Montesquieu
 019287649X, 0192876481

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Judith N. Shklar

Montesquieu

Oxford

New York

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1987

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling fay a Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press © fudith N. Shklar 1987 First published 1987 as an Oxford University Press paperback and simultaneously in a hardback edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Shklar, fudith N. Montesquieu.—(Past masters). 1. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,

baron de

I. Title II. Series 194 B2097 ISBN 0-19-287649-X ISBN 0-19-287648-1 Pbk Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Shklar, fudith N. Montesquieu. (Past masters) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 1689-1755—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 1689-1755. De l’esprit des lois. I. Title. II. Series. PQ2012.S53 1987 320.5’ 092’ 4 87-5785 ISBN 0-19-287649-X ISBN 0-19-287648-1 (pbk.) Set by Grove Graphics Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd. Guildford and King’s Lynn

For John Rawls

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my daughter Ruth for helping me with both the content and the style of this book, and to my friends Stanley Hoffmann and Stephen Holmes for their criticisms and encouragement. I also want to thank Humaira Ahmed for helping me prepare the manuscript. This book is based on the Carlyle Lectures that I gave in Oxford in 1986 and I am much indebted to the Carlyle Trust for their invitation and support. Oxford November 1986

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Contents

Abbreviations

viii

1

The making of a polymath

2

The Persian Letters: how others see us

3

Philosophical history: the rise and decline of the Romans

4

The Spirit of the Laws: constraint and liberty

5

The Spirit of the Laws: necessity and freedom

6

The father of constitutions Further reading Index

1 29

49 67 93

111

127

132

Vll

Abbreviations

O.C. stands for CEuvres completes de Montesquieu, edited by Andre Masson (Paris, Les Editions Nagel, 1950-5). References to The Persian Letters are to the individual letters and are given in lower-case Roman numerals. Romans refers to Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence, in O.C., vol. I. All references to it are to page numbers. Spirit refers to L’Esprit des lois, in O.C., vol. I. References are to books, given in upper-case Roman numerals, followed by chapters in Arabic numbers. Pensees are numbered as they appear in O.C., vol. II.

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1

The making of a polymath

Charles-Louis de Secondat, the future Baron de Montesquieu, was born on 19 January 1689 at the chateau of La Brede, near Bordeaux, into a family of magistrates, soldiers, and ecclesiastics. His great-grandfather had been a Protestant in the service of Henri IV, who had rewarded him by raising his property, Montesquieu, to a barony. His heirs returned to Catholicism and continued to prosper. Both of Charles-Louis's grandfathers were presidents of the parlement at Bordeaux, and his oldest uncle inherited that office. Charles-Louis's father, Jacques de Secondat, became a soldier and the boy's other paternal uncles and aunts entered the Church. When he was in his thirties Jacques de Secondat left the army to return home and marry MarieFrancoise de Pesnel, an heiress of a very old noble family, who brought him the estate of La Brede as part of her dowry. They had four surviving children, two sons and two daughters. Charles-Louis, the eldest, was 7 years old when his mother died in childbirth. Her widowed husband wrote a brief but moving account of her character for their children. She had the mind of an astute man of business, he told them, and had no taste for trivialities. Her love for her children was exceptional and she was intensely religious. These, clearly, were the qualities most admired in a provincial noblewoman. Her eldest son inherited her property and the title of Baron de la Brede, and eventually he too was to marry a devout woman, who managed his business affairs very capably while he was away in Paris or travelling abroad. His brother and two sisters entered the Church. In keeping with the practices of the time, Charles-Louis was put out to nurse, and spent the first three years of his life in the family of a miller. That is where he learned to 1

Montesquieu speak and he apparently never lost the local accent. Until he was 11 he was tutored at home with two cousins and then the three boys were sent to a famous school at Juilly run by the Congregation of the Oratory. It was said to be a modern establishment: geography, science, mathematics, French, and French history were taught along with the usual classical subjects. Greek was not stressed. Jacques de Secondat gave both his sons an expensive education. The younger one, Jean-Baptiste, also went to Juilly and then to the Sorbonne before assuming his ecclesiastical duties. Charles-Louis entered the University of Bordeaux to study law, receiving his degree in 1708, and then went to Paris for more legal training. Fie later said that his father had made him undertake these studies, but he seems to have been a willing and very diligent pupil. There are six large notebooks filled with notes in his hand on Roman, French, and local law, as well as on cases that he had attended while he was in Paris. Fie was being prepared for a career as a high magistrate, since his uncle had no surviving sons and would therefore leave his title and office to his eldest nephew. State offices were a form of property, and as such were meant to stay in families. The ecclesiastical uncle also resigned his benefice in favour of Jean-Baptiste, his younger nephew. Even with these expectations the two boys received an unusually good education. Most of the new magistrates knew almost no law, because the university required no examinations and the parlement's own qualifying test was a joke. All one needed to become a magistrate was to belong to a good family, and to be rich and Catholic. When his father died in 1713 Montesquieu returned home, took possession of his estates, and, as was expected of him, looked around for a wife. Two years later he and Jeanne de Lartigue were married in a very quiet ceremony. She came from a suitable family, but was a practising Calvinist and continued to adhere to her faith in spite of the real dangers and disabilities that this involved. We know

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The making of a polymath nothing more about her, except that she was the mother of Montesquieu's children - a son and two daughters. There are good reasons for believing that Montesquieu was not a faithful husband. Until he published his novel, The Persian Letters, in 1721, Montesquieu's conduct seems to have been entirely conventional for a man of his class and fortune. He had inherited his uncle's office in 1716, and as he had not yet reached the required age to assume it, he had to ask for a special dispensation which was granted, as usual, for a fee. He was now a fairly wealthy man. His uncle had left him some valuable property and the office of president a mortier was a considerable investment. Like most of the local nobility he was keenly interested in developing his estates. For a provincial city Bordeaux was a lively and commercially extremely active place. It was unusually cosmopolitan because the wine trade brought a lot of foreign businessmen to the city. There had once been a large Protestant population which had suffered horribly during the religious wars, and whose remnants were in constant danger during Louis XIV's persecutions. At the time of the Fronde the notables of the region had joined in the rebellion, but by the eighteenth century calm had returned to Bordeaux. Its nobility fell into three groups. The old 'nobility of the sword' were neither rich nor distinguished and lived in sleepy little towns. There was a small group of newly ennobled local magistrates, who played a significant part in local politics but not in the social hierarchy of the city. The people who really mattered economically and socially belonged to the 'nobility of the robe', like Montesquieu. They held all the high offices and owned most of the land. Almost all the vineyards were in their possession and they constantly increased them at the expense of their tenants, who were driven off the best land. These noblemen were, moreover, not only growers, but were actively involved in every aspect of the wine trade. Many also invested in the export and import trades

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Montesquieu including the slave traffic, without loss of social standing. They were generally far less interested in their feudal dues than in expanding the market for their produce and in increasing their commercially valuable holdings. Their relations with the government in Paris were as a result often acrimonious, since they resisted any effort to raise taxes on vineyards, to limit production, or to protect small growers. Montesquieu was an active member of this commercial aristocracy, and indeed wrote a pamphlet against the government's plans to regulate the local vineyards. Whatever these members of the French aristocracy may have been, they were not poor, indolent, or dull. The pailement of Bordeaux, run by the nobility of the robe, had a stormy history of constant conflict with the Crown and its chief administrative representative, the intendant of the province. They also quarrelled with the city council. Their main responsibilities were judicial, but they had enough administrative functions to exacerbate these chronic disputes. The pailements were also still expected to register royal decrees and had the right to address remonstrances to the king, but these privileges had ceased to be meaningful, since the king and his ministers regularly disregarded them. As gestures they only permitted the pailements to maintain the fiction that they were the guardians of the ancient French constitution. Internally the pailement of Bordeaux was organized in a strict hierarchy. At the top was the president, who was appointed by the king and who both represented the Crown in the pailement and spoke for the pailement as a whole to the rest of the official world. Right below him were nine piesidents a moitiei (so called because of the hats they wore), who acted for him in his absence. Montesquieu was a member of this group. Below them were four lesser presidents and eighty-four councillors. With the exception of the presidency every one of these offices could be bought, sold, leased, or inherited. The price depended on the

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The making of a polymath prestige of the office, which was its main attraction, since the financial returns on the investment were meagre, coming mostly out of the fees paid by plaintiffs. The work was, however, not demanding. Barely six months a year were spent in listening to cases, and litigants were not well served. Justice was slow and uncertain. A great deal of time and energy was consumed by internal bickering, mainly about points of precedence, which the men of the robe took very seriously. Their judicial work was conducted in five specialized chambers. Montesquieu presided over the Tournelle, the criminal division, throughout the eleven years of his presidency. There he administered sinister prisons in which the accused were held while they awaited trial, and took part in the infliction of torture, which was a normal part of criminal investigations. He also meted out the usual punishments of execution, deportation to criminal colonies, and service in the galleys. We do not know what he thought about these practices while he was engaged in them, but when he later pleaded for the reform of the criminal law and an end to torture and brutal punishments, he spoke with the voice of someone who had a direct knowledge of these subjects. Montesquieu does not seem to have been on the best of terms with his colleagues in the parlement. He was frequently absent and got into arguments about work loads. Boredom may have troubled him too. Procedure particularly eluded him, which annoyed him because he had noticed that even very stupid people could remember its rules easily. On the positive side, his standards of judicial conduct were high, and he claimed that on the whole he had lived up to them. We certainly know that even as a young man Montesquieu knew a lot of law, more probably than most of the other magistrates, but his interest in it was obviously scholarly, not practical. His correspondence indeed makes it clear that the Academie of Bordeaux, far more than its parlement, was the real centre of his social and intellectual life.

