary hypothesis, and with that act he had moved to a stage of thought which was both post-pagan and post-Christian.

3 The Spirit of the Laws

The centrepiece of Montesquieu’s most comprehensive and systematic treatise is its typology of sociopolitical forms. Monarchy in politics is matched in society by an ethos revolving around the ‘principle’ of aristocratic honour; Oriental despotism is characterized by the principle of fear; and the ancient republic was enlivened by civic virtue.

By ‘monarchy’ Montesquieu understands feudal government in its final incarnation during the Old Regime. Absolute in theory, the power of the king is thwarted in fact by ‘intermediary bodies’ – the first and second estates (clerics and nobles) and the parlements, which were judicial institutions, not legislative bodies. Corporate and hierarchical, the social order is so thoroughly under the sway of the privileged estates that the members of the middle class, far from challenging the aristocrats, want nothing more than to amass enough wealth to buy a noble title and to pay someone – as did Molière’s bourgeois gentleman – to teach them how to put on aristocratic airs.

Voltaire believed that The Spirit of the Laws was in reality nothing more than an apology for the privileged classes to which Montesquieu, a noble and former member of the Bordeaux parlement, belonged. The ancient republic was something lost and gone forever, and Oriental despotism was not only the worst of all possible worlds but a constant reminder that to remove the intermediary bodies from a monarchy is to invite disaster. Hence, Voltaire concluded, Montesquieu was a formidable apologist for all the abuses of the Old Regime. If Montesquieu championed the English example, Voltaire assumed the hidden agenda was to suggest that power be taken away from the French monarch and turned over to nobles seated in a legislature.

Modern historians, Marxists and all those who wish for a ready-made link between social and intellectual history, have repeated Voltaire’s charges. It is therefore crucial to note that other philosophes refused to follow Voltaire’s lead, and to ask why. The best place to begin our reexamination of The Spirit of the Laws is with the recognition that, in its pages, England figures not only as the most free country in the world but also as the only monarchy that no longer possesses intermediary bodies, whereas Spain is portrayed both as the nation in which the intermediary bodies could not be more powerful and as a country plagued by a peculiarly Western variety of despotism.

‘Abolish the privileges of the lords, the clergy, and cities in a monarchy’, wrote Montesquieu, ‘and you will soon have a popular state, or else a despotic government’. Although in despotism Montesquieu found nothing but evil, he did have considerable sympathy for the popular state that had emerged from the ashes of a feudal past. ‘The English, to favour their liberty, have abolished all the intermediate powers of which their monarchy was composed.’ During the upheavals of the seventeenth century, the remnants of feudalism perished in England, with the consequence that in Montesquieu’s day the English had a monarch but no Old Regime. England was the first new nation.

Call England a monarchy and Montesquieu will not object, for such it once was and such it still is on the surface. But on a closer look England is much better described as a ‘republic hiding under the form of a monarchy’. Unlike the republics of antiquity, but like Holland across the Channel, England is a commercial republic. Politically, however, there is a significant difference between Holland and England: the Dutch live in a confederate republic, the English in a centralized republic.

As a result of purging the feudal ‘intermediary bodies’ England is, at one and the same time, the most free country and the one in which freedom is in greatest danger of declining into its opposite. No sooner has Montesquieu applauded English liberty than he issues a stern warning: the English ‘have a great deal of reason to be jealous of this liberty; were they ever to be so unhappy as to lose it, they would be one of the most servile nations upon earth’. Under the conditions of a post-feudal world, where power is centralized as never before, only a ‘system’ of liberty will suffice, a constitutional structure wherein there is a sharp separation of legislative, executive and judicial functions. In the famous Book XI, chapter 6, Montesquieu outlines his proposal for a system of freedom and deems it especially appropriate for the British; in Book XIX, chapter 27, he makes it clear that the spoils system (of Robert Walpole) is what actually exists in England.

Whatever his misgivings about England and Holland, Montesquieu was convinced that they were not only the most free but also the most powerful nations. Each age, he remarked in his notebooks, has its spirit, and the spirit of the modern age is that of commerce. Conquests weaken the conqueror, trade strengthens the most economically progressive nations. Both Holland and England are small; neither has much of a standing army; and yet these two commercial nations may well be the most formidable powers of Europe.

Altogether different is the situation of once proud Spain. Fields lie uncultivated, trade is nonexistent, and the Spaniards sit by idly while ‘the rest of the European nations carry on in their very sight all the commerce of their monarchy’. It is the very power of the ‘intermediary bodies’, the nobility and the clergy, that accounts for the increasing powerlessness of the nation which in early modern history had been the leading country in Europe. The Church does nothing with its ever growing holdings of land, nor do the nobles produce anything since the aristocratic code of honour forbids titled persons to engage in commercial activity.

