Montesquieu Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède
et de Montesquieu , generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social
commentator and political thinker who lived during the Age of Enlightenment. He is famous
for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions
throughout the world. He did more than any other author to secure the place of the word
despotism in the political lexicon, and may have been partly responsible for the popularization
of the terms feudalism and Byzantine Empire. Biography
Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in the southwest of France, 25 km
south of Bordeaux. His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble
ancestry. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles was seven, was
an heiress who brought the title of Barony of La Brède to the Secondat family. After
the death of his mother he was sent to the Catholic College of Juilly, a prominent school
for the children of French nobility, where he remained from 1700 to 1711. His father
died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu. In 1715 he married
Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, who eventually bore him three children. The Baron died in
1716, leaving him his fortune as well as his title, and the office of Président à Mortier
in the Bordeaux Parliament. Montesquieu's early life occurred at a time
of significant governmental change. England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy
in the wake of its Glorious Revolution (1688–89), and had joined with Scotland in the Union
of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France the long-reigning Louis XIV died
in 1715 and was succeeded by the five-year-old Louis XV. These national transformations had
a great impact on Montesquieu; he would refer to them repeatedly in his work.
He achieved literary success with the publication of his Lettres persanes (Persian Letters,
1721), a satire based on the imaginary correspondence of a Persian visitor to Paris, pointing out
the absurdities of contemporary society. He next published Considérations sur les causes
de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur
and Decadence of the Romans, 1734), considered by some scholars as a transition from The
Persian Letters to his master work. De l'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws) was originally
published anonymously in 1748. It quickly rose to have enormous influence. In France,
the book met with an unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the
regime. The Catholic Church banned l'Esprit – along with many of Montesquieu's other works –
in 1751 and included it on the Index of Prohibited Books. It received the highest praise from
the rest of Europe, especially Britain. Montesquieu was also highly regarded in the
British colonies in North America as a champion of liberty (though not of American independence).
Political scientist Donald Lutz found that Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted
authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more
by the American founders than any source except for the Bible. Following the American revolution,
Montesquieu's work remained a powerful influence on many of the American founders, most notably
James Madison of Virginia, the "Father of the Constitution". Montesquieu's philosophy
that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" reminded
Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government
required a clearly defined and balanced separation of powers.
Besides composing additional works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number
of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and
18 months in England before resettling in France. He was troubled by poor eyesight,
and was completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He was buried in
the Église Saint-Sulpice, Paris. Philosophy of history
Montesquieu's philosophy of history minimized the role of individual persons and events.
He expounded the view in Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de
leur décadence that each historical event was driven by a principal movement:
In discussing the transition from the Republic to the Empire, he suggested that if Caesar
and Pompey had not worked to usurp the government of the Republic, other men would have risen
in their place. The cause was not the ambition of Caesar or Pompey, but the ambition of man.
Political views Montesquieu is credited amongst the precursors
of anthropology, including Herodotus and Tacitus, to be among the first to extend comparative
methods of classification to the political forms in human societies. Indeed, the French
political anthropologist Georges Balandier considered Montesquieu to be "the initiator
of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social
anthropology". According to social anthropologist D.F. Pocock, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the
Laws "is 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". Montesquieu's
political anthropology gave rise to his theories on government. When Catherine the Great wrote
her Nakaz (Instruction) for the Legislative Assembly she had created to clarify the existing
Russian law code, she avowed borrowing heavily from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, although
she discarded or altered portions that did not support Russia's absolutist bureaucratic
monarchy. Montesquieu's most influential work divided
French society into three classes (or trias politica, a term he coined): the monarchy,
the aristocracy, and the commons. Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing:
the sovereign and the administrative. The administrative powers were the executive,
the legislative, and the judicial. These should be separate from and dependent upon each other
so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two,
either singly or in combination. This was a radical idea because it completely eliminated
the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the aristocracy, and
the people at large represented by the Estates-General, thereby erasing the last vestige of a feudalistic
structure. Likewise, there were three main forms of government,
each supported by a social "principle": monarchies (free governments headed by a hereditary figure,
e.g. king, queen, emperor), which rely on the principle of honor; republics (free governments
headed by popularly elected leaders), which rely on the principle of virtue; and despotisms
(enslaved governments headed by dictators), which rely on fear. The free governments are
dependent on fragile constitutional arrangements. Montesquieu devotes four chapters of The Spirit
of the Laws to a discussion of England, a contemporary free government, where liberty
was sustained by a balance of powers. Montesquieu worried that in France the intermediate powers
(i.e., the nobility) which moderated the power of the prince were being eroded. These ideas
of the control of power were often used in the thinking of Maximilien de Robespierre.
Montesquieu was somewhat ahead of his time in advocating major reform of slavery in The
Spirit of the Laws. As part of his advocacy he presented a satirical hypothetical list
of arguments for slavery, which has been open to contextomy. However, like many of his generation,
Montesquieu also held a number of views that might today be judged controversial. He firmly
accepted the role of a hereditary aristocracy and the value of primogeniture, and while
he endorsed the idea that a woman could head a state, he held that she could not be effective
as the head of a family. While addressing French readers of his General
Theory, John Maynard Keynes described Montesquieu as "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 (which are the qualities an economist should have)."
Meteorological climate theory Another example of Montesquieu's anthropological
thinking, outlined in The Spirit of the Laws and hinted at in Persian Letters, is his meteorological
climate theory, which holds that climate may substantially influence the nature of man
and his society. By placing an emphasis on environmental influences as a material condition
of life, Montesquieu prefigured modern anthropology's concern with the impact of material conditions,
such as available energy sources, organized production systems, and technologies, on the
growth of complex socio-cultural systems. He goes so far as to assert that certain climates
are superior to others, the temperate climate of France being ideal. His view is that people
living in very warm countries are "too hot-tempered," while those in northern countries are "icy"
or "stiff." The climate of middle Europe is therefore optimal. On this point, Montesquieu
may well have been influenced by a similar pronouncement in The Histories of Herodotus,
where he makes a distinction between the 'ideal' temperate climate of Greece as opposed to
the overly cold climate of Scythia and the overly warm climate of Egypt. This was a common
belief at the time, and can also be found within the medical writings of Herodotus'
times, including the 'On Airs, Waters, Places' of the Hippocratic corpus. One can find a
similar statement in Germania by Tacitus, one of Montesquieu's favorite authors.
From a sociological perspective Louis Althusser, in his analysis of Montesquieu's revolution
in method, alluded to the seminal character of anthropology's inclusion of material factors,
such as climate, in the explanation of social dynamics and political forms. Examples of
certain climatic and geographical factors giving rise to increasingly complex social
systems include those that were conducive to the rise of agriculture and the domestication
of wild plants and animals. List of principal works
Memoirs and discourses at the Academy of Bordeaux (1718–1721): including discourses on echoes,
on the renal glands, on weight of bodies, on transparency of bodies and on natural history.
Spicilège (Gleanings, 1715 onward) Système des idées (System of Ideas, 1716)
Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721) Le Temple de Gnide (The Temple of Gnidos,
a novel; 1725) Histoire véritable (True History, a reverie;
c.1723–c.1738) Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur
des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans
and their Decline, 1734) at Gallica Arsace et Isménie (Arsace and Isménie, a
novel; 1742) De l'esprit des lois ((On) The Spirit of the
Laws, 1748), volume 1, volume 2 at Gallica; La défense de «L'Esprit des lois» (In Defence
of "The Spirit of the Laws", 1750) Essai sur le goût (Essay on Taste, pub. 1757)
Mes Pensées (My Thoughts, 1720–1755)