Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

David Carrithers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754627012
• eBook ISBN: 9781351572224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The French philosophe Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a political and social thinker of enormous depth, range, originality, and influence. The essays by eminent scholars reprinted in this volume explore significant aspects of his contributions to political, constitutional, and religious thought during the epoch of the French Enlightenment. Topics highlighted include his Persian Letters (1721), his history of Rome (1734), and the views he expressed in The Spirit of Laws (1748) on natural law, forms of government, English constitutionalism, religion, commerce, international relations, and the philosophy of history. Supplemented by a detailed introduction that contextualizes the papers selected for this volume, as well as an extensive bibliography, this work serves as an authoritative reference to the best scholarship on Montesquieu's political thought. The volume is edited and introduced by David W. Carrithers, Adolph Ochs Professor of Government at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and author of numerous publications on Montesquieu.

Part I
The Persian Letters

[1]
Personality and Politics in the Persian Letters

OREST RANUM

The Johns Hopkins University

The making of a social critic is a very complex matter. Not genius alone or literary ability, but obviously certain kinds of frustrations, anger, and failure to adapt to society drive individuals in some instances to try to understand their own life history. In this reflective process the analysis of society plays a major role, and the potential critic may assert that it was society’s fault, not his, which caused their failure to come together. The rejection of society for the non-activist critic then may culminate in literary activity.

Montesquieu’s failure to adapt well to his society began very early and while he was still part of his family. As a member of a noble household with aristocratic pretensions and prestige emanating from the judicial offices of his father, Montesquieu never perceived distinct lines or limits between the behavior of the individual, the role of the family, and the entire society of the ancien régime.

If the Abbé de Guasco, one of Montesquieu’s closest friends in later life, can be trusted as a faithful recorder of the philosophe’s conversations, at least one bit of evidence survives about the psychic development of the author of the Persian Letters.

He has said to some friends that if he were going to publish those letters now, he would omit those in which the fire of youth had got the better of him, being obliged as he was, by his father, to spend the entire day on the Code, after which he found himself so wrought up by evening that in order to amuse himself he began to compose a Persian letter, which flowed from his pen without effort.¹

There are other kinds of evidence about his early life. We know when and where he went to college, who his teachers were, and what the rank of his family was in society, but save this recollection there is nothing intimate and self-revealing.² The childhood, adolescence, and early adult life of Montesquieu are almost completely unknown. With so little evidence it is impossible for a historian to apply the techniques of analysis developed by psychiatry. The history of the anxieties or the development of the “identity crisis” which caused this son of a parlementaire to reject the practice of law and to abandon high office in Bordeaux cannot be written.³ But this recollection is a clue, an extremely valuable clue, to what Montesquieu’s psychic development must have been.

In his Pensées Montesquieu wrote: “as far as my job of president went, I had an upright heart, I understood the questions as such; but as for the procedure, I did not comprehend it at all. I did apply myself, too, but what disgusted me the most, was that I saw stupid men with the talent which escaped me….”⁴ Though written about a period several years later than the years in which he worked on the Code, this thought confirms the frustration expressed in the first recollection. The Code, with its emphasis on principles, and the Parlement, bound as it was by interminable procedures and rituals, caused him frustration despite his efforts to apply himself. Owing to the lack of this sort of evidence our only alternative is to attempt to supplement these glimpses into Montesquieu’s early life by making inferences from his early works, and by analyzing his thought in the context of the political and social climate of France in the Regency of Louis XV.⁵

It is tempting to assert that Montesquieu developed as he did as much because of the intense crisis which France experienced immediately after the death of Louis XIV as from a conflict with his father. The Persian Letters, as will be shown, were directly stimulated by day-to-day happenings in Paris which Montesquieu followed with almost a fixation and sense of despair. Without this intense religious and political conflict after 1715 Montesquieu might never have outgrown his provincialism, or developed from a local somebody and amateur scientist into a leading light of the eighteenth century. But the one recollection of an adolescent obedient to his father, yet resentful and frustrated with the study and practice of law, serves to temper any biographical analysis based solely on external conditions affecting his development. Montesquieu grew discontented with the heritage which his father attempted to force on him; the crisis of the Regency did the rest.

Though Montesquieu came to reject his noblesse de robe heritage, he remained bound and enthralled by it throughout his life. He studied physical sciences, he read Hume, Spinoza, Hobbes, Newton, and Locke; he gained entry into bright salons, academies, and finally the French Academy. But his mind remained the same: captured by the law. The striking thing about Montesquieu’s thought is its continuity.⁶ The principles, the forms, and the assumptions remained the same in his mind from the beginning to the end of his life. This was partly because they were broad, inclusive categories which could be stated in the form of a maxim. Indeed, what appears as maxim in the Persian Letters becomes laws of sociology in the Spirit of the Laws, as Montesquieu expanded each maxim, refined it, and supplied historical and later anthro-geographical evidence to illustrate the force of such laws in societies either dead or living.

By laws Montesquieu meant not only codes and other legislation either ancient or contemporary. His concern, indeed his passion, was to go beneath these to discover the reasons for their acceptance or rejection as laws. In discovering these reasons he found the relationships between morals, laws, and the classic forms of government. This reflective, deductive process of discovering relationships and analogies typifies what J. G. A. Pocock calls the “common-law mind.”⁷ By this term Pocock means the presence of assumptions, usually vaguely formulated political thought, the forms of government such as monarchy, aristocracy, and republic which, when supported by historical evidence, become a forceful ideology for change and revolution. Pocock traces the evolution of the “common-law mind” in English political thought, and demonstrates how it developed into the Whig interpretation of history, and finally into historicism.