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Montesquieu Local academies were appearing in many towns in France at the time, and Bordeaux's learned society was neither unique nor particularly distinguished, except for having Montesquieu as its leading member. Voltaire's unkind remark, that provincial academies were like nice girls who never caused anyone to talk about them, was perfectly true. The Academie of Bordeaux had begun as an informal literary and musical society, but when Montesquieu was elected to it in 1716 it had already received a royal patent and had also turned its attention to the natural sciences. Montesquieu heartily approved of that move, since he thought that such a body could do nothing worthwhile for literature but might well make useful contributions to science. To that end he endowed a prize for anatomy, the noble patron of the Academie, the due de Force, having already provided one for physics. There were nine full members when he joined, all local notables, and some of them remained his best as well as his oldest friends. Fie was to be the director of the Academie for four terms and he continued to take a genuine interest in its affairs long after he had ceased to attend its meetings. At one time he had hoped that the intellectual life of the provinces would not be inferior to that of Paris, but in fact no single work of distinction emerged from the Academie of Bordeaux, and in retrospect one sees that creativity may not have been the real purpose of its sessions. They served to introduce the local elites to the totally new world of modern science. The organization of the Academie was a mirror of the social structure of Bordeaux. Its regular, or 'ordinary', members were all notables of the parlement. Below them were a larger number of associates and then aspirants, each lower down in the social ladder, but they were often intellectually quite distinguished. Most of the members were genuinely enthusiastic amateur scientists, well read and even learned in some cases. They took their reports to their fellow members very seriously, and gave out prizes only after careful deliberations. In his capacity as director

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The making of a polymath Montesquieu was obliged to make summaries of and report on all the papers submitted for these prize competitions. For his personal development, and ultimately that of France, it is significant that there was a certain tension in these arrangements which was at least potentially radicalizing. While the inner life of the Academie was rigidly hierarchical and traditional, no attention at all was paid to the social standing of the scientists who sent papers to it. They were judged entirely on their intellectual merits. One way to deal with this mixture of social exclusion and intellectual openness in a society in which everyone was meant to serve the same ends, was to stress the social usefulness of the Academic's work. Its members were serving the public good by encouraging the sciences and by promoting morally and socially useful studies. The notion of social utility is, however, not without its ambiguities either. For as a measure of social worth it bears no intrinsic relation to ancestry and hereditary social standing. Like scientific accomplishment it is wholly a matter of personal achievements, not of family rank. Both science and utility, moreover, look to the future and not to the past. Results, not origins, matter. As patrons of science the full academicians stood on a shaky bridge between the social habits of a caste society and their new values of individual achievement and utility. That science stood outside the prevailing constraints of social hierarchies and political authority was a doctrine that Descartes had already promoted, and its acceptance by the provincial academies all over France was one of his major legacies. The very nature of their enormous admiration for Descartes, however, also had its ethical complexities. Montesquieu read a paper to the Academie that was very revealing in this respect. Fie began by praising Descartes's system as immortal, grand in its simplicity and in the perfection of its proofs. Descartes had been the master of the critical method and had dispelled the errors of the old philosophy. Nevertheless, he had been proved wrong on many particular

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Montesquieu points and future generations would surely go far beyond him. This did not, however, in any way diminish his glory,on the contrary, it only showed that he had forged the arms which were turned against his errors. He had taught all posterity to accept nothing on trust, even his own philosophy. This was a very new view of human greatness. Great men used to be praised for living up to the example of their illustrious ancestors or to a classical, static model of a noble character. Human greatness was now to be found in the future benefits of a life's work and it was a matter of utility. Scientists were dignified by their contribution to an ever-changing, collectively augmented body of knowledge, and it was very much to their credit if they helped their successors to prove them wrong. To be self-effacing in this way had nothing to do with personal modesty. It was a new, dynamic vision of human greatness. These ideas were being promoted with particular energy by Fontenelle, the permanent secretary of the Academie des Sciences in Paris, whom Montesquieu had met there. This inherently dynamic and radical ethic cannot have been easily absorbed by the provincial academicians and it jostled uneasily side by side with their inherited social beliefs. Montesquieu only very gradually abandoned the more traditional outlook, and for years these two irreconcilable attitudes competed for his moral allegiance. His chronic state of doubt and sense of the multiplicity and diversity of human beliefs surely owed something to the clash of ethical commitments in his own mind. Montesquieu not only wrote comments on the work of contestants for the Academie,- he read works of his own before it and also made himself the spokesman of its ethical aspirations. When in 1725 he presented 'A Discourse on the Motives which Ought to Encourage us to Pursue the Sciences', he had already come to his most fundamental and enduring conviction: that science is our best moral medicine. Science cures us of destructive prejudices and prevents their recurrence. It also makes us happy, because

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The making of a polymath we are bound to feel a profound self-satisfaction as we improve the quality of our minds and become more and more intelligent. We are, moreover, naturally moved by curiosity and it calls us to the pursuit of science. Not only does science make us individually more rational, it also makes us useful as we contribute our brick to the building of a great intellectual edifice, which is gratifying. The social and economic usefulness of the sciences is another incentive to engage in research. It will generate new commodities, more commerce, navigation, and other sources of wealth. Medicine, navigation, astronomy, and geography had already benefited from the work of scientists, and would continue to do so. Who would not want to join them in efforts that left mankind so much better off than before? Finally, ignorance was dangerous. Who would care to suffer the fate of the hapless American Indians, who lacked the technology to defend themselves against the murderous atttacks of the Spaniards? This was a perfect summary of the aspirations of the provincial academicians and it validated their procedures and activities, at least in their own eyes. The Academie had certainly a more than purely intellectual value for Montesquieu. He saw it as a 'temple' of peace in a world that was too often at war. It was the one place where criticism had replaced violence. Sometimes Montesquieu entertained great ambitions for the Academie. He once even proposed that it undertake an enormously difficult natural history of the ancient and modern world. These proposals came to nothing, but they reveal the extent of Montesquieu's scientific hopes. Like other members he reported on papers and discussed subjects which he understood only poorly, such as the causes of the echo, the weight of bodies and their transparency, meteorological questions and anatomical observations, but the information he acquired in the process was evidently important and even inspiring to him. Without the proceedings of the provincial academies he, his fellow

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Montesquieu members, and others like them all over France would not have known nearly as much about scientific thinking and work. Irresistibly they were being pulled into the modern age. On the whole, although Montesquieu was occupied with its affairs to the end of his days, the Academie of Bordeaux probably did much more for him than he did for it. Great though his hopes and admiration for science were, Montesquieu was not always optimistic about its future. Like many of his contemporaries, he feared that the great age of discoveries was over. That did not, of course, diminish the moral dignity of science or its social usefulness, but it was a very real worry. And it may well have been justified by the lack of any progress in the life sciences in the first half of the eighteenth century. After a prolonged period rich in spectacular but futile speculations and disputes, they seemed to have reached a dead end. Medicine was in a particularly unpromising state. No intelligent person believed that physicians could cure any diseases. Biology was overrun with amateurs who engaged in random observations and whose sense of evidence was poor or wholly non-existent. Montesquieu was in these respects no more competent than other gentlemanly laymen. He owned several microscopes and looked at the organs of various animals through them, and then wrote up what he thought he had seen. His reading was eclectic, and he disliked and knew nothing about mathematics and physics. So while he knew many of the leading scientists of his day well, no one ever suggested that he be elected to the highly professional Academie des Sciences. Nevertheless, when Buffon was asked to list the greatest men, he named Bacon, Newton, Leibniz, Montesquieu, and, modestly, himself. This was not an isolated judgement. In his eulogy of Montesquieu, the mathematician d'Alembert was to speak of him as 'a Newton in his science', and the Swiss botanist Charles Bonnet made the same comparison. The celebrated biologist Maupertuis spoke of him in similar

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The making of a polymath terms. These men of science had some reservations about one or another aspect of Montesquieu's writings, but they all saw him as one of their own, and for good reasons. He spoke in their vocabulary and he shared many of their most pressing intellectual perplexities. Among these was the transition, not yet wholly complete, from theology to an entirely natural science of man. This was especially urgent in the movement from Descartes's metaphysical dualism of soul and body to a naturalistic human psychology grounded in physiology. Instead of body and soul, and the moral and physical determinants of behaviour as effects of the divine will, biologists wanted to talk only of the natural causes of human development and dysfunction. They kept the old terms, but emptied them as much as possible of any supernatural implications. The language of causality in general had to be altered as well. The words remained the same, but their meaning was changed. General and occasional causes were no longer modes of God's creative activity, but now referred to natural causes, some of which were enduring while others were mere accidents. In the scholarly medical literature especially, these terms were applied to the deep causes of diseases as contrasted to their surface symptoms. In a comment on a medical paper by one of the members of the Academie, Montesquieu specifically praised the author for seeking out the general causes of diseases rather than just discussing particular cases. Eventually he was to make the new language of natural causality the focus of his project as a political historian. It was this part of his work that drew the admiration of the natural scientists. He had, one of them wrote in a letter, discovered the laws of the mental world as Newton had found those of the material universe, and it was a comparable achievement. If it is absurd to claim that Montesquieu was a serious natural scientist, he nevertheless learned from the biologists, and especially from medical texts, what he needed to know in order to develop a science of man as a

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Montesquieu social being. The very core of his political theory depended on ideas about the ways in which the physical environment, especially the climate, impinges upon human character and political institutions, and he built it from the first out of materials he had gathered in his reading of the works of physicians. It was they who gave his mind its particular cast. Like them he wanted to develop a science capable of identifying and describing the course of diseases, except that he was looking not at physical illnesses but at social collapse and the deadly condition of despotism. On the road to his life's work he had therefore to learn how to think scientifically about the functions and failures of the human body, or 'our machine', as he and his favourite authors called it. On the whole he tended to favour the 'vitalists' among the physicians, those who believed that the body was in a constant state of 'ferment', or chemical interaction between its liquid substances, or 'humours'. When an imbalance occurred between these, disease set in. In keeping with this outlook, Montesquieu sided with the more radical 'epigenecists' in the raging argument about human generation. The orthodox theory of reproduction in the early eighteenth century was 'preformation', that is, that either the male sperm or the female ovum contained a 'germ' which was a minuscule but complete human being. Contact between the two sexes merely started its growth off, but God had already created all mankind once and for all time. A few distinguished biologists, however, rejected this theory in favour of the notion that male and female fluids stimulated by heat fortuitously combined to form an embryo. The chief merit of this view was that it dispensed with divine intervention altogether, and also accounted adequately for the fact that children inherit the characteristics of both parents. Preformationists thought that intra-uterine influences accounted for that. The environment in fact played an enormous part in both these theories, because both believed in the heritability of social characteristics. Epigenesis, however, also made great and

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The making of a polymath genuine biological changes seem possible. Montesquieu actually believed that new plant and animal species might appear on earth as a result of different mixtures of liquids. Montesquieu at times thought that the 'absent God'; mentioned in the Bible, was completely irresponsible, since He had abandoned us with nothing but a blind faith to guide us. In fact, he also thought that God had created and withdrawn from the world, and had been replaced by a spontaneous, self-generating, and self-maintaining nature. It was a notion that had not only a scientific but also an aesthetic appeal for him. He wanted to think of nature as dynamic and ever-changing. 'Everything is animated, everything is organized', he wrote in his notebook, and among nature's marvels none was more stunning than the human body. 'When one observes the immutable laws that are followed in this little empire, and considers these numberless parts that all work together for the common good, these animal spirits so imperious and yet so obedient, these movements so submissive and yet so free at times; this will that commands like a queen, and obeys like a slave, these well-regulated periods, this machine so simple in its actions and so complex in its springs; this constant renewal of energy and life; this miracle of reproduction and generation, and always new relief for new needs: what a grand idea of wisdom and economy!' Here is nature's masterpiece. Nature is creative, self-regenerating, admirable, beautiful, exciting, and even lovable. To contemplate and understand it is the most edifying activity open to us. It allows us to participate in an expansive and transforming experience. Far from condemning us to an Epicurean melancholy, the rise and fall of whole species merely reveals the endless fecundity of God's original design. That may be why, rather late in life, Montesquieu wrote to Bishop Warburton that to attack revealed religion was merely to dispute some particular doctrine, but that to reject natural religion was to assault religion as such, which 13

