Montesquieu and England

Enlightened Exchanges, 1689–1755

Ursula Haskins Gonthier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138663831
• eBook ISBN: 9781317313779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Gonthier sets Montesquieu's work in the context of early eighteenth-century Anglo-French relations, taking a comparative approach to show how Montesquieu's engagement with English thought and writing persisted throughout his writing career.

1 IMPORTING GOOD SENSE: LETTRES PERSANES (1721)

In 1721 when Montesquieu’s first published work, the Lettres persanes, was printed anonymously in Amsterdam, England and France had been at peace for eight years and had been allies for five. The Anglo–French alliance of 1716 was a direct result of the deaths of England’s Queen Anne and of the French King Louis XIV in 1714 and 1715 respectively. In England, the accession of Anne’s Hanoverian cousin, George I, was intended to preserve the democratic, Protestant regime established by the Glorious Revolution. This regime was however immediately threatened by the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, in which French collusion was suspected. In France, Philippe d’Orléans took over as Regent during Louis XV’s minority (1715–23). He too was in a weak domestic position, his power threatened by the Spanish faction at court who wished to transfer the regency to Philip V of Spain. The two vulnerable rulers therefore decided to cooperate for mutual benefit, concluding an alliance that saw France guarantee the Hanoverian Succession and England pledge support to France against Spain. The Jacobite Pretender was also expelled from French soil.¹ Although the alliance was a matter of political necessity for George I and the French regent it was ‘unpopular and fragile’, and met with significant domestic opposition on both sides of the Channel.² Cardinal Dubois, the French negotiator, writes of the ‘fury’ expressed in pamphlets and public meetings where the alliance was discussed.³ Yet for some French political thinkers, Montesquieu among them, the alliance with England represented the possibility of rapprochement with a nation that they increasingly saw as a model for France to emulate.

Louis XIV’s rule had been synonymous with political absolutism, enforced religious uniformity, and the pursuit of ruinously expensive military campaigns in Europe. His death created a vacuum in French politics that was quickly filled with plans for political and fiscal reform. In the years following the Peace of Utrecht (1713), England’s financial prosperity was in stark contrast with France’s debt-ridden and sclerotic state. French intellectuals of the Regency period began to appreciate the connection between England’s mixed government, commercial entrepreneurialism and flexible mechanisms of public credit, and the nation’s displacement of France as an international power.⁴ French attempts to replicate England’s success did not prosper, however. Hopes that more power would be devolved from the French Crown to the nation’s parlements were briefly encouraged by D’Orléans’s restitution of the parliamentary right of remonstrance in 1715, but this was rescinded in 1718 and traditional absolutist rule resumed. Similarly, John Law’s scheme to establish an English-style banking and share-trading system in France foundered with the collapse of the Mississippi Company in 1720.⁵ As a high-ranking président à mortier of the parlement of Bordeaux from 1716–26, Montesquieu was a keen observer of these developments.⁶ The Lettres persanes are now generally read as a text reflecting the increased intellectual freedom of the Regency and the frustrations of the aristocratic campaigners for reform who had hoped that Louis XIV’s death would lead to the restructuring of France’s political and financial systems.⁷ This interpretation dates from the last decades of the twentieth century, when the pioneering scholarship of Jean Starobinski, Robert Laufer and others overturned the then conventional view of the Lettres persanes as a mere rehearsal of the ideas expressed in L’Esprit des lois.⁸ However, whilst most scholars now acknowledge that the Lettres persanes are firmly rooted in the intellectual and political context of Regency France, many overlook the fact that during this period the Regent and his advisors pursued a policy of entente cordiale with England, a policy welcomed by the more forward-thinking members of the French governing classes.⁹

This chapter will examine how Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes address the evolution of relations between France and England in the Regency period. The image of England and the English that emerges from the text will be compared with that championed by the French establishment, shedding new light on Montesquieu’s views regarding contemporary political culture and constitutional debates. Despite the fact that scholars are now foregrounding the impact of the circulation of ideas across national borders in the early Enlightenment, the potential significance of the Lettres persanes as a site of Anglo–French intellectual exchange has yet to be adequately explored. This is in part due to the fact that the publication of Montesquieu’s first work is often seen as inaugurating the French Enlightenment as an intellectual tradition,¹⁰ a chronology that foreshortens the prehistory of a text which builds on and challenges ideas circulating from the late seventeenth century onwards. This re-examination of the Lettres persanes will analyse how the text acts as a channel for English Enlightenment ideas. This will first involve addressing the question of how ideas from and connected with England were diffused in France in the period prior to the publication of Montesquieu’s first work in 1721.

