1) His Biography:
Montesquieu was born in the Château de la Brède, 25 kilometres (16 miles) south of Bordeaux, in southwest France. His father, Jacques de Secondat (1654-1713), was a soldier with a lengthy line of aristocratic ancestors that included Richard de la Pole, the Yorkist contender to the English throne. Marie Françoise de Pesnel (1665-1696), Charles’ mother, was an heiress who gave the Secondat family the title of Barony of La Brède when he was seven years old.
Following his mother’s death, he was transferred to the Catholic College of Juilly, a prestigious institution for the children of French nobles, where he stayed from 1700 until 1711. He became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu, when his father died in 1713. In 1714, he was appointed to the Bordeaux Parliament as a counsellor. He married the Protestant Jeanne de Lartigue the next year, and they had three children together. In 1716, the Baron died, leaving him his riches as well as his title and the position of président à mortier in the Bordeaux Parliament, which he would retain for the next twelve years.
Montesquieu grew up in a period of considerable political transition. Following the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), England proclaimed itself a constitutional monarchy and joined Scotland in the Union of 1707 to become the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France, the long-reigning Louis XIV died in 1715, and the five-year-old Louis XV took his place. Montesquieu was deeply affected by these national developments, and he referred to them often in his writings.
Montesquieu stopped practicing law in order to focus on his studies and writing. With the publication of his 1721 Persian Letters (French: Lettres persanes), a satire depicting society through the perspective of two imagined Persian visitors to Paris and Europe, he attained literary triumph, ingeniously critiquing the follies of current French society. Within a year, the work went through four editions, but the craze for such work faded soon. In 1722, he travelled to Paris and made his way into royal circles with the assistance of Duke of Berwick, whom he had met when Berwick was military governor of Bordeaux.
He also became familiar with Viscount Bolingbroke, an English statesman whose political opinions were eventually included into Montesquieu’s examination of the English constitution. However, since he did not live in Paris, he was denied admission in the Académie Française, and in 1726, he sold his office owing to his hatred because his intellectual inferiors progressed further in court and gained a fortune, reestablishing his dwindling worth. In January 1728, he was welcomed into the Academie after making several concessions, including a house in Paris.
Montesquieu set off on a great tour of Europe in April 1728, accompanied by Berwick’s nephew Lord Waldegrave, and maintained a diary throughout. Austria and Hungary, as well as a year in Italy, were among his destinations. In the company of Lord Chesterfield, he travelled to England at the end of October 1729, when he joined a freemason and was admitted to the Horn Tavern Lodge in Westminster. In the spring of 1731, he returned to La Brède after a brief stay in England. He seemed to be settling down as a squire on the surface, altering his park in the English manner, enquiring into his own lineage, and asserting his seignorial privileges.
But he was never far from his research, and his travels inspired him to think on geography, laws, and traditions, which formed the fundamental sources for his major works on political philosophy at the time. Considerations on the Causes of the Romans’ Greatness and Decline (1734), one of his three best-known works, followed. Some academics see it as a bridge between The Persian Letters and his masterwork The Spirit of the Laws, which was first published anonymously in 1748 and translated into English in 1750. It swiftly ascended to a position of great political influence in Europe and America.
The book was regarded with hostility in France, by both supporters and opponents of the dictatorship. The Spirit was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Catholic Church in 1751, along with several of Montesquieu’s other writings. The rest of Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, praised it highly.
Montesquieu was also recognized as a defender of liberty in the British colonies of North America (though not of American independence). According to one political scientist, he was the most often mentioned authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, with the exception of the Bible, being cited by the American founders more than any other source. Many of the American founders, including James Madison of Virginia, the “Father of the Constitution,” were influenced by Montesquieu’s writings after the American Revolution. Madison and others were reminded by Montesquieu’s concept that “government should be set up so that no man need beware of another” that a free and stable basis for their new national government needed a properly defined and balanced division of powers.
Montesquieu suffered from weak vision, and at the end of his life, he was entirely blind. He went to Paris towards the end of 1754 with the idea of getting out of his lease and eventually retiring to La Brède. However, he became sick quickly and died on February 10, 1755, from a high fever. He was buried at Paris’s Église Saint-Sulpice, but his remains were erased during the Revolution.
2) Main Works:
Persian Letters:
Usbek, accompanied by his teenage buddy Rica, departs his seraglio in Isfahan in 1711 to go on a lengthy voyage to France. He leaves five women in the care of a number of black eunuchs, one of them being the head or first eunuch (Zashi, Zéphis, Fatmé, Zélis, and Roxane). They criticise on several elements of Western, Christian civilization, notably French politics and Moors, in letters written with friends and mullahs, throughout the voyage and their extended stay in Paris (1712–1720), culminating in a caustic parody of the System of John Law. Various difficulties emerge in the seraglio over time, and the situation there swiftly unravels starting in 1717 (Letter 139). Usbek orders his chief eunuch to crack down, but his message is delayed, and a mutiny ensues, resulting in the deaths of his wives, including his favorite, Roxane, and, it seems, the majority of the eunuchs.
