Baron Montesquieu

Generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French lawyer, man of letters, and political
philosopher who lived during the Age of Enlightenment.
He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in
many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to
secure the place of the word "despotism" in the political lexicon.
Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 kilometres (16 mi) south
of Bordeaux.[3] His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble ancestry. His
mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles was seven, was an heiress who brought
the title of Barony of La Brède to the Secondat family.[4] After the death of his mother he was sent to
the Catholic College of Juilly, a prominent school for the children of French nobility, where he
remained from 1700 to 1711.[5] His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron
de Montesquieu.[6] He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. In 1715 he married
Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, who eventually bore him three children.[7] The Baron died in 1716,
leaving him his fortune as well as his title, and the office of Président à Mortier in the Bordeaux
Parliament.[8]
Montesquieu's early life occurred at a time of significant governmental change. England had
declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution (1688–89), and had
joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France the long-
reigning Louis XIV died in 1715 and was succeeded by the five-year-old Louis XV. These national
transformations had a great impact on Montesquieu; he would refer to them repeatedly in his work.

Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to study and writing. He achieved
literary success with the publication of his Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721), a satire
representing society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary Persian visitors to Paris and Europe,
cleverly criticizing the absurdities of contemporary French society. He next published Considérations
sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of
the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans, 1734), considered by some scholars, among his three
best known books, as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. De l'Esprit des Lois
(The Spirit of the Laws) was originally published anonymously in 1748. The book quickly rose to
influence political thought profoundly in Europe and America. In France, the book met with an
unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the regime. The Catholic Church banned
l'Esprit – along with many of Montesquieu's other works – in 1751 and included it on the
Index of Prohibited
Books. It received the highest praise from the rest of Europe, especially Britain.

Montesquieu was also highly regarded in the British colonies in North America as a champion of
liberty (though not of American independence). Political scientist Donald Lutz found that
Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial
pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except
for the Bible.[9] Following the American revolution, Montesquieu's work remained a powerful
influence on many of the American founders, most notably James Madison of Virginia, the
"Father of the Constitution". Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that
no man need be afraid of another"[10] reminded Madison and others that a free and stable
foundation for their new national government required a clearly defined and balanced separation
of powers.

Lettres familières à divers amis d'Italie, 1767

Besides composing additional works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number
of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and 18 months
in England where he became a freemason, admitted to the Horn Tavern Lodge in
Westminster,[11] before resettling in France. He was troubled by poor eyesight, and was
completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He was buried in the Église
Saint-Sulpice, Paris.
Philosophy of history
Montesquieu's philosophy of history minimized the role of individual persons and events. He
expounded the view in Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence that each historical event was driven by a principal movement:

It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of
successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses
when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every
monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by
these causes. And if the chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to
ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle. In a word,
the main trend draws with it all particular accidents.

In discussing the transition from the Republic to the Empire, he suggested that if Caesar and
Pompey had not worked to usurp the government of the Republic, other men would have risen in
their place. The cause was not the ambition of Caesar or Pompey, but the ambition of man.

Political views
Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors, which include Herodotus and Tacitus,
of anthropology, as being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the
political forms in human societies. Indeed, the French political anthropologist Georges Balandier
considered Montesquieu to be "the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the
role of cultural and social anthropology". According to social anthropologist D. F. Pocock,
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of
human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning
of institutions."] Montesquieu's political anthropology gave rise to his theories on government.
When Catherine the Great wrote her Nakaz (Instruction) for the Legislative Assembly she had
created to clarify the existing Russian law code, she avowed borrowing heavily from
Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, although she discarded or altered portions that did not support
Russia's absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.

Montesquieu's most influential work divided French society into three classes (or trias politica, a
term he coined): the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons. Montesquieu saw two types of
governmental power existing: the sovereign and the administrative. The administrative powers
were the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. These should be separate from and
dependent upon each other so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed
that of the other two, either singly or in combination. This was a radical idea because it
completely eliminated the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the
aristocracy, and the people at large represented by the Estates-General, thereby erasing the last
vestige of a feudalistic structure.
Meteorological climate theory
Another example of Montesquieu's anthropological thinking, outlined in The Spirit of the Laws
and hinted at in Persian Letters, is his meteorological climate theory, which holds that climate
may substantially influence the nature of man and his society. By placing an emphasis on
environmental influences as a material condition of life, Montesquieu prefigured modern
anthropology's concern with the impact of material conditions, such as available energy sources,
organized production systems, and technologies, on the growth of complex socio-cultural
systems.

He goes so far as to assert that certain climates are superior to others, the temperate climate of
France being ideal. His view is that people living in very warm countries are "too hot-tempered",
while those in northern countries are "icy" or "stiff". The climate of middle Europe is therefore
optimal. On this point, Montesquieu may well have been influenced by a similar pronouncement
in The Histories of Herodotus, where he makes a distinction between the "ideal" temperate
climate of Greece as opposed to the overly cold climate of Scythia and the overly warm climate
of Egypt. This was a common belief at the time, and can also be found within the medical
writings of Herodotus' times, including the "On Airs, Waters, Places" of the Hippocratic corpus.
One can find a similar statement in Germania by Tacitus, one of Montesquieu's favorite authors.