Enrichment through plunder, conquest, and murder is ‘honourable’; indeed, it is holy as well when combined with forcible baptism. Thus the Church blessed the bloody conquests of greedy and cruel Spanish nobles in the Americas, as did the state which, following a mercantilist policy, was only too happy with the mounds of gold the conquistadores shipped back to the old world. Which is to say, the Spaniards mistook a symbol of wealth for wealth itself. As the quantity of gold in the king’s coffers piled up, the value of gold declined: ‘Spain behaved like the foolish king who desired that everything he touched might be converted into gold, and who was obliged to beg of the gods to put an end to his misery’ (The Spirit of the Laws, XXI, ch. 22). Well in advance of Adam Smith, Montesquieu declared that the wealth of nations depended on the production of goods and services.

A regressive economy was one consequence of the influence of Spain’s powerful intermediary bodies; the Inquisition was another. That the French government might well follow Spain in permitting the Catholic Church to dictate oppressive public policies, even at the cost of undermining the power of the state, was indicated, Montesquieu believed, by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). The Huguenots sent into exile by Louis XIV were the most able economic producers in France; in eliminating them Louis inflicted serious damage on the economic resources without which there can be little political power. Let the heirs of Cardinal Richelieu talk as much as they wish about reason of state; policy will never be reasonable when the king’s confessor advocates the destructive measures dictated by the fanatical politics of divine right.

From his earliest writings to his last, Montesquieu was constantly attentive to Spain, the country which was a living example of what form despotism was likely to assume in the Western setting. In the Orient it is the absence of intermediary bodies that makes despotism so devastating. In the Western world it is the very triumph of those same bodies that fosters a less overt and less total despotism but a despotism nonetheless.

When Montesquieu looked to Spain and England he saw countries which, like France, had evolved from the embryo of a feudal past. Both those countries were further down the road of historical development than his native land. Would France duplicate the Spanish example, as Montesquieu feared? Or would it break with its feudal past, as had England? The best possibility, to Montesquieu’s mind, was for France to chart its own course, one that would be constitutionalist, assuredly, but more politically decentralized than the British government. How to accomplish this task of reconstruction, he was the first to admit, was far from obvious. Surely the Catholic Church would not readily relinquish its stranglehold in France, nor would the nobility readily learn how to succeed economically or how to share political power. Historical and comparative analysis tell us what our problem is; they provide no easy solutions.

4 Legacy and reputation

The philosophes regarded Montesquieu, quite rightly, as an eloquent and penetrating spokesman for the outlook of the Enlightenment. For Diderot and D’Alembert, editors of the Encyclopédie (1751–72), it was a great victory for the party of humanity that the illustrious Montesquieu agreed to submit an article on taste to their undertaking in collective and committed publication. Yet most of the philosophes, despite their admiration of The Spirit of the Laws, denied that climate, a physical rather than a ‘moral’ cause, played the dominant role in the non-Western world that Montesquieu attributed to it. Frequently, too, the philosophes displayed some impatience that Montesquieu spent so much time discussing what is, when they were more interested in what ought to be.

In the nineteenth century Hegel, who acknowledged his intellectual debts, praised Montesquieu as superior to other writers of his age in taking an historical approach to his subject matter and in ‘always treating the part in its relation to the whole’. Among noteworthy French authors Benjamin Constant’s writings make incessant use of insights and formulations gleaned from Montesquieu; this includes Constant’s frequently cited Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns (1819). Not only did Constant agree with Montesquieu in championing modern notions of freedom as privacy, but the two writers were alike again in their estimation that the freedom to pursue our individual desires will never be safe if we completely abandon the public and civic conceptions of liberty which prevailed in antiquity.

Finally, Tocqueville must be mentioned. His entire manner of conducting comparative analysis is reminiscent of The Spirit of the Laws (1835), and the specific objective of Democracy in America (1840), to fathom the political, economic, social, and cultural possibilities of a post-feudal republic, is already present a century earlier in Montesquieu’s examination of England.

There are signs that the scholarship of our age is finally removing the onus with which Voltaire burdened Montesquieu’s reputation. No longer is it common to see Montesquieu diminished to the lowly stature of an apologist for the privileged orders of his day. Unquestionably, he now figures as a far more profound thinker than Voltaire, and has begun to compete with Diderot and Rousseau for the title of the greatest French thinker of his time. Despite the historical specificity of his method, Montesquieu continues to speak to all persons who adhere to the ideals and aspirations of the Enlightenment.