Montesquieu
NAME: Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de
ACHIEVEMENT: He established the field of political and social science.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 18 January 1689, at Chateau La Brede, near Bordeaux,
France
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 10 February 1755, in Paris, France. Aged 66
DISCIPLINE: Philosopher
FIELD: Philosophy
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Jacques de Secondat (d. 1713) and Marie-Francoise de Pesnel (d.
1696)
SIBLINGS: Jean-Baptiste and two sisters
SPOUSE: Jeanne de Lartigue, married 1715
CHILDREN: One son (Jean-Baptiste) and two daughters
EDUCATION: Private tutors until 1700; College de Juilly, 1700-05; University
of Bordeaux
MAJOR WORK: ''The Spirit of Law’, 1748
LIFE AND TIMES: In 1716 Montesquieu inherited his uncle's title, estates and office of deputy president of the Parlement of Bordeaux, becoming a member of the newly formed Academie de Bordeaux the same year.
Now socially and financially secure, over the next ten years he settled down to the study and practice of law, and the administration of his estates. He also began to experiment in the newly developing fields of geology, biology and physics, summarizing his results in papers presented before the Bordeaux Academy (1718-20).
These papers reveal his particular interest in the effects of changes in temperature on animal tissue, experiments which would later influence his conclusions concerning the effects of climate on human beings and their social institutions.
In 1721 Montesquieu anonymously published his first work: 'Persian Letters,' in which he gave a satirical portrait of French culture, supposedly seen through the eyes of two Persian travellers. Among many other aspects of European life, the 'Persian Letters' attacked the fashionable idleness of the aristocracy, the religious wars, the Inquisition, the pope, the absolutism of Louis XIV, and the disastrous episode of speculation which became known as the Mississippi Bubble (see <satirized> Law*).
When Montesquieu's authorship became known, he instantly became famous. From 1722 he spent many months each year in Paris, where he mixed with the intellectuals of the day - including <a pal of> Maupertuis* and <a pal of> Voltaire*.
Although during this period Montesquieu continued to practice as a lawyer, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with law as a career. What he sought was the spirit behind the laws, the reason for the development of social institutions, and the foundations of justice. In 1726 he sold his post in the Bordeaux Parlement, moved to Paris, and in January 1728 was elected to the Academie Francaise.
In April 1728 he set off on a long tour of Europe, with Lord Waldegrave, recently British ambassador in Paris, as his travelling companion. Together the pair visited Austria, Italy, Hungary, Switzerland, the small German states along the Rhine, Holland, and finally England, where he stayed for 15 months (1729-31).
In London he became a fellow of the <fellow of> Royal Society*, studied the political writings of <studied works of> Locke*, was presented at court, and attended sessions of the House of Commons, where he observed with great pleasure the open criticism of government policy by both the opposition parties in Parliament and by the press, a freedom denied entirely to the French under absolute monarchy.
On his return to France in the spring of 1731, Montesquieu settled on his estate at La Brede, where he remained for the next two years, writing the short but controversial treatise ''On Universal Monarchy in Europe,' printed in 1734 but immediately withdrawn. During this period he was mainly occupied with an essay on the English constitution (not published until 1748), and with his ''Reflections on the Causes of the Grandeur of the Romans and of their Decadence' of 1734.
This important work would later greatly influence the English historian <influenced> Gibbon's* 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' (1776-88). After the success of his work on the Romans, Montesquieu took a short rest before starting his major project, a work on law and politics, the aim of which was to reveal the scientific laws behind social institutions and phenomena which, to Montesquieu, depended on neither providence nor chance, but on the mechanistic laws which also govern nature.
In preparation for this work, in his great 40-by-60 foot library, Montesquieu undertook an extensive programme of reading in law, history, economics, geography, and political theory, and employed a series of secretaries, sometimes as many as six at a time. During the late 1730’s and early 1740’s he continued to visit Paris, where he kept a second library and also made use of the Bibliothèque du Roi, attended the Academie, visited the salons, and enjoyed meeting Italian and English visitors.
The first draft of the work was ready by 1743, and he spent the next three years revising it. In November 1748, the work appeared under the title 'The Spirit of Law' (published in England in 1750). This work established the field of political and social science. In his analysis of political institutions, Montesquieu considered laws as they related to type of government (tyranny, monarchy, or democracy), the physical characteristics of the country (climate, size, nature of its terrain), its economic and demographic makeup, and its moral, ethical and religious traditions.
Fundamental to Montesquieu's outlook was an absence of absolutes, which led him to an acceptance of the "relativity" of human beliefs and institutions, and a cosmopolitanism in which differences in countries are to be expected, and in which one’s home country is not always right. Controversially, Montesquieu reserved special praise for the English government of the time, in particular for its separation of the three main powers (legislative, executive and judicial) and its use of checks and balances in government.
The work was praised by the Scottish philosopher <admired by> Hume*, the Swiss scientist <admired by> Bonnet*, and legislators in the United States where, during the debates of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia throughout the summer of 1787, "the celebrated Montesquieu" was often quoted as an authority. The work proved controversial in France and Rome, where it was placed on the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books in 1751, despite Montesquieu's forceful and brilliant defence, published in 1750.
In 1748 he had also published 'Lysimaque', a dialogue on despotism, arguing that Protestant, commercial and constitutionalist England and Holland represented the best of Europe, while Catholic, economically backward and politically absolutist Portugal and Spain represented the worst of the Western world.
Now internationally famous, Montesquieu spent his final years limited by his failing eyesight. In the early 1750s he wrote a romance, 'Arsace et Ismenie', but his final work was for <worked for> d'Alembert*, who had requested an essay for the 'Encyclopedie' on democracy and despotism.
Instead, Montesquieu wrote his ''Essay on Taste,' which he had first drafted about 25 years earlier.
ASSESSMENT: One of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, famous in his own time both in France and abroad, from Russia to the American colonies. In his efforts to analyse politics systematically, using the comparative method, he stands virtually alone in his age.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: Influenced penal reformer <influenced> Beccaria*
He knew Mme du <knew> Deffand* and philosopher <knew> Helvetius*
ONELINER: Montesquieu, influential Enlightenment thinker
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB, DSB, Collier's Encyclopedia
Shklar, Judith N., Montesquieu, Oxford & New York: OUP, 1987