There is much in Montesquieu which is akin to the thinking of Sir Edward Coke, chief justice of England in the reign of James and of his followers who, in the Great Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution, developed semi-historical, semi-mythical notions of the English constitution.⁸ For Coke and the Whigs of the late seventeenth century, English law was something handed down from “time immemorial,” as custom. From this they proved to their satisfaction that both the Parliament and the Anglican Church were older than the Monarchy, more lawfully constituted, and therefore not the creations of kings or the inferiors of royal courts.

Scholars have not sought to discover whether a parallel Whiggish tradition existed in France; but the French parlementaires and their heirs, the supporters of the thèse nobiliaire in the eighteenth century, may have shared certain Whiggish assumptions about the past with their English counterparts. From the great jurists of the sixteenth century, who were very interested in the Frankish constitution, to Loyseau, Omer Talon, and Joly de Fleury, a Whiggish view may have been formulated to oppose the Monarchy in the judicial Fronde of 1648. If a Whiggish tradition did not in fact develop in France, then it was brought over, as Dedieu suggests, in the late seventeenth century.⁹ Montesquieu’s thought was from the beginning more like that of the English Whigs than that of the court reformers Fénelon and Vauban, whom he admired for their criticisms of Louis XIV. But neither Fénelon nor Vauban were trained in the law, and, furthermore, neither came from Bordeaux, a city with a strong parlementaire tradition and English sympathies.

The most important predilection of the “common-law mind” was to revere the past, the era of Anglo-Saxons and Franks, and to fear the future. Judges less bright than Montesquieu shared with Montesquieu the fear that royal power had developed at the expense of liberties and that it would pervert or corrupt society. They prophesied doom. A despotism constructed on the ashes of broken liberties would, they argued, inevitably result from increased royal power.¹⁰ This predilection toward fear is found in Montesquieu’s letters when he writes about the crisis of the Regency of Louis XV, and about French society. In the Persian Letters Montesquieu is a prophet of doom. Not restricting himself to France alone, Montesquieu made numerous and random reflections about the nature of society and states, and of early, post-Roman European history, which demonstrate this love for the past and fear of the future.

Besides fearing the future those imbued with the “common-law mind” believed that historical incidents in the remote past determined once and for all, and significantly, the evolution of states, institutions, morals, and personal freedom. Beneath all of Montesquieu’s thought lurks the historicist notion that some incident occurring several thousand years ago might permanently give character to a society. Like the judge or lawyer with laws and procedures centuries old, Montesquieu considered time in years, decades, or centuries as of little significance. The precedent, regardless of its age, was still a precedent which could affect the proceedings of a court and even condemn a man to death. Not unlike other historical incidents in the remote past, such as the defeat of a nation in battle, it affected the society for its entire, organic life.

For the Whigs monarchy was thought to have come to Europe unnaturally, as the result of either conquest by foreigners or of stupidity. Montesquieu could not appeal to the Anglo-Saxons, as did Coke, but he came close when he has Rica write: “Properly speaking these tribes [which conquered Europe] were not barbarian, for they were free. But they have become barbarian since the day when, being subjected for the most part to an absolute authority, they lost that sweet liberty so in conformity with reason, humanity and nature.”¹¹ In the Persian Letters Montesquieu scarcely ventures an explanation of how the tribes lost their liberty, and how individuals became corrupted by absolutism, but this problem is a theme in the Spirit of the Laws. He does include the Whiggish explanation, however, when Rica writes Rhedi:

Who could imagine that the oldest and most powerful kingdom of Europe should have been governed for more than ten centuries by laws not made by itself? If the French had been conquered, this would not be hard to understand. But they are the conquerors! They have abandoned the ancient laws, made by their first kings in general assemblies of the nation [the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon Parliament] and what is even more amazing is that the Roman laws they took in their place were in part made and in part written down by emperors contemporary with their own lawgivers.¹²

Mystified by what had happened, Montesquieu investigated the history of the Franks until he found an explanation.

Franz Neumann’s essay summarizes Montesquieu’s place in the quarrel over the Frankish constitution, showing that historically Dubos was correct, and not Montesquieu.¹³ Coke and his followers, of course, were also incorrect in their interpretation of English history. But on nearly every other count Montesquieu’s careful research and observations on human nature carried him far beyond the Whiggish and very partisan political quarrels of his heritage. On this crucial question of the origins of monarchy in France the “common-law mind” enjoyed a complete triumph.

II

Steeped as he was in legal and classical history, Montesquieu went far beyond the ordinary predilections of a judge to investigate the forms of government. In the Persian Letters this interest remained second to his passionate concern over changing the course of politics in the Regency of Louis XV. The forms are there, to be sure, but they remain on the second plane as a kind of backdrop for the portrayal of a despotic government and its overthrow. It was Montesquieu’s purpose to describe despotism in its most violent form so that Frenchmen would rally round the system of councils established by the Regent, the Duke of Orleans, to avoid the rise of an all-powerful minister such as Richelieu or Louvois.

Whether Montesquieu set about doing this deliberately, at least at first, is something we shall never know. But the genre with which he chose to depict despotism as it existed in Asia was something well established in political thought. Book III of Herodotus described how the Persians had come to choose monarchy, and how that monarchy had become despotic in the hands of kings who tried to conquer Greece. In the sixteenth century Parisian ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Persian Letters
• Part II Roman History
• Part III The Methodology of the Spirit of Laws
• Part IV Republics
• Part V Monarchies
• Part VI Despotisms
• Part VII England
• Part VIII Religion
• Part IX Commerce, Economics and International Relations
• Part X Philosophy of History
• Name Index