The Spirit of Law:
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, published The Spirit of the Laws in 1748. It is a masterpiece of comparative law and political theory. In this essay, Montesquieu makes the case that political institutions must accurately represent the social and geographic characteristics of the local community in order to succeed. He advocates for the abolition of slavery, the maintenance of the legal system and civil liberties, and the establishment of a constitutional form of government.
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline:
Montesquieu initially only intended to devote a few pages on the subject. He was however overwhelmed by the enormity of his subject and decided to broaden the scope of his work from the early Roman Republic to the fall of the late Roman Empire. He starts in 753 BC, which is the conventional year that Rome was founded, and goes on until 1453 AD, when an Ottoman Empire invasion force overthrew Constantinople.
3) Main Themes in his Writings:
Women’s Purity:
In the Persian letters Usbek and his eunuchs think that women’s virtue stems from purity rather than bravery or knowledge. They think that women should be kept away from males other than their spouses, and that a woman who is viewed by a stranger is polluted in some way. As a result, while the ladies are going by litter in the countryside, they must keep all other males at bay, and the women must wear veils at all times.
Potential for Silliness in Religion:
As observed in the Persian Letters, in the Christian religion as it is practiced in France, Usbek observes a lot of inconsistency. He is astounded by the volume of theological discourse, which he believes demonstrates a general lack of clarity and trust. He also points out that certain conceptions, like the Holy Trinity, are fundamentally contradictory. However, in some of the Mollah’s letters explaining why Usbek and other Muslims avoid pork, the “wise” holy man retells an even more absurd narrative than what Usbek is seeing in France.
Philosophy of History:
In Montesquieu’s philosophy of history, the importance of specific individuals and events was downplayed. In Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, he defended the theory that every historical event was influenced by a major movement. He asserted that other men would have risen in their stead if Caesar and Pompey had not worked to usurp the Republic’s authority when discussing the change from the Republic to the Empire. The cause was human ambition, not the ambition of Caesar or Pompey.
Meteorological Climate Theory:
The meteorological climate hypothesis, which maintains that climate may significantly influence the nature of man and his civilization, is another illustration of Montesquieu’s anthropological thought, which is described in The Spirit of Law and alluded to in Persian Letters. Montesquieu anticipated modern anthropology’s interest in the effects of material conditions, such as readily available energy sources, organised production systems, and technologies, on the development of complex socio-cultural systems by emphasising environmental influences as a material condition of life.
He even goes so far as to say that certain climates are preferable to others, with France’s moderate climate being the best. According to him, people in colder nations are “icy” or “stiff,” while those in very hot places are “too hot-tempered.” Middle Europe therefore has the ideal climate. On this issue, Montesquieu might have been influenced by a similar assertion made by Herodotus in The Histories, where he contrasts the “ideal” temperate climate of Greece with the excessively cold and excessively warm climates of Scythia and Egypt.
Theory of the Separation of Powers:
The monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons were the three groups that Montesquieu classified French society into in his most famous work, which he referred to as the trias politica. The sovereign and the administrative were the two categories of governmental authority that Montesquieu recognised as existing. The judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government held administrative powers. These should be independent of and dependent upon one another in order to prevent any one force from having more influence than the other two, either separately or together. This was a novel notion because it did not adhere to the French Monarchy’s three Estates framework, which represents the clergy, the nobility, and the general populace through the Estates-General, removing the final remnant of a feudalistic organisation.
Each Power should only do its particular functions, according to Montesquieu. There won’t be a split or division of powers if the legislative branch appoints the executive and judicial branches, as Montesquieu suggested, because the ability to appoint also entails the authority to revoke. Similar to this, there are three main types of governments, each of which is based on a social “principle”: monarchies, which are free governments led by hereditary figures like kings, queens, or emperors, rely on the principle of honour; republics, which are free governments led by people who are elected by the people; and despotisms, which are enslaved governments led by dictators, rely on fear.
Free governments rely on precarious constitutional frameworks. Four chapters of The Spirit of Law by Montesquieu are devoted to an examination of England, a modern free republic where liberty was upheld by a balance of powers. Montesquieu was concerned that the nobility, which in France served as the prince’s check on power, was losing its influence. Maximilien Robespierre frequently incorporated these concepts of power control into his thought.
4) His Legacy:
One of the most significant theorists of the Enlightenment is considered to be Montesquieu (1689–1755). Students and academics have read his Persian Letters and The Spirit of Law throughout the past 200 years. Montesquieu is renowned for developing the principle of the separation of powers, which is included into numerous constitutions all around the world. Additionally, he is renowned for having done more than any other author to establish the term “despotism” in the political lexicon.