Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as
simply Montesquieu, was a French lawyer, man of letters, and political philosopher 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. He became a counselor
of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. 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, 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. Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of
law to devote himself to study and writing. He achieved literary success with the publication
of his Lettres persanes, a satire representing society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary
Persian visitors to Paris and Europe, cleverly criticizing the absurdities of contemporary
French society. He next published Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains
et de leur décadence, considered by some scholars, among his three best known books,
as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. De l'Esprit des Lois was
originally published anonymously in 1748. The book quickly rose to influence political
thought profoundly in Europe and America. 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. 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:
It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence
of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses
when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every
monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are
controlled by these causes. And if the chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has
brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish
from a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents.
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 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: 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,
which rely on the principle of honor; republics, which rely on the principle of virtue; and
despotisms, 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 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."
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: including discourses on echoes, on the renal
glands, on weight of bodies, on transparency of bodies and on natural history.
Spicilège Système des idées
Lettres persanes Le Temple de Gnide
Histoire véritable Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur
des Romains et de leur décadence at Gallica Arsace et Isménie
De l'esprit des lois The Spirit of the Laws, 1748), volume 1, volume 2 at Gallica;
La défense de «L'Esprit des lois» Essai sur le goût
Mes Pensées See also
Government of France Liberalism
List of liberal theorists Napoleon I of France
U.S. Constitution, influences References
Notes
Bibliography Articles and chapters
Books
External links Free full-text works online
The Spirit of Laws 1748 English audio Complete ebooks collection of Montesquieu
in French. Montesquieu, "Notes on England"
Montesquieu in The Catholic Encyclopedia. Montesquieu in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Timeline of Montesquieu's Life
Château Saint Ahon - Historic estate once owned by Charles de Montesquieu
(French) Lettres persanes at athena.unige.ch