Montesquieu could be socially dangerous and contrary to our natural sentiments. The interaction between mind and body was a part of every physiological controversy of the time. It was also of the umost interest to moral and political philosophy. Both sides of the generation controversy, for instance, explained birth defects as the result of something that had upset the mother during pregnancy. Behind all these disputes stood Descartes's unbridgeable dualism. Montesquieu tended to join those scientists who modified Descartes with a notion of two souls, one rational, the other sensitive. The latter controls the 'animal spirits' which stimulate the body's motions and carry the messages of the senses to the mind. The 'humours' also impinge upon the sensitive soul and through them so does the entire physical environment, especially the climate. Indeed, the entire life-style of a patient affects his case and gives it a personal character, because physical and moral causes are inextricably combined in both human health and illness. The most important change in usage here was to turn from body and soul to the physical and moral causes of conduct, thus bypassing the Cartesian and religious soul altogether. Montesquieu at once appreciated this intellectual strategy, though he was not a radical materialist. To be sure he was sometimes tempted to follow the most materialist medical writers who claimed that the soul was composed of infinitely small particles and that human beings could be fully understood in terms of extension and motion. More generally he rejected this proposition because it did not sufficiently distinguish men from animals. Montesquieu's real interest in the relations between mind and body simply was not philosophical. What he wanted to know was how physical and moral causes affected the development of the characters of individuals and groups over long periods of time and how they changed. Like the medical writers, he needed a theory that would explain the causes of both wellbeing and suffering, not speculations about the essence of

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The making of a polymath the soul. In this as in so many other ways he joined the culture of the life scientists, though for purposes of his own. He certainly believed, as Hippocrates had, that a knowledge of medicine was an essential part of a good education. Montesquieu's personal communications to the Academie were not on scientific subjects, but on history and political theory. He was remarkably constant in his intellectual interests. Most of his earliest jottings and essays were to reappear in a more developed form in his mature works. The library at La Brede and his own and his secretaries' notes show him to have been an avid reader throughout his life. In addition to the sciences, he was a careful reader of the ancient and modern historians and philosophers. (Plutarch was a special favourite.) He kept up with current literature in all its genres and was particularly interested in the reports of travellers. Geography and ethnography obviously fascinated him. Among modern authors, Descartes was a real presence, but the Essays of Montaigne left the deepest recognizable traces on many of his pages, and Montesquieu's contemporaries were quick to recognize the affinity. Above all, he simply loved information, and he was a tireless collector of bits and pieces of fact, such as clippings from the English and Dutch newspapers, which he filed away. All this reading at first inspired reflections which were quite conventional, as indeed he seemed to be in his early years in Bordeaux. It was not until he was over 30 years old that the originality of his mind suddenly found expression in a sensational novel. Among his earliest literary plans was a treatise on duties, in imitation of Cicero's Offices, but he gave it up because it seemed too vague. He continued to admire Cicero's character and religious rationalism, but did not choose to copy him. The most substantial part of the work on duties remaining is a section on the politiques, that is, statesmen who tended to be Machiavellian opportunists. Montesquieu did not object to them on moral grounds, but he found them 15

Montesquieu intellectually shallow. They crudely overestimated the possibility of predicting and planning for the future. The real causes of significant historical events lie far in the past and are too obscure for us to be able either to promote or to avert them. Thus Charles I of England was certainly an unusually incompetent ruler, but no degree of intelligence could have prevented the storm that engulfed him, because its origins went back to the policies of the first Tudors. Montesquieu was inclined to agree with Thucydides that mediocrities make the best statesmen, because they are not likely to enter upon bold and ruinous adventures. Machiavelli and his heirs were too prone to take unwise risks. Montesquieu's moral tone was subdued in this case, but it became more strident in an essay on sincerity, also written for the Academie. To practise a false politeness in private life, he noted, deprives us of the possibility of genuine friendship; but his real target was public flattery at the royal court. This was an enduring object of his loathing. A sincere man at court would be like a free man among slaves. Clearly Montesquieu was a fairly disaffected aristocrat throughout his life. Among these moral essays there is one on reputations, which reveals Montesquieu's early interest in social change. Reputations, he observed, are entirely dependent upon the values of a given time and place. If one longs for fame, one must know exactly what the spirit of one's age happens to be at that moment. Finally, he tried his hand at writing double lives in the manner of Plutarch, but that seems to have been a casual diversion. The most substantial essays of Montesquieu's Bordeaux years were on public finance and universal monarchy, and both touched upon one of the central political preoccupations of his life: the structure of empires generally and the futility and danger of wars of imperial conquest particularly. One of these papers, on the wealth or, to be exact, the impoverishment of Spain, was to become a part of The Spirit of the Laws in virtually unaltered form. In

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The making of a polymath its first version it was a companion piece to an essay on the possibility of a universal monarchy in modern Europe. Europe had become a single economic unit, and every part depended on the others, so that wars among its states had, he argued, become inconclusive, too prolonged, and simply too expensive and self-destructive. The cost of large armies had also become exorbitant. They were, moreover, useless, for the great European states were not to be conquered by their continental rivals. The example of Spain, in his view, proved all of these propositions conclusively. The imperial project, he was sure, had become a hopeless enterprise. The Spanish kings had hoped to conquer Europe with armies paid out of the gold extracted from their newly discovered American possessions. Instead they had ruined Spain. The vast influx of gold merely lowered its value and created a price inflation. The amounts that could be transported remained constant, but production costs went up and up as the value of the gold fell and fell. The local miners, he was to note later, received nothing for their labours, so no local economy grew up around the American mines as it did in Germany and Hungary. The Spaniards, unlike the English and the Dutch, did not invest their gold in commercial ventures, they just hoarded it and wasted it on wars, as their taxable wealth declined. These notes prepared in 1724 and his later treatment of the same topic have earned Montesquieu the admiration of modern economists, especially Lord Keynes. Montesquieu's earliest paper on public finance had a more immediate target. In 1715, right after the death of Louis XIV, he wrote a memoir on the public debt of France, in the clear hope of influencing the new government, which was confronted with chronic and severe financial difficulties. His proposal was an ingenious scheme for repudiating the debt rather than raising taxes. The biggest change was the suggestion that the king take over the debts of the clergy in return for regular future tax 17

Montesquieu payments. Retrenchments were suggested, but the main point of the project was that the burden of repudiation be distributed proportionately in such a way that every bondholder would remain in exactly the same position relative to all the others as before. There was to be no relative deprivation at all, and therefore no real injury. That reveals a very public view of wealth as a mark of social standing rather than as the accumulation of personal possessions. The social consequences of public finance were, in fact, to remain an enduring concern. Later his objections to John Law's disastrous trade and banking schemes were also that they had upset an entire society. As a quick fix for the royal finances John Law, a clever financial manipulator, had been permitted first to set up a central bank and then to add it to a joint stock company which was given a monopoly to develop the vast lands France owned on the banks of the Mississippi. After a wild speculative spree the whole structure collapsed in 1720, in the French equivalent of the South Sea Bubble. Montesquieu's main criticism of this episode was that some poor people were suddenly made very rich, while others of long-standing wealth were impoverished in the course of a few days. Many years after Law had fled into exile Montesquieu remained interested in him, and he actually visited him in Venice just before the old financier died. He wanted to understand exactly what Law had done and what his economic ideas were. He found him far less reprehensible than the powerful courtiers who had manipulated him. Montesquieu's sober caution extended to other aspects of the politics of the Regency that governed France during the infancy of Louis XV. Its ministers, he wrote, engaged in a succession of failed projects, and in spite of some good intentions produced only confusion. It was a mixture of authority and weakness and mostly was simply inefficient. Nevertheless, like many other Frenchmen, he was happy enough to see the end of Louis XIV's gloomy and oppressive rule. He remained for the rest of his life a bitter critic of the

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The making of a polymath religious intolerance and military aggression of that reign. In contrast he was on friendly terms with many of the people who governed France during the Regency, though he would never appear at Court, regarding it as beneath his dignity. The greater intellectual liberty and relaxed sexual atmosphere did have a tremendous effect upon him. In 1721 he published a brilliant, irreverent, and scandalous novel, totally unlike anything ever written by any other provincial magistrate. The Persian Letters was the perfect Regency novel, written for an audience that was prepared to enjoy the free play of ideas and a critical wit that spared no icon and no institution. Montesquieu became instantly famous,for although he did not acknowledge his authorship, everyone knew that he had written the book. He began to spend a lot of time in Paris and soon he knew all the cleverest and most fashionable people in the capital. If he had not been a nobleman he would not have been welcome in all these salons, but if he had not written a sensationally entertaining novel he would not have been noticed at all. He certainly enjoyed the aristocratic salons where wit and gallantry reigned, and some of his hostesses were to become his dearest friends. Madame du Deffand and he remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, and he wrote her a very touching letter when she went blind shortly after he had suffered the same affliction. That was, however, something that happened many years after his frivolous Regency years. Not all his time in Paris was spent in idle pleasures. He looked after the charter and other affairs of the Academie of Bordeaux, and he acted on behalf of the parlement. His friends were also working hard to get him elected to the Academie Frangaise. There was some difficulty over the matter because the king had heard that he had written an irreligious book, but after an interview with Cardinal Fleury, the king's closest adviser, whom Montesquieu assured that there were no offensive pages in his novel, he was allowed to enter the Academie in 1728. Montesquieu 19

Montesquieu had certainly succeeded in both the literary and the social worlds, but he remained somewhat uneasy. He did not want to be thought of as a man of letters or a bel esprit. He found it difficult to integrate his literary and intellectual gifts with his social personality, even after he had resigned from the parlement in 1725. Perhaps that is why he continued to be addressed as M. le president. There is, however, no reason to believe that he ever regretted giving up the life of a provincial magistrate for that of a literary lion in Paris. It was rumoured that he had sold his office because he was in financial trouble, due to the cost of living in Paris. The sale did not, however, bring him a very large return and there is no reason to suppose that his estates were not being run profitably by his wife. It is more likely that after he had written The Persian Letters and tasted the pleasures of high life in Paris, he no longer wanted to fulfil the obligations of an office which does not appear to have given him much satisfaction at any time. He had a few very old friends in Bordeaux, people of his own social class, with whom he continued to correspond, but his life was now centred on his Parisian circle and on La Brede, where he eventually spent many quiet years writing his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws. Soon after his election to the Academie Franfaise, Montesquieu set out on a long voyage abroad in the company of an English friend, Lord Waldegrave. He visited Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Italy. Wherever he went he talked to socially and politically prominent people, but also gathered as much reliable information as he could about the economic condition of the people as a whole. Italy was clearly a tremendous experience for him. He was completely overwhelmed by the works of art that he saw there. Moreover, several Italian historians and legal scholars taught him a great deal about the history of Rome, which had long interested him. Their contribution to his later work was very considerable. Both of his philosophical books, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of 20

The making of a polymath the Romans and their Decline and The Spirit of the Laws, were deeply influenced by the most advanced historical scholarship in Europe, which at that time flourished in Italy. After his European travels Montesquieu went to England, where he lived for about two years, until 1731. He had written about English freedom before that, but what he found seems to have exceeded his expectations. While he was in England he attended several debates in Parliament and followed political events closely. He was very popular in his usual social circles. While he enjoyed staying at the country houses of intellectually undistinguished dukes, he also made friends with scientists and writers, and he joined the Freemasons in London. In 1731 he was elected to the Royal Society and attended its meetings regularly. Martin Folkes, a notorious free-thinker, was then its secretary, and Montesquieu regarded him as one of his dearest friends. In his notebook he was to write that Folkes was the only perfect person he had ever met. The intellectual and political freedom of England were not merely gratifying personal experiences for Montesquieu, they were important for his entire future intellectual development. England proved to him that the rule of law and political freedom were practical possibilities, open in one way or other to all modern European states. France too did not have to endure an absolute monarchy for ever. As soon as he returned home, inspired by these convictions, he set to work on The Spirit of the Laws. It was published in 1748 and was an enormous success. Before he died, Montesquieu was able to prepare a revised edition of the book and also to write a commentary on it, in the course of a spirited defence of his ideas against the attacks of his Jesuit and Jansenist critics. He was acccused of Spinozism, of infidelity, and of treating moral matters en anatomiste. He barely denied these charges, but only underlined the essential liberalism and anti-clericalism of his book. For the rest of his life he thoroughly enjoyed the fame that it had brought him in

