Montesquieu

Modern philosophy

Montesquieu was a French philosopher of the eighteenth century (1689-1755). He is known for his works The Spirit of the Laws and Persian Letters. Born at the Château de la Brède, near Bordeaux, he became a councillor in the Bordeaux parliament. An inheritance allowed him to leave his post, after which he developed a passion for science, politics and philosophy. His works, celebrated throughout Europe, were nonetheless placed on the Index. Shortly before his death, he began contributing to the Encyclopédie.

Montesquieu's Works Summarised on This Site

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The Spirit of Laws

In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu identifies the different types of government (monarchy, aristocracy, republic...) and shows which type of law corresponds to each

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Bibliography

Here are the essential books if you wish to gain a better understanding of this author's thought:

Paul A. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Keegan Callanan, Montesquieu’s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Sharon R. Krause, The Rule of Law in Montesquieu, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Keegan Callanan and Sharon Ruth Krause (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Vickie B. Sullivan, Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe: an interpretation of "The Spirit of the laws", University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Biography: Life of Montesquieu

Youth

Charles Louis de Montesquieu was born in 1689 at the Château de la Brède in the Gironde, near Bordeaux, into a family of the noblesse de robe. His mother died when he was seven.

He was educated at Juilly, in Seine-et-Marne, then at the Collège d'Harcourt in Paris.

In 1708, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law in Bordeaux. After obtaining his law degree, he was called to the bar and settled in Paris, where he moved in intellectual circles.

When his father died in 1713, he inherited the château of la Brède.

At twenty-five, he was appointed councillor to the Parliament of Bordeaux. A year later, in 1715, he married Jeanne de Lartigue, whose dowry brought him considerable wealth.

On the death of his uncle, he inherited a substantial fortune, the title of Baron de Montesquieu, and the office of Président à mortier of the Bordeaux Parliament — which he eventually sold to pay off debts.

He wrote his first work of political philosophy, Dissertation on the Policy of the Romans in Religious Matters. This early essay, lacking real depth, passed largely unnoticed.

Success

He first turned his attention to the sciences, conducting a number of experiments, and was elected to the Bordeaux Academy of Sciences. He wrote essays on physics and medicine.

His literary temperament then asserted itself, and at thirty-two he wrote the Persian Letters, which appeared anonymously in Amsterdam in 1721. The work was a great success, and he was soon identified as its author.

This success opened the doors of the Parisian salons to him, and he remained in the capital for seven years.

Having been elected to the Académie française, he travelled across Europe — Austria, Germany, Italy. He spent a year and a half in England, where he was initiated into Freemasonry.

He studied the political, economic and other characteristics of the countries he visited. This furnished the material for his Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, a major work tracing the history of the Roman Empire from its foundation to its fall.

Beyond this, he was already planning a far larger undertaking.

It would take him fourteen years to complete. In 1748, he finished his masterwork, The Spirit of Laws.

It was published, again anonymously, in Geneva — a country where censorship was less oppressive than in France.

The book was an immediate sensation: translated into every major language and reprinted twenty-two times within eighteen months.

Montesquieu nonetheless faced numerous attacks, which prompted him to write a Defence of The Spirit of Laws. This was not enough to prevent the book from being banned by the Catholic Church and placed on the Index. The Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne condemned seventeen propositions it contained.

The Spirit of Laws exerted a profound influence on the thought of its age. Several decades later, for instance, the drafters of the Constitution of 1791 drew inspiration from it — above all the celebrated doctrine of the separation of powers (executive, legislative and judicial) that would come to define democratic government.

Later Life

Montesquieu continued his travels across Europe, visiting Hungary, Austria and Italy. He was appointed director of the Académie française.

Nearly blind, he lent his prestige to the Encyclopédie project and undertook to write the article on "taste" — though he died before completing it; Voltaire finished it in his stead.

He devoted the last years of his life to rereading and revising certain passages of The Spirit of Laws.

In 1755, he died of a severe fever and was buried in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

Main Works

Persian Letters
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Spirit of Laws