Regicide, Revolution and Reason: French Views of England in the Early Eighteenth Century

Despite the existence of the Anglo–French alliance, at the time the Lettres persanes appeared English ideas did not benefit from the widespread popularity they later enjoyed in French circles.¹¹ Jeremy Black’s analysis of Anglo–French relations reveals that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the French generally viewed England with a combination of hostility and ignorance.¹² Following the turbulent events of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, England was overwhelmingly associated in French minds with dissent and rebellion. The generalized involvement of the English population in politics was viewed with great suspicion from across the Channel. Jean-Marie Goulemot highlights the fact that the French authorities under the absolutist Louis XIV could not but condemn a nation where the people violated traditional notions of kingship and claimed the right to define the nature of their own government.¹³ Even after Louis’s death, the improvement of diplomatic relations with England in the Regency period did not meet with widespread approval. Prevailing opinion reflected the long-established view of England propagated by French supporters of Bourbon absolutism from Bossuet onwards. In his 1669 funeral sermon for Charles I’s exiled French widow Henrietta-Maria, Bishop Bossuet had deplored the violent vicissitudes of English history culminating in the beheading of Charles I and the establishment of Cromwell’s Protestant Republic. He portrayed France’s rival as a nation tormented by ‘unruly curiosity and a spirit of revolt’. There was an element of self-congratulation underlying such conventional French vilification of the English as heretics and regicides, which enabled commentators to contrast the disordered state of England with that of France. On one side of the Channel, Catholicism and absolutism guaranteed security and stability, whilst on the other could be observed ‘unbridled libertinism; laws abolished; the throne violated by unprecedented abuses; usurpation and tyranny practised in the name of liberty’.¹⁴

Following the deposition of James II by parliament in 1688, England and the English were even more firmly identified in French minds with the idea of popular revolution and destructive regime change.¹⁵ Works such as the père d’Orléans’s Histoire des révolutions d’Angleterre (1693–4) reinforced this view, highlighting the dangerous instability of the English political system and praising French absolutism.¹⁶ D’Orléans’s Histoire was dedicated to Louis XIV, and presented to the king as: ‘the portrait of a monarchy as subject to change, as your conduct is unchangeable’.¹⁷ Reprinted in 1695, 1714 and 1719, his work was evidently still seen as relevant at the time the Lettres persanes were written. Likewise Claude Jordan de Colombier’s eight-volume Voyages historiques de l’Europe, originally published in 1692, achieved its fifth edition in 1721. The volume of the Voyages dedicated to England reiterated the view that ‘the [English] people are cruel, harsh and seditious … The ancient Britons were warmongers, and frequently took up arms to defend their liberty. This remains the character of Englishmen today’.¹⁸ Colombier presented the Stuarts as the legitimate monarchs of Great Britain; a view propagated by official French sources until the Treaty of Utrecht obliged France to recognize the Protestant succession.¹⁹ Anti-Hanoverian propaganda was subsequently diffused by Jacobite refugees who sought exile in France following the failed uprising of 1715. The Jacobite Andrew Ramsay (commonly known as the Chevalier Ramsay due to his French connections), published his Essay de politique in France in 1719. The essay was an attack on what Ramsay saw as England’s illegitimate and anarchic regime. He declared that ‘all government must necessarily be absolute’ if men were not to live in a state of ‘savage liberty’.²⁰ Dedicating his work to the Old Pretender, Ramsay claimed that the existing English political system would soon collapse, allowing the Stuarts to reclaim the throne.

The view that England was continually poised on the brink of another bloody civil war was held even by moderately sympathetic commentators such as the Huguenot historian Paul Rapin de Thoyras, whose Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys (1717) stressed the volatility of England’s political regime and the violence of party sentiment.²¹ Even when reporting contemporary events, French commentators’ views were coloured by English history. For instance, the hard-fought general election of 1715 which saw the triumph of the Whigs was reported in French gazettes as exemplifying the turbulence, violence and corruption endemic in English politics.²² This was typical of reports concerning England in the domestic French press. Analysis of early issues of the Mercure Galant (founded 1672, later renamed Mercure de France) has shown that England was rarely mentioned other than in a hostile context emphasising the nation’s state of apparent lawlessness. Before the 1720s only a dozen or so articles appeared that portrayed English culture in any positive light. Even compliments were frequently double-edged; the reviewer of Joseph Addison’s play Cato praises the English playwright’s style but notes his violation of neo-classical theatrical tenets, commenting: ‘The English will one day have to learn to subdue their wild imagination and submit to the yoke of convention’.²³ In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France, therefore, accurate knowledge of England and the English was scanty. Neither the scientific and philosophical developments of the nascent English Enlightenment, nor the system of parliamentary democracy established by the Bill of Rights in 1689 were made widely intelligible to the French population. Few attempts were made to alter the longstanding image of the English established in French public opinion.

However, if domestic French publications provided little information concerning the new developments in English politics and philosophy, in the period following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the periodicals founded by the exiled Protestant journalists of the Refuge provided francophone readers across Europe with a new supply of information on England and the English. The crucial role played by publications such as Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque universelle et historique, Henri Basnage de Beauval’s Histoire des ouvrages des savants and Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in the diffusion of enlightened ideas is now widely recognized.²⁴ Discussions regarding the importance of the press in the emergence of the public sphere have also drawn attention to Huguenot journalism. There is a view that the development of a fully functioning public sphere in early eighteenth-century France was handicapped by the nation’s lack of a free press. Journals such as the Mercure de France merely reflected official opinion, and French readers who wished to see state policy debated or criticized, or who sought information on intellectual advances outside France, had to turn to the Huguenot periodicals.²⁵ These publications therefore constituted a francophone, if not a French, forum for the free exchange of ideas during the early Enlightenment. Montesquieu is known to have been an avid reader of these periodicals, as evidenced by the holdings of his library at La Brède and the references and press cuttings contained in the his notebooks.²⁶ Despite this, scholars often overlook the fact that the controversial depiction of Regency France in the Lettres persanes could have been informed by the critical ideas and opinions expressed in the francophone periodical press in the early eighteenth century.²⁷ There is moreover much to be gained by including the Huguenot periodicals among the sources of the Lettres persanes. Firstly, they represent a possible answer to questions that have arisen previously regarding the provenance of certain ideas contained in the text. Secondly, an examination of the views expressed by Huguenot journalists provides a new insight into the passages concerning England and the English in the Lettres persanes.

Across the range of journals published in Holland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, several general trends of opinion emerge. Above all, it is noticeable that the Huguenots’ reporting of events in England is far from innocent. Having suffered at the hands of the French authorities who viewed French Protestants – like their co-religionists the English – as heretics and rebels, the exiled Huguenots used their journals to strike back at the absolutist government of Louis XIV.²⁸ Particularly where questions of political liberty or religious tolerance were concerned, the exiled journalists tended to conflate praise for English practices with criticism of the French government.²⁹ According to this logic, English policies and ideas were often explained to francophone readers in terms that highlighted the contrasting injustice of the French state. Even literary journals such as the Bibliothèque angloise, founded to combat the ignorance that prevailed in France where English literature was concerned, retained this polemical function to some extent. In this publication, to which Montesquieu subscribed, the writer presents a carefully chosen selection of English texts to the reader, designed to create a particular impression.³⁰ The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are summarized in every issue, showing England to be at the forefront of scientific progress, and works by English authors are reviewed and excerpts translated. Again, these works are selected with a view to modifying the negative views a francophone reader might harbour towards England. For example, when reviewing a collection of Locke’s works in 1720, the journalist singles out The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina for particular attention. He comments that: ‘One sees throughout this work a clear image of the English character and style of government. He [Locke] extracts from the laws of his native kingdom all that is most conducive to happiness, and to the liberty of the people’. In a clever rhetorical move, the reviewer exhorts readers not to accept unquestioningly his own opinion of Locke’s work, and upholds ‘the liberty that all men have to judge for themselves’.³¹ This reinforces the impression given throughout the journal that contact with English thought is synonymous with intellectual, and by implication political and religious, independence.

The English Exception

Contrary to the views expressed by the French establishment, by exiled Jacobites and by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Anglo–French Relations in the Early Enlightenment
• 1 Importing Good Sense: Lettres persanes (1721)
• 2 In Search of Enlightenment: Voyages en Europe (1728–31)
• 3 Reconsidering Rome: Considérations sur les … Romains (1734)
• 4 Cosmopolitan Constitutionalism: L’Esprit des lois (1748)
• 5 Aesthetic Allegiances: Essai sur le goût (c. 1753–5) Conclusion: Spheres of Influence
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index