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Montesquieu France and throughout Europe. He tried to keep his book off the Index, but failed. England seems to have radicalized Montesquieu. In his last years he was on very good terms with the most advanced younger men of letters. The great salons were by then more open to talent without birth than they had been in his youth, and he certainly kept up with these trends. He made friends with the editors of the Encyclopedie, especially with d'Alembert, and with its general writer, Jaucourt, who popularized almost all of Montesquieu's ideas in his articles for the great dictionary. The eulogy of Montesquieu that d'Alembert wrote for the Academie Franqaise was published at the head of the fifth volume of the Encyclopedie, a unique tribute to a man whom its writers admired profoundly. Montesquieu had even agreed to contribute an article, On Taste, to the Encyclopedie which, as everyone knew, was a highly subversive publication. He did not live to finish the essay, but it was printed in its incomplete form with an addition by Voltaire. This was a gesture of solidarity. Voltaire had spilled a great deal of ink in criticizing Montesquieu's political ideas, but stood by him when the Church attacked his works. Montesquieu, for his part, admired some of Voltaire's verse, but in his notebooks expressed considerable contempt for the man's character and mind. His ties, even to the younger philosophes, were not personal, but a matter of intellectual affinity. They were never as close to him as some of his society hostesses. It would seem that he did not change his mind about not wanting to be a man of letters. His English friends appear to have meant the most to him, and the affection was often returned. In 1755 Montesquieu caught what sounds like influenza and he soon realized that he was going to die. With his usual lucidity he remarked, 'This moment is not as awful as one thinks.' While he lay dying, an unseemly tug of war went on between the Jesuits and his friends. The former wanted to prove to the world that the old sceptic had

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The making of a polymath returned to the Church on his deathbed, while the latter wanted it to be known that he had not abandoned his doubts. Scenes such as this had become quite commonplace. The evidence suggests that Montesquieu, averse as ever to making a fuss, tried to please both sides. He had already noted that as one grew older one had to learn how to die, and he had clearly prepared himself to do so in a dignified manner. When he died he was surrounded by several of his aristocratic Parisian friends. Diderot was the only distinguished man of letters to attend his funeral. Montesquieu seems to have died with all his contradictions intact. We know very little about Montesquieu's personal life. His surviving correspondence is completely unrevealing. Most of his letters deal with the problems of the Academie of Bordeaux, his own business affairs, his endless lawsuits, some gossip, and there are a few love letters to unnamed women. There are some affectionate but matter-of-fact letters to his younger daughter, and a note to his son, telling him to study hard and to stay away from women. We have nothing either to or from his wife, his elder daughter, or his sisters. His son composed a stiff and uninteresting memoir which tells us that his father was brilliant, pleasant, and frugal. When Montesquieu travelled, moreover, he wrote down what he saw and heard, not what he felt, so that his own notes are of small biographical interest and tell us nothing about his personality. He was the least confessional of writers. On the two occasions when he tried his hand at autobiography, he began by declaring that it was a silly thing to do. One of these efforts was a brief and incomplete sketch of his family, written for his grandson. He began with a genealogy, which he stated at once was foolish. After this unpromising beginning, his grandson was assured that he need not blush for his family. It had only three hundred and fifty years of proven nobility, of which he should be neither proud nor ashamed. He himself, Montesquieu told the boy, was much attached to his name,

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Montesquieu and his fortune and birth were exactly matched, which was a good thing. To his son he once wrote that he would have to choose between the robe and the sword when he grew up. The former would give him greater freedom, the latter greater social expectations. Nothing could be more conventional than these remarks. In the event, Montesquieu's son did not take his father's advice and became a modest naturalist and retiring country gentleman, and apparently a very devout Catholic. Montesquieu's second attempt to write about himself also begins with a disclaimer. The only excuse for drawing his own portrait was that, after all, he did know himself rather well. What follows is a list of his traits and typical responses, but we do not really know him any better after we have read through this account. He tells us that he was usually happy and that his soul took to everything it encountered, so that he was as pleased with the country as with the city. When he woke up in the morning he greeted daylight with a secret joy. (That may well have had something to do with constantly failing eyesight, which ended in complete blindness for the last twenty-odd years of his life.) He loved his family well enough to look after the essentials, but left the details to others. Among his good traits was that he did not hold grudges and was neither mean nor a spendthrift. On the darker side, he admitted that he was excessively timid in the company of the great and was afraid of appearing either too clever or too stupid. When he was a young man he had attached himself to women who he believed loved him, and as soon as he felt that they no longer cared for him he left them at once. One guesses that he was ill at ease with those whom he regarded as his social superiors. We know from contemporary gossip about him, of which there is very little, that he was rather quiet in society and extremely absent-minded. His correspondence gives the impression of a busy and generally cheerful person. There is only one letter to Madame du Deffand, in which he says that he is too miserable to do 24

The making of a polymath anything but read novels but he does not go on to say why. It is the only time we hear him admit openly to being unhappy. Montesquieu's reticence about his personal life was not casual. He objected to introspection generally, because it makes us self-centred. Much as he admired the Stoics' precept that the purpose of philosophy was self-knowledge, he thought that they had chosen a self-defeating means to that end. Self-love is bound to make us corrupt judges of our own characters. There are enough people like Narcissus, in love with themselves, around already, and self-analysis would only add to their number. What we really need is not to look into our own hearts, but sincere friends to tell us in plain words just what is wrong with us. Free-and-easy exchanges between people who want to improve each other offer us the only effective moral education. One might therefore suppose that Montesquieu was a gregarious and outgoing person. His notebooks do not, however, give one that impression at all. There is, in fact, a real difficulty with the picture of Montesquieu as an uncomplicated man, happy in his own skin. He wrote a novel that is among other things a masterpiece of black humour. Its hero, Uzbek, is an oriental despot and a deeply melancholy and self-tormenting character, who in many ways resembles his author. Some of Montesquieu's friends and his son called him Uzbek, so the similarities were no secret. Not long after the novel, moreover, Montesquieu wrote several shorter tales, which unlike The Persian Letters are not philosophical fables. They are violent, gloomy and passionate stories full of coincidences and mischances. All of Montesquieu's fiction, in fact, is about the impossibility of human happiness, and this does not suggest an author satisfied either with himself or with his world. On the social level all his works suggest that our habits and acquired beliefs injure us psychologically, and that our needs and institutions are never in harmony. That also is not the testimony of an untroubled mind. 25

Montesquieu It is of course quite possible that Montesquieu was satisfied with his own life but not with the world around him. His closest intellectual predecessor, Montaigne, thought the world an appalling spectacle, but liked himself very well. However, as befits a true sceptic, Montaigne was deeply introspective, and wrote about himself. To the question, 'what do I know?', he had replied, 'myself', while Montesquieu, apart from Uzbek as a possible and fictional self-portrait, never talked about himself at all. Much as these two gentlemen of Bordeaux resembled each other in their hatred of war and religious intolerance and in the range of their intellectual interests, they did differ in this respect. The reason may lie in the diverse sources and character of their religious doubts. Neither was an atheist, but both had ceased to be Christians. For Montaigne Christianity had lost its moral claim in the course of the wars of religion. Post-Cartesian science had made it unacceptable to Montesquieu. He was therefore a far more partial sceptic than either Montaigne or David Hume, even though the latter was an admired friend. Montesquieu did not doubt that certain scientific knowledge was possible, and his cultural relativism did not extend to philosophical doubt. He was also not a historical sceptic. Unlike Voltaire he was not tormented by the unreliability of all historical evidence and by the impossibility of achieving certain knowledge about the past. He took it for granted, or simply chose to believe, that he could find out all that he needed to know. The question for him was therefore neither, 'what am I?' nor 'what can I know?', but 'who are you?' and 'how can I know you?', and above all, 'how can we know people who are utterly unlike us?' All his writings, especially in their passionate attachment to every shred of ethnographic information, were efforts to deal with these questions. Because there are so many local religions, moral beliefs, and usages, one must simply suspend judgement and cultivate a tolerant respect for other people. He was therefore particularly horrified by the brutalities of 26

The making of a polymath religious violence, but they had not caused him to lose faith in Christianity; he seems never to have had much to lose. Religious doubts did not shake all his certainties; he was neither an agonized nor an insecure sceptic. Science supplied all the certainty he needed. While he rebelled against the cultural and religious dogmatism of Europeans, and used the vast variety of human beliefs and customs to ridicule their every claim to parochial superiority, European science was exempted from these strictures. The truths of science were never a part of his otherwise radical relativism. He was both psychologically and philosophically the sort of sceptic whose doubts call out for facts about the world rather than for an emotional or intellectual upheaval. Montesquieu's scepticism was also compatible with hopes for political improvement. Like many liberal noblemen of the next generation he felt confident that France could be reformed. Probably he had been only a semi-loyal aristocratic subject when he was still a provincial magistrate seeing no reason to pay high taxes to an alienating absolutist king. Feudal insubordination joined to a modern scientific intelligence was not a recipe for a passive acceptance of the Church and State of the ancien regime. In the event, in spite of many reservations and no strong sense of the future, he was more given to hope than Montaigne, who had thought that an old habit was better than a new one, simply because usage was a good sign, while novelties lacked even that feeble recommendation. It was this flexibility as much as his open anti-clericalism that made Montesquieu such a hero to the younger philosophes and to liberals of future generations. Montesquieu's political philosophy had no Utopian features. Indeed, his whole career gives the lie to the notion, made popular by Tocqueville, that the intellectuals of the Enlightenment lacked all practical political experience. In fact many of the men who contributed to the Encyclopedie were high civil servants, and others came from families that had long held ecclesiastical and public 27

Montesquieu offices. Montesquieu was not unusual in that respect. He remained M. le president to the end of his days, even though he had become the foremost voice of liberalism in France. It was precisely because he knew his world so well that his personal genius could express itself in so devastating a case against its public customs and beliefs and on behalf of a more humane vision of politics. That does not mean that he was a man without tensions. He admitted that he could not stop writing books, even though he was ashamed of it. He was a nobleman and a magistrate who wrote radical books. His deepest belief, however, which informed all of his works, allowed him to rise above this incongruity. 'Knowledge makes us gentle and reason draws us toward humanity. Only prejudice makes us turn away from it,' he wrote. It is the authentic voice of the Enlightenment.

