Part I

republic, this formsd a monarchy or more than a monarchy. In

monarchies, the laws have protected the constitution or have been
adapted to it; the principle of the government checks the monarch; but
in a republic when a citizen takes exorbitant power,18 the abuse of this
power is greater because the laws, which have not foreseen it, have
done nothing to check it.
The exception to this rule occurs when the constitution ofthe state is
such that it needs a magistracy with exorbitant power. Such was Rome
with its dictators, such is Venice with its state inquisitors; these are
terrible magistracies which violently return the state to liberty. But how
does it happen that the magistracies are so different in these two
republics? It is because, whereas Venice uses its state inquisitors to
maintain its aristocracy against the nobles, Rome was defending the
remnants of its aristocracy against the people. From this it followed that
the dictator in Rome was installed for only a short time because the
people act from impetuosity and not from design. His magistracy was
exercised with brilliance, as the issue was to intimidate, not to punish,
the people; the dictator was created for but a single affair and had
unlimited authority with regard to that affair alone because he was
always created for unforeseen cases. In Venice, however, there must be
a permanent magistracy: here designs can be laid, followed, sus-
pended, and taken up again; here too, the ambition of one alone
becomes that of a family, and the ambition of one family, that of several.
A hidden magistracy is needed because the crimes it punishes, always
deep-seated, are formed in secrecy and silence. The inquisition of this
magistracy has tobe general because its aim is not to check known evils
but to curb unknown ones. Finally, the Venetian magistracy is
established to avenge the crimes it suspects, whereas the Roman
magistracy used threats more than punishments, even for those crimes
admitted by their instigators.
In every magistracy, the greatness of the power must be offset by the
brevity of its duration. Most legislators have fixed the time at a year; a
longer term would be dangerous, a shorter one would be contrary to the
nature of the thing. Who would Want thus to govern his domestic
" ~ h i sis what caused ihe overihrow of the Roman republic. See the Considtrations on the
Causa of the Grcatness of theRomans and their Decline, Paris, 1755[chap. I I, pp. 107-108;
1965 Eng. edn.].

d~ontesquieuoften uses the verb&mer in the old sense of establishing by giving

shape.
 Laws derivingfrom the nature ofgavernment

affairs? In Ragusa,I9 the head of the republic changes every month; the
other officers, every week; the governor of the castle, every day. This
can take place only in a small republicZ0surrounded by formidable
powers which could easily corrupt petty magistrates.
The best aristocracy is one in which the part of the people having no
share in the power is so small and so poor that the dominant part has no
interest in oppressing it. Thus in Athens when Antipater2' established
that those with less than two thousand drachmas would be excluded
from the right to vote, he formed the best possible aristocracy, because
this census'was so low that it excluded only a few people and no one of
any consequence in the city.
Therefore, aristocratic families should be of the people as far as
possible. The more an aristocracy approaches democracy, the more
perfect it will be, and to the degree it approaches monarchy the less
perfect it will become.
Most imperfect of all is the aristocracy in which the part ofthe people
that obeys is in civil slavery to the part that commands, as in the Polish
aristocracy, where the peasants are slaves of the nobility.
lvUoseph Pinon] Toumefort, Relation dirn vqyagedu Levant. [Not in Tournefort; he did not
write about Ragusa. A probable source is Louis Des Hayes Courmenin, Voiage deLevant,
p p 480, 484,485; 1632 edn.].
11n Lucca, the magistrates are established for only two months.
2 1 ~ i o d o r uSiculus
s [Bibliotheca histonca], bk. 18, p. 601, Rhodoman edition [18.18.4].

'See 13.7 @. 216) for a further discussion of the Athenian census

CHAPTER 4
On laws in their relation to the nature of monarchical
governmentf
Intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers constitute the
nature of monarchical government, that is, of the government in which
one alone governs by fundamental laws. I have said intermediate,
subordinate, and dependent powers; indeed, in a monarchy, the prince
is the source of all political and civil power. These fundamental laws
f ~ h awkwardness
e ofsome ofthe sentences and paragraphs in this chapter reflects the
difficulties inherent in asserting, in the middle of the eighteenth century in France,
that intermediate powers, however understood, were intrinsic to monarchy.