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2 The Persian Letters: how others see us Montesquieu must have begun to write his novel, The Persian Letters, soon after he had married and settled down in Bordeaux. Evidently his imagination carried him far away from his sober local pursuits. The story is set partly in a Persian harem and partly in the Regency salons of Paris. The exuberance that followed the death of Louis XIV can be felt on all its pages. The sudden lifting of his oppressive policies gave France a chaotic government but permitted those who could afford it to indulge openly in every pleasure and diversion. Montesquieu was disturbed by the political incompetence, but he thoroughly enjoyed the relaxed social scene. To be sure, there were limits to change. The censorship of publications continued, religious tolerance was not even contemplated, and Protestants had to remain in exile. Compared to the immediate past, however, the Regency seemed easygoing and its atmosphere positively stimulated questioning minds. The monarchy and its codes of conduct had shifted just enough to make the regime seem no longer quite so self-evidently right, necessary, and unalterable. And among the newly critical observers none was more ironic, caustic, and mockingly irreverent than Montesquieu, who appeared to be both pleased and worried by the disarray around him. The Persian Letters was published anonymously in Amsterdam. In the preface the author explained, reasonably enough, that if the critics knew his identity, they would say that 'his book clashes with his character; he ought to use his time to better purpose. This is not worthy of a serious man.' In short, it was not the sort of a book one would expect from a president a mortier. The publisher applied for a 'tacit permission' to distribute the book in France, but the censor neither granted nor denied the request, which meant 29

Montesquieu that it could be smuggled into France without too much danger, but it did not appear in the catalogues of French booksellers until some ten years later. Inefficient censorship has never hurt sales, and The Persian Letters predictably sold like hot cakes. For eight years a new edition came out annually and there were countless imitations. Montesquieu's novel consists of letters exchanged mainly between two Persian visitors to Europe and their friends, servants, and wives at home. The novel in letters was not new when he began to write, and travel literature, both factual and fictitious, had also become very popular. Even the use of foreigners, the equivalent of our visitors from outer space, was already a common literary device for making fun of one's own time and place. It was the content rather than the form of The Persian Letters that was startling. The device of a many-sided correspondence, moreover, suited Montesquieu's sceptical purposes perfectly. It made possible the seemingly spontaneous expression of a plurality of opinions and voices, all speaking simultaneously. The characters develop, change, and reveal themselves directly without the author intruding upon their conversation with comments or descriptions. This offers an appearance of verisimilitude, which, given some of the story's exotic oriental setting, was difficult to achieve. Montesquieu noted in the introduction to a later edition that some readers had been surprised to find 'a sort of novel' within the book. It was essential to the whole that the letters about the reactions of the visitors to France, and those that dealt with the increasing disorders of the seraglio at home, be put together. For this, he claimed, was not meant to be an ordinary novel; the erotic story was an integral part of a philosophical and psychological exploration. The chief delight of the book was ‘in the eternal contrast between real things . . . and the strange ways in which those things are perceived'. Indeed, it shows not only how under the gaze of an astonished foreigner every belief 30

The Persian Letters: how others see us and custom wilts and loses its certainty, but also how the visitors are gradually transformed by the experience of an alien way of life. The French reader is jolted into seeing himself as he appears to a Persian, while the latter is changed by being abroad. People who do not share the associations of ideas and the self-understanding of the members of a society often make very funny but also disturbing remarks. Why should one argue so much about the merits of an ancient poem?, asks the man to whom the name Homer means nothing (xxvi). What madness passes before the eyes of a man who watches a comedy without any idea of what theatre is? (xviii). A specifically political thought experiment is also being performed. The chief Persian character, Uzbek, is a despot back home, and the question 'what is it like to be a despot, and to treat others as one's property?' is gradually answered as his typical fantasies and habitual conduct are revealed to us in the course of the nine years that he spends in France, at odds with and yet deeply affected by his alien surroundings. Despotism was Montesquieu's perpetual nightmare and he began his life as an author by imagining both its sinister psychological structure and its crushing social effects. Uzbek's domestic drama, which is the novel inside the social satire, gives this idea all its psychological force, and the general theme of the book, the universal power of selfdeception, is built around it. Merciless ridicule of the most cherished illusions is the epitome of intellectual radicalism, and Montesquieu's first readers fully appreciated his daring. That should not be confused with plans for the transformation of society. Marxist critics have not been slow to note that Montesquieu's art as a novelist is static and rococo in style. It puts things in question, but does not go on to a revolutionary answer. In this it is said to reflect the contradictions of a society in immobile tension caught between a falling but still powerful aristocracy and a notably rising but not yet self-aware bourgeoisie. Be that as it may, Montesquieu's 31

Montesquieu original readers certainly saw the book quite differently. They were struck by the audacity of the opinions that he put into the mouths of his Persians. They were sure that they were his own and that he was only playing 'outsider'. In fact he had made himself a double outsider, first as a Persian in Paris, and then as that same man at home in his exotic harem. To make oneself at home in a strange society and a foreigner in one's own is itself an assertion of imaginative freedom. On one level the seraglio is a thinly veiled and very dark picture of monastic and court life in France, but it is also a genuine picture of Persian despotic society. Uzbek, its master, is the ironic proof that a man might see a foreign cultural universe clearly and rationally, but not his own. Uzbek's creator, however, in the very act of inventing him, also demonstrated that one can rise above one's normal condition of inherited prejudice and credulity and see things as they are. For Montesquieu it was a moral and intellectual victory. The first reviewers of The Persian Letters concentrated entirely on its raillery, which made it such a sensation. Read as a comedy of Parisian manners and a caricature of French society it is a very witty book, but surely Michelet was right when he said that it is superficial to think of it as a light novel. The horrors of the seraglio, despotism in general, the effects of religion on our conduct, political degeneration, the relations between the sexes, jealousy, suicide, vanity, illusion, and doubt are the main topics of the letters, and they give a bitter tang to all of them. Most puzzling of all is the personality of Uzbek, who in some ways is Montesquieu's alter ego. Fie is both an enlightened philosopher and a despot, who at first sees only the follies of the 'profane' Europeans, and then recognizes his own Persian irrationalities which, however, he cannot overcome or even control. In the end rationality itself is put in doubt when this intelligent and clear-sighted man shuts himself up in the seraglio in a desperate rage. If many of his opinions are Montesquieu's own, Uzbek plays many roles

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The Persian Letters: how others see us besides that of the author's mouthpiece. Above all he was meant to illustrate the fatal flaws of the then fashionable theory of 'enlightened despotism', which argued that a rational and omnipotent ruler who relied on the advice of enlightened experts could soon transform France into a good society. Uzbek was designed to show that despotism would always triumph over reason and that the outcome would be a particularly virulent sort of oppression. When we first meet Uzbek he is very pious. The practices of this orthodox Muslim, to be sure, have a curious resemblance to Christianity. In his very first letter he writes: 'We stayed only one day at Qum. After we had finished our devotions on the tomb of the Virgin who gave birth to twelve prophets, we continued our journey.' His subsequent hostility to Christian practices is due entirely to the idiocies that the two faiths share. Religion does not, however, cloud Uzbek's mind entirely. He wants to go abroad, he says at first, to seek enlightenment beyond the borders of his own country. In another letter, however, he admits that he has made enemies at court by telling the truth even to the ruler. He has withdrawn from the court, feigning an interest in the sciences, for which he has come to feel a genuine love, but he remains in danger and must leave (viii). We thus know from the first that while the pursuit of knowledge is important for Uzbek, it is an acquired taste. That may be true of all of us. Uzbek's most profound thought, reflecting all his experiences, may well be his suggestion that we should think of ourselves as sentient rather than as rational beings (xxxiii). Uzbek is not the only Persian visitor to Paris. He is accompanied by a young friend, Rica. Unlike his older friend Rica does not have a harem back home, which may account for his cheerfulness. He is lighthearted, adaptable, good-humoured, and he enjoys every new experience. His letters are full of gossip, funny stories, and clever character sketches, for he sees vanity everywhere and finds it easy to puncture any number of egos. He does not, however, deal

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Montesquieu with any serious moral questions, only with surface foibles. Rica acts as a counterpoint to both Uzbek's darker character and his philosophically deeper observations. It makes for lively reading, but it also raises the question of how much criticism one should direct at minor flaws, considering the suffering inflicted by oppression and violence. That Uzbek should be morose is not surprising, for he has many cares. In Persia he has a large harem which is being run in his absence by an army of eunuchs. Like any despot, and Montesquieu's God, Uzbek is absent from his domain. Whether he pardons or threatens its inmates, he is never there. Unlike God he is, however, a despot because he is not bound by laws of any kind, nor is he as omnipotent. The seraglio is a system run well or badly by the eunuchs. All its members, even its master, are mere parts of a selfperpetuating social machine. Everyone has a function, but any individual can be replaced. This only increases Uzbek's anxieties, especially as he expects nothing less than total obedience from his wives and eunuchs. The mental rigidity that makes him truthful also makes him insanely exacting. His uneasiness is further enhanced by his inability to bring any coherence into his existence. What he believes and what he does never meet. Thus he can say with complete conviction that all that religion demands is that one be a good son and father, obey the rules of one's society, and be kind to everyone, and never notice that he is none of these things (xlvi). His whole life is an illustration of the distance between theoretical knowledge and personal conduct. Thus he is quick to notice the arrogance, insolence, and corruption of Turkish officials and soldiers, but it never occurs to him that he also has much to answer for in these respects in his treatment of his wives (xlix). He can criticize not only foreigners but his own country, and he certainly knows a lot about other people, but nothing about himself. Indeed, he never doubts that his oppressed wives adore him and are perfectly happy in his seraglio, even though he receives constant reports of trouble and unrest among them. It 34

The Persian Letters: how others see us is only we who are at regular intervals reminded that Uzbek is not only a reflective and intelligent man, but also a selfinfatuated and cruel tyrant, because at strategic moments we are reminded of his less cerebral self. Right after his highly moralistic letters about the rise and fall of a civic Utopia, Uzbek gets a letter from one of his eunuchs describing the combined servitude and power of this human instrument of the harem system (xv). After a series of rational letters by Uzbek discussing the absurdities of religion, he gets one from one of his wives telling him how the eunuchs killed two men to prevent them from dishonouring their master by actually looking at his wives (xlvii). Uzbek's fine letters on religious tolerance come to an abrupt end when a letter from another wife announces that she is putting her seven-year-old daughter into the harem so that she may be trained for her 'natural' station in life (lxii). In a later letter Uzbek rejoices at the thought that he will be the only intact male whom his daughter will ever see before she is sent off to her husband's seraglio, and that is the only time he speaks as a father at all (lxxi). Having explained why extreme severity of punishments does not in fact yield obedience, Uzbek goes right on to threaten his eunuchs with death and worse, and instructs them to treat his wives with the utmost harshness (lxxx, cxlviii, and cliii). These interruptions from the harem keep the flow of serious letters from becoming tedious, but they are also disruptive, thus mirroring the discontinuities of Uzbek's tormented personality (lxxi). They hint as well at the limits of philosophy, given the power of human unreason and self-deception, especially when there is nothing to restrain them. The questions raised by all this evidence of pervasive irrationality were to preoccupy Montesquieu for the rest of his life. Why do enormous numbers of people obey one man? Why are most governments so oppressive? Why do we inflict so many fears upon each other and ourselves? Why is the contrast between belief and actuality so stark? What,

35

Montesquieu if anything, is natural for human beings? And most of all, what is happiness, and why is it so rare? It cannot be said that The Persian Letters makes the slightest effort to answer these tormenting questions, but it certainly does put them to the reader. For it is the story of two people who are puzzled by them when they suddenly find themselves in a world in which none of their certainties and habitual responses are accepted or even understood. If the French seem, oddly enough, to be no less happy than the Persians, what then is it that makes people happy and unhappy? By happiness Montesquieu did not mean that supreme good or the crown of a life of virtue that Aristotle had in mind. Flappiness was for him a psychological problem created by the ample evidence of universal unhappiness. The whole harem story is, in fact, about avoidable unhappiness. As soon as Uzbek leaves home two of his wives write to him to say they are not happy because he is not around to make love to them (iii and vii). The cause of their unhappiness is simple enough: frustrated sexuality, but the rules of the seraglio prohibit any remedy. The traditions of their religion and society doom these women to a life of physical torment. As his wives have noticed, moreover, Uzbek is even less happy than they are. Fie does not know how to be happy, while they at least know what would please them. Though they are nothing but his intruments they can feel sorry for this jealous and joyless man (lxii). The eunuchs, however, who are no less oppressed than the women, think that their master must be very happy, because he has everything that they can never have. The power to torment the women has become a substitute for happiness for them, and they therefore imagine that the one man for whose happiness they labour must be happy, because he is the embodiment of power. These castrated slaves rage at the sexual and social prowess of their master, but they can see only the obverse of their own deprivation in him (ix). The women see him more clearly, but only Uzbek himself can describe his misery completely: jealousy, apathy, fatalism,

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The Persian Letters: how others see us and a sense of futility. To feel both useless and omnipotent is obviously not a recipe for happiness. In a very early letter he says that his absolute power over his wives has deprived him of all sexual desire and love, that he cannot take an interest in them, and that they are just cumbersome possessions. He is, nevertheless, very jealous (vi). His honour and his public status as a master depend on the women belonging to him and to no one else. He is therefore endlessly insecure and worried about the efficiency of his eunuchs. Freedom may or may not make us happy, but it is obvious that without it we are certain to be unhappy. In The Persian Letters we find only two happy people, a brother and sister united in an incestuous marriage. They alone act completely spontaneously in following their earliest and deepest inclinations. Society contributes nothing but grief and difficulties to their lives, but by overcoming the latter and keeping faith with each other they survive the dangers that confront them. Is it their virtue that makes them happy? We are told that there was more courage in the heart of the brother, a mere merchant, than in the breast of most kings, but that is not the cause of his happiness. It is due entirely to his doing what he has wanted to do since his childhood, to live with his sister (lxvii). Of all Montesquieu's stories this is the most subversive. Incest is the taboo of taboos. Only Plato in The Republic suggested it, and then only for the perfecting of an elite. To make incest the condition of happiness is to say that the rules of society do nothing to make us good or happy. The moral psychology of individuals and the minimal demands of social conventions are out of joint; they thwart each other. Does this mean that happiness is our 'natural' pre-social condition? The second fable about happiness in The Persian Letters does not suggest such a simple answer (xi-xiv). The Troglodytes, Uzbek tells a friend, once lived entirely selfishly and refused to co-operate for any purpose, so they were soon destroyed. There was, in Montesquieu's view, no

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Montesquieu rational exit from Hobbes's state of nature, and it was in any case a useless fiction which did nothing to help us understand our ineluctably social state (xciv). All the Troglodytes perish, except one vituous family. They cooperate happily and easily, each one eager to do what is best for the others. Neither men nor women think of themselves as anything but members of an expanding family. They naturally prosper and defend themselves with selfless courage against aggressive neighbours. Nevertheless, spontaneous political virtue becomes too much for them, and they choose a king to govern them. This virtuous elder warns them against it, predicting that social indifference will soon set in and be succeeded by a despotic monarchy. The moral of this tale seems to be that political virtue would make us happy, but not in a way that we can endure for long. There is also a hint of a paradox here. The very qualities that make a people prosperous and happy cannot survive in a wealthy and contented society. Nothing seems to fail like republican success. A not too exigent condition of freedom might therefore be best, both for political societies and for most private families. Neither republican nor despotic rigour are really bearable. The first is too good, the second too bad for mankind. Uzbek and Rica observe with amazement that while there are many miserable marriages in France, French families do seem to be a lot less unhappy in their freedom than the Persians in their harems (xxxiv). Public constraint is by no means the only way to make us miserable: our private conduct does us just as much harm. Jealousy especially can spread unhappiness all around itself. It is an incurable disease of impotence that feeds on itself. Uzbek and his eunuchs are not only its victims but also its agents as they bring its hostile energy to bear on the women in the harem. The French, Rica is quick to observe, are better off. Husbands are rarely jealous. What after all can they do about their wives? Many have every reason to trust them, and even those who do not would be ridiculed as monopolists and disturbers of 'public pleasure' if they showed any overt signs

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The Persian Letters: how others see us of jealousy (lv). Montesquieu at one time thought of writing a history of jealousy. When he found out how dependent its various expressions were on social custom he abandoned the project, but not before deciding that even jealousy was not natural, but learned conduct (Pensees, 483-99). Politics, not sex, accounted for most of it. The habits of conquerors tended to prevail in these matters, and the freedom of women was commensurate with the political liberty of society as a whole. The analysis of jealousy as a serious psychological disorder must therefore be part of the study of oppressive government. Uzbek's jealousy is particularly virulent, because it is a despot's passion. His harem must have no existence apart from his own. It is not an ambition that can be fulfilled, but that does not prevent Uzbek from trying, at a horrible cost to his wives. The novel ends with a rebellion by the women, as all of Uzbek's illusions are swept away. He finds out that the apparently most dutiful of all his wives, Roxane, does not adore him, but in fact hates him, and has even managed to smuggle a lover into the seraglio (cxlvii-clxi). There is no reason why she should love Uzbek. He raped her. It is, however, typical of the blindness of tyranny that he should believe that she invited and enjoyed his attack (xxvi). Now, at last, he knows what he is and what he does. This knowledge does not improve him; on the contrary, the sudden realization of his impotence only maddens him. He is aware of his own personality, he notes, only when 'a dark jealousy ignites and gives birth in my soul to fear, suspicion, hate, and regret'. Instead of saying farewell to his harem, he returns to Persia to lock himself up with his wives and eunuchs. It is the victory of despotic jealousy over enlightenment. It is Uzbek's belief that we never know when to rejoice or to suffer, because we cannot see reality properly (xl). It is, of course, in his interests to think that we cannot help being morally obtuse, but he also finds it difficult to resign himself to these limitations. If he were not a Muslim, he says, he 39

Montesquieu would take to drink, because alcohol relieves the painful pressure of the body on the mind. Stoic resignation is no remedy; it is too rational for us (xxxiii). It would do us no good in any case, because we do not need to be more fatalistic than religion has already made us. It is one of the shared inclinations of Muslims and Christians to give up and leave it all to Providence, and this fatalism makes them feel not only futile, but also insensitive and inactive (cxix). Its effect upon Uzbek himself is not negligible, for the sense of his own insignificance makes him contemplate, or at least justify, suicide. His arguments in its favour are perfectly rational, and were to set the terms for the debate about suicide that was to rage for the rest of the century. At the heart of the case for suicide was the transfer of human obligations from God to mankind. Do we or do we not owe it to our fellow men to go on living when nothing on earth can give us any pleasure? Why should one not leave a society that contributes nothing to one's well-being? One owes the prince no more than obedience to the laws, and once one is dead that no longer enters into the calculation. Nature will certainly not be affected by an earlier rather than a later death. There are, in short, no rational obstacles to the right to choose the moment of one's own death, once one no longer thinks that one's life belongs to God (lxxvi). Significantly, Uzbek does not commit suicide. His depression is only a despot's rage at a cosmic futility which he shares with the rest of mankind. It is Roxane who takes her own life out of despair and as a final act of liberation. In her case suicide is what it had been in Rome, a political gesture to affirm one's public dignity. Uzbek, however, is only claiming the right to be left alone. In a later work Montesquieu was to speak with real admiration of Roman suicide. If the Stuarts had not been Christians, Charles I would not have had such a death, and his brother, James II, would not have had such a life, he noted sarcastically (Romans, 450-1). Eventually he came to think of some suicides as mental diseases induced by the climate of northern Europe. That served to underline the real issue for

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The Persian Letters: how others see us him, which was less the right to suicide than the babarity of punishing those who commit it and their families. Uzbek's opening outcry was Montesquieu's as well, 'European laws are merciless against those who take their own lives. They are made, so to speak, to die a second time. They are infamously dragged through the streets; they are covered with ignominy; their possessions are confiscated.' To heap such fear upon fear is the policy of religion at its most punitive and cruel. Uzbek may be a neurotic egotist, but the prevailing response to the illness and despair that cause most suicides was so revolting that Montesquieu never ceased to protest against it. He was, moreover, able to recognize how complex the act itself was. The two suicides in The Persian Letters, one merely considered and the other carried out, are very different deeds. Uzbek's defence of suicide may merely express the effects of fatalism, or alternatively, the idea that our bond to society is a terminable contract. When Roxane kills herself in anguish and to affirm her freedom, she is clearly performing an entirely different action. It is a mark of Montesquieu's ability to suspend judgement and to avoid heavy affirmations of moral rules that he does not tell his readers what to make of these two suicides, thus forcing them to a higher level of reflection. There can, however, be no doubt about what he thought of the consequences of intense, systematic, and protracted fear, and those who spread it. Fear also plays a part in the inherently unsatisfactory relations between men and women. These could not be wholly blamed on the diseases of religion. Montesquieu thought of writing a book on the pathologies of religions, and had he done so the tendency to generate fear, distrust, and sexual misery would have played a big part in it. Not everything, however, could be charged to religious prejudices. Montesquieu thought that in spite of their enormous differences the social rules governing the mutual conduct of the sexes had never been adequate at any time or in any place. He could fantasize about the Utopia of the Troglodytes in which

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Montesquieu both men and women were wholly absorbed in their families. At times he indulged in a 'good old times' nostalgia for domesticated women who led lives of rural probity. At other times he praised the unlimited power of the Roman paterfamilias, but that was only because it diffused political power. He had no illusions about the women of classical antiquity. The sexual manners of the Regency both amused and shocked him, as some of the lightest and funniest pages of his novel show. Surprisingly, his scepticism went so far that he could even question whether male domination over women was justifiable. The power of men stifles the talents of women in just the same way as despotism inhibits all its subjects, especially the most gifted among them. The dependence of women demoralizes them and reduces them to perpetual dissimulation. Rica notices that in the seraglio all the women are squeezed into a single mould and are forced to pretend that they are all alike (lxiii). Both he and Uzbek certainly enjoy the company of the free women of Paris. Indeed, it is their first chance actually to know women, for it is only when people are at liberty, free of fear, that they can know each other at all. If men rule women simply because they are stronger, Rica asks, is their dominion just, and is it natural? In the end Montesquieu threw up his hands in doubt. Men must either rule women or be ruled by them. Without any firm conviction he seems to have remembered that he was a man and chosen his own side (Pensees, 276, 784, 596). To allow Rica to wonder whether the actual relations between women and men are natural amounts to asking whether anything is natural at all. It is the extremity of doubt. Montesquieu often used the word 'natural' as a term of approval, but that did not stop him from questioning the conventional lines drawn between nature and custom. More significantly, he wanted to show that what is usually taken to be the evidence of nature is far from obvious. A woman's virginity is for most men an absolute and natural necessity, the very emblem of the mastery that comes from being 42

The Persian Letters: how others see us perfectly certain. Virginity is a powerful cognitive sign, and if it cannot be proved, what certainty and security are left intact? Uzbek is not particularly disturbed by such uncertainties, so when he hears that a Persian bridegroom sent his new wife back because she was not a virgin, he replies that the man had a perfect legal right to act as he did, but that no physical proof of virginity was possible. It was, in effect, a legal fiction. If female virginity is only a ‘just so' story, what is not? Uzbek understands the meaning of that question very well, but it does not stop him from locking up his daughters and wives. What then is natural? The Frenchman who asks Rica, ‘How can one be a Persian?', obviously thinks that there is something unnatural about not being a European (xxx). It is aberrant to be a person so unlike himself that he cannot identify him as anything other than an impossibility. Custom constitutes our world, and what we call 'natural' is a mass of inherited beliefs that blind us to everything foreign. Impenetrability thus haunts the face-to-face relations between all strangers, not just the encounters of men and women. To Rica the wonderfully ridiculous new world he has found proves that we each live in our own world oblivious of others. If triangles were to invent gods, they would give them three sides, he notes (lix). To him modesty seems the only reasonable response to these realities. Uzbek concludes, as have many other sceptics, that doubt ought not to affect one's adherence to the accepted customs of one's society, since that is the line of least resistance. The difficulty in Uzbek's case is that this plausible strategy for getting through life makes him harsh and miserable and causes his wives enormous suffering. It may, in fact, be the wrong response to doubt. For the rigid Uzbek the wisdom of tolerance is not easily acquired, but he does eventually wonder where his ideas of purity and impurity come from. What is so defiling about pork? And once you ask about pork, you have put every ritual practice into question. The biblical story offered him by a 43

Montesquieu priest is simply ridiculous (xvi-xviii). One man's faith is another man's superstition, he discovers, and he begins to judge his world more independently. The Muslim and Christian zeal for conversion now seems absurd, futile, and even sinister to him (xxxv, xxxix, and lx). Religious disputes in general are similarly only displays of a petty temper (xxiv, xxvi). Forcing religious dissenters into exile has been a selfdestructive policy. Because they were denied state offices the French Protestants had concentrated all their energies on productive business enterprises. When they had to flee, France lost some of its most valuable citizens (lxxxv). It was their social position, not their doctrines, that made them so industrious in Montesquieu's view, which seems more plausible than Max Weber's notions about the acquisitive consequences of their 'inner worldly' asceticism. To be sure Montesquieu was not eager to ascribe social merit to any form of Christianity. It had occasionally improved an individual, but never a society as a whole. If it had persuaded kings to end slavery in Europe, it had also encouraged them to enslave vast numbers of colonial natives, which was no improvement (lxxv). Rica can easily mock the endless pretensions of the religious. We hear of abbes who get actresses pregnant and then abandon them and of casuists who make wrong appear right. These men are just 'dervishes', his name for monks and Jesuits. Not everything is funny, however. The seraglio is a very thinly veiled picture of a convent, with all its sexual repressions and its irrational discipline. The eunuchs, like the clergy, are celibate while the women are wedded to an omnipotent and absent being and are kept obedient by a mixture of blind faith and fear. None of the inmates are sincere. The women rebel as soon as they can, and the eunuchs hate the master who has mutilated them. This is not a comforting vision and it is appropriately Uzbek himself who fears that the nightmare of Descartes's Second Meditation, that the world is ruled by an evil demon, might be true. Ffe dismisses the thought because it might disrupt our already tenuous bonds of mutual obligation. The rules of

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The Persian Letters: how others see us equity should be followed with or without divine sanctions, but clearly he thinks that a belief in a benevolent deity is morally helpful (lxxxiii). Montesquieu was not subject to anarchist impulses, but he could not help wondering why men, who seem made to be sociable, show so little spontaneous inclination for cooperation. What claim, moreover, do governments have to our obedience? Gratitude obliges us naturally, but very few subjects have any reason to feel grateful to the kings who rule them. Paternal rule on the Roman model appears correspondingly more defensible (xvii, cxxix). The best governments are those that follow the penchants of the people they rule. The troubling question of whether some people are fit only for despotism is left hanging in The Persian Letters. Uzbek suggests that despotic rulers are easily overthrown but that the system never really changes. For genuine stability he points to free Holland and Switzerland, but not to Europe's monarchies, because he does not think that they can be reformed (lxxx, cii, ciii). Unlike many social critics, Uzbek does not give way to a cosmic nostalgia. When a Persian friend suggests that modern weapons prove that material changes are not a form of progress, he replies that the advances of the modern age have softened our manners and made warfare less brutal. Wealth not only makes nations more powerful, it also reduces their barbarism. There were evidently limits to Montesquieu's admiration for the martial rigour of the Romans, but his confidence in the humanizing effects of the arts and of luxury hardly amounted to a theory of progress. In one respect, he was sure, the world had regressed since antiquity: depopulation. The extermination of colonial populations and the epidemics of venereal diseases brought back from the imperialist wars had devastated two worlds. With no hope of emancipation, American slaves did not, like those of Rome, reproduce. Catholicism with its celibate clergy and prohibition of divorce had also done its share to lower Europe's birthrate. In this respect it was exactly like

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Montesquieu any despotism where a general hopelessness discourages people from having children (cxiii-cxxiii). The letters on population were much admired by Montesquieu's contemporaries. Only Hume disagreed with the proposition that Europe had been more populous in the distant past. It is not entirely clear whether Montesquieu was really discussing demography at all. His real subject was unfreedom, and the great epidemic was political and religious oppression and the joyless fatalism they had produced (lxxviii). Many readers since Voltaire have noted that Montesquieu's accounts of Asian societies were full of factual errors. In The Persian Letters he may not have been trying to keep to the known facts. While he did take a lot of trouble to find out as much as he could about the Orient, it is not, in his novel, a geographic area but a nightmare territory of the mind in which all the worst human impulses govern. Encased in a moralistic and rigid religion and social order, the eunuchs and women find relief only in mutual contempt and malice. Between these two groups an 'ebb and flow' of humiliation prevails (ix). The system is utterly inefficient in the absence of a directing intelligence or an active elite. It is held together by only one thing, universal fear. In a well-run harem, one of the eunuchs writes, absolute silence reigns and everyone rises and retires at exactly the same time, each in her own cell. Spies and intrigue prevent any conspiracy, indeed any communication, between the women. The master can then 'captivate' their hearts, because his agents have already 'subjugated their minds' (lxiv). Do these women love their master? Some, in the self-abasing spirit of victimhood, really do adore him, but others hate him. He can never know, because we can know each other at all only if we are free (lxiii). The eunuchs enjoy being cruel, though they must pretend that they do it for the sake of their master. When in his final rage Uzbek orders them to 'purify' the harem, we know that he is the fount of terror, but not its immediate agent. The political and religious implications of all this were not lost on Montesquieu's first readers.

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The Persian Letters: how others see us The Persian Letters is not only a searing satire, it is also full of amusing vignettes and scenes. In Rica's letters we meet all the pretensions of the three estates, dervishes, an infatuated alchemist, women who pretend to be the same age as their daughters, a parade of old soldiers who never die, idle and pompous judges, smart-alecky young fops, fatuous academicians, newly rich bourgeois gentlemen who keep the genealogists busy, tax farmers whose social position depends entirely upon the skills of their chef, and scholars whose vanity and pedantry are as great as their talents are small. To a stranger the Pope and king are clearly magicians since they can get so many people to obey them. There is also a puzzling story about a blind man who can play cards and who shows Rica the way to the most remote corners of Paris. We know that Montesquieu found this anecdote in a magazine, but what is it doing here? Is the man just a clever crook, or does he prove that one can get along perfectly well without ever seeing things as they really are? Rica certainly comes to believe that. Nevertheless, we are never allowed to forget one truth: that frivolous and foolish Regency Paris is not despotic Persia, and Rica is so charmed by it that he decides to remain there. Only Uzbek returns home when he discovers that his harem is not what he had believed it to be. He goes back to force the women to conform to his idea of a perfect order. The Persian Letters was to be Montesquieu's only successful work of fiction. His later Le Temple de Gnide is an insipid love story written for a princess. Another oriental tale, Histoire veritable, was never completed. It is a lurid story about the transmigrations of a soul doomed by an evil spirit to remember all its embodiments. It was again meant to allow for multiple perspectives, even those of animals, and it plays around with the perplexities of personal identity, as befits the sceptical imagination, but it is a tedious novel. Another story, again full of violent events, was meant to illustrate the joys of confident love and the agony of jealousy. It too remained unpublished, for good reasons. Although Montesquieu was never able to recover in his other fiction 47

Montesquieu either the irony or the humour of his first book, its spirit returned to him in his political writings. Rica remained his model. Like him we may never know how much we actually know of reality, and there may be no direct path from our subjective convictions to the world of other people. We may not even understand ourselves. Our happiness does not, in any case, depend upon such certainties, but upon being active, curious, and outside ourselves in pursuit of an object. In his notebook Montesquieu wrote that it is useless to seek happiness directly. It all depends upon our 'machine', but to master the world of appearances and to have a wide range of experiences is our likeliest road to contentment (Pensees, 30, 1675). And so he decided to travel to seek enlightenment abroad, but unlike his anti-hero he found it.

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3

Philosophical history: the rise and decline of the Romans

When Montesquieu returned from his travels he went to work in earnest to put his political ideas in order. The final result was his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws, but while he was working on it he also wrote a shorter and far more tentative book, Considerations on the Greatness and Decline of the Romans. It was published in 1734 anonymously in Holland, but circulated freely in France. Unlike Montesquieu's other books, it was not particularly popular, though it had its admirers, of whom Gibbon was surely the most important. Voltaire was not alone in dismissing it as a sequence of suggestions rather than a book. That was not entirely unfair, since it is indeed experimental in tone and content, and it lacked the critical rigour that Voltaire wanted to impose on historical writing in order to reduce its intrinsic unreliability. Montesquieu was not much moved by these doubts, and in any case Romans was not meant to be a work of pure scholarship. Its intellectual force comes from its enormous ideological and political vigour. This was Rome for philosophers and statesmen, as d'Alembert was to say in its praise. Although many of its sections were eventually worked into The Spirit of the Laws, the two books are very different. Romans is a philosophical history, while the later work is an analysis of the structure of social rules. They do, however, share several aims, not least among them to demonstrate the great difference between ancient and modern politics. A strange culture can be used just like a foreign visitor or a voyage abroad to illuminate a familiar world. Comparative history can thus be a path to self-understanding, but precisely because it brings out the differences between ages and peoples it does not encourage imitation. The very first chapter begins with the remark that Rome was not a city in

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Montesquieu the modern sense at all, but just a public meeting place. And at every opportune moment throughout the text the reader is reminded how very different, both internationally and locally, the European world now is. Montesquieu's Rome was not a model to be copied, but a case study that could help him to arrive at some general truths about politics. The psychological identity of humanity made that possible, although the cultural disparities were far too great to permit the revival of a dead polity, even one as deeply admired as ancient Rome. As history, Romans follows the achievements and failures of one people chronologically over many centuries, from their tribal origins to the final fall of Constantinople. It does so, however, not continuously, but in a highly episodic and selective way. Linear history was alien to Montesquieu generally. He did not believe in cumulative progress, and his sense of the most recent past was one of radical discontinuity rather than of continuous development. It seemed to him that the expansion of Europe after the discovery of America had made it so wealthy and powerful that it was wholly unlike anything that had ever existed in the past. Moreover, while he was interested in medieval law, he looked upon the middle ages as a black hole of barbarism, which was now fortunately behind a Europe that was getting over its superstitions. The history of Rome was far more relevant than the less remote past, both because the republic was an example of a free state, and because empires were on the agenda of every major modern state in Europe. Philosophical history, in any case, does not have to be an uninterrupted narrative. It should be accurate, but it need not tell the whole story, only what has a bearing on its general propositions. Montesquieu's account of events is constantly broken off for reflections about their psychological and historical significance. The whole purpose of the enterprise was to demonstrate that history can only be understood by seeking out the deep, underlying 'general' causes of political changes, and not by simply recording symptomatic events,

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The rise and decline of the Romans which are merely 'occasional' or 'particular' causes. The first and most enduring model of this genre is Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, in which the interplay of character and circumstances, the burden of protracted war, and the dynamics of imperialism are all woven into a gripping tragedy. His chief successor, Polybius, served Montesquieu as a guide through much of the history of the Roman Republic, as well as suggesting to him a cyclical theory of regimes. Not the least influential feature of Polybius' idea of political change was his account of the Roman Republic as a mixed constitution which could avoid the course of decay that inevitably afflicted pure monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies. Both Machiavelli and Montesquieu found something of value in Polybius' history, even though they knew that Rome too had fallen victim to corruption; for unlike their classical predecessors they were not writing contemporary history, but retrospective accounts. Their task was thus quite different. It was to make the distant past speak directly to the present and to reveal what was permanently true about politics under the most varied historical circumstances. Montesquieu owed Machiavelli's Discourses a considerable debt. Like his Italian predecessor, he concentrated on the Roman art of ruling and waging war, with special attention to the manipulative skills of the Senate, especially in matters of religion and foreign policy. Both admired the spirit and popular freedom of the early republic, but the differences between the two were very significant. Machiavelli believed in great men, who in pursuing their own glory transform the world around them and can be defeated only by the malice of fortune. Montesquieu thought in far less personal terms. In republics especially, leaders make institutions only in the infancy of society. After that, it is institutions that mould the chiefs (353). And he consistently debunked or ignored the reputations of the legendary heroes of antiquity. It was not a 'great-man oriented view of history at all. Occasionally Montesquieu 51

Montesquieu expressed his admiration for the character or abilities of a statesman or a general, such a Caesar, but these figures did not in his view alter the course of history. At the most, spectacular individual agents set some deeper immanent tendency of their society in motion. Whatever Sulla's designs may have been, he was never anything but a stepping-stone toward the rise of Caesar, and if the latter had not put an end to the republic, some other general like him would have done so (420-1). Heroics were of no interest to Montesquieu, and without supermen there was also no need to blame fortune for precipitating their otherwise unaccountable defeats. Men are not governed by any sort of fate. They make their own history, although they rarely understand the reasons for and consequences of their conduct. That in no way reduces the moral responsibility of individual leaders for their actions. Sulla particularly fascinated Montesquieu, and he composed a little dialogue between him and an imaginary philosopher, Eucrate (O. C. I. 553-63). Sulla begins by defending his reputation as the liberator of Rome and the restorer of the Senate. Posterity might even blame him for not spilling enough blood. Eucrate replies by mentioning the cost to mankind of a man who puts himself above humanity. Moreover, his only achievement has been to have set an example for an even worse successor. Both his intentions and his results have shown him to be 'a cruel man and a bad citizen'. Unlike Machiavelli, Montesquieu was without nostalgia for the classical past. A close comparison of Roman and English liberty proved to him that the latter was not only more attainable, but also inherently superior. It had greater powers of self-correction (410). He therefore did not stop, as Machiavelli had, well before the establishment of the Empire, but went right on to the bitter end, to the disintegration of its Eastern half. Quite apart from a certain fastidious disdain for Machiavelli, Montesquieu did not share his faith in the efficacy of military power, nor his admiration for imperial aggrandizement. Indeed, his main 52

The rise and decline of the Romans point was to demonstrate its futility and to discourage modern imitators of the power that was Rome. Montesquieu had reasons for concentrating on empires that did not exist for Machiavelli. While both were equally hostile to the politics of the Church, Montesquieu had a special target in mind, Bishop Bossuet, Louis XIV's court theologian. Bossuet was not only the offical apologist for royal absolutism, he had underwritten its policies with his Discourse on Universal History, in which he demonstrated that all particular causes depended on the secret decrees of Divine Providence, which had used the rise and fall of empires to spread Christianity and to realize God's purposes. The task of the French king was to remain 'the eldest son' of the Church by recognizing its miraculous continuity, by protecting it, and by working for its reunification. That a single united Church needed a single public vessel was an old doctrine and the religious and imperial duty of the French monarchy seemed clear, especially to Louis XIV, as he engaged in one disastrous war after another. Montesquieu's strategy for undermining this theological ideology was to confront it with a naturalistic alternative. His history of the Roman Empire had room for only human causes in politics. The emergence of Christianity was for him an unremarkable event, entirely in keeping with the normal course of Roman religious politics (463). He also took pains to show that the policies of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, were uniformly ill-conceived and had dire political consequences. Here was a natural history of empires to rival Bossuet's divinely driven drama. And whatever the greatness of Rome may have been, it was not a model to be imitated by the kings of France. Montesquieu and his contemporaries had many reasons to find imperial politics of compelling interest. Demythologizing the Roman origins of Christianity was only one objective. There were new forms of imperialism all around them. First of all there was the Spanish conquest of South America, which Montesquieu along with most enlightened 53

Montesquieu observers found horrifying in its cruelty to the native population. Its outcome was not only the physical destruction of the Indians, but also the economic ruin of Spain itself. In addition, the French had recently lived through a disastrous succession of wars for hegemony in Europe which simply could not be won. And finally, there was the uniquely successful empire for commerce that the English had created in North America, and which was of equal benefit to the local population and its rulers. Until the end of the Seven Years War the contrast between empires for conquest and empires for trade was a credible theory of international relations. Then the discontents that culminated in the American Revolution put it in doubt. Montesquieu, however, could still believe that conquest and commerce, like war and law, were two poles between which statesmen had to steer the policies of states. There was no doubt in his mind that the peaceful course was the only rational one in modern Europe. His account of Roman expansion is thus a grim tale that certainly takes all the glamour out of bloodshed. While the Romans were always flawed by their ferocity, Montesquieu was far from blind to their political achievements. To give their history a full measure of tragedy he had indeed to show just how much they lost when their little free republic became the imperial master of the world. He also made them directly responsible for all that happened to them. While in principle he thought that there were always both physical and moral causes that explained the character of groups as well as of individuals, in Romans he considered only the latter. He had written a paper for the Academie of Bordeaux on the changes in the climate and physical environment that had made the modern Romans as sober as their ancestors had been intemperate (O.C. 11.1732). Now, however, he was concerned only with the psychological and political alterations among the Romans as they moved from one form of goverment to another. The task of the historian was to explain these morphological changes. Underlying the entire history of Rome was the inveterate 54

The rise and decline of the Romans bellicosity of the Roman people, which, Montesquieu believed, had survived into the present, and still displayed itself in fights in the theatres. 'Nature', he concluded, 'always acts, but it is overwhelmed by social customs' (.Pensees, 1296). This was the chief reason for Rome's extraordinary rise and fall. Within the realm of moral causality the historian must sort out three different subcategories: general, occasional, and particular causes. The terms are lifted from the theological vocabulary of Malebranche, who used them to describe God's actions toward mankind, but they are here, ironically, given a wholly naturalistic meaning. The difference between these three kinds of causes is that the first are long-range and fundamental, while the latter two are merely precipitating events. In this usage Montesquieu closely followed his favourite medical authors who saw it as their task to find the ultimate causes of disease rather than just to describe individual cases. 'Fortune does not rule the world', he concluded. 'There are general causes, be they moral or physical, which act in every monarchy to raise it, to maintain it, or to cast it down. All accidents are subject to these causes, and if a battle, that is a particular cause, has destroyed a state, then there was a general cause that determined that this state should perish in a single battle. In a word, the main trend carries all particular accidents along' (482). In Romans we find two kinds of general causes, the fundamental institutional policies of successive governments and the spirit of the people. When the early kings of Rome decided to claim absolute hereditary power and abased the nobility, they destroyed themselves. The rape of Lucretia was merely the occasion on which the last king was overthrown by a bellicose people that would not put up with such a monarchy. The general cause of its fall was that no monarchy can long survive without a nobility to stand between the prince and the people. When Flenry VII of England pursued the same policy as the last two primitive 55

Montesquieu kings of Rome the result was the same: the throne was ultimately enfeebled beyond repair. 'Because men at all times have the same passions, the occasions that produce great changes differ, but the causes are always the same' (353-4). Thus also the sacrifice of Virginia in the Roman Republic was only the occasion of the downfall of the oppressive decemvirs. The real cause was that the Roman people were not made to endure that kind of rule (Spirit, II. 15). Any policy that either offends the spirit of a people or seriously alters the basic structure of government will act as a general cause with long-lasting consequences. Thus when Constantine divided the Empire to build a new Christian capital in the East, he wrote the death warrant of the Western half of the Empire. Poor military planning just set the moment when one or other of the outlying peoples would invade and conquer it. If not Odoacer's Goths, some other barbarians would have given it the final blow (474-6, 493-4). General causes act like forces of nature, but if they are scientifically understood they are not beyond human control. There is a very clear lesson for any monarch in the consequences of the self-aggrandizing policies of the Roman kings and of Henry VII. That a monarchy can survive without a nobility is a law of social nature. However, Montesquieu did not believe in political inevitability. His constant resort to counterfactuals to explain the outcomes of political decisions makes that quite clear. There was always a road not taken, which might have been followed, but was not pursued. Fully to understand the meaning of political choices the alternatives must be imagined, and that implies that these were at least possible at one point. Thus it would not have been feasible for Julian the Apostate, whom Montesquieu greatly admired, to restore paganism, for it was dead. If he had lived longer, however, he might very well have succeeded in establishing a new religion that would have replaced paganism and prevented the spread of Christianity (473). At crucial moments rulers make political decisions which cannot be reversed because their effects are

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The rise and decline of the Romans transforming. That makes it as pointless to speak of historical inevitability as it is to believe that everything is politically possible at any time. The chief object of a correct diagnosis is to be able to prognosticate the probable course of the disease. In some cases knowing the cause may make it possible to prevent a disorder, but in the eighteenth century medicine had no reliable cures, and Montesquieu's history was designed to warn rather than to prescribe remedies. In Montesquieu's analysis of the Romans even the spirit of the people is created by moral causes. The early kings from the first engaged in constant warfare, and this contributed a great deal to giving the Roman people their enduringly warlike character. It set them on their permanent path (355-7). The Romans from their earliest days on were always at war with their neighbours for booty, women, and land. This early experience moulded their spirit indelibly and influenced all their future political conduct and institutions. Not only did one war lead to another, but military success invited renewed ventures, and the Romans always won. The entire history of Rome was a working out of these determining experiences. The one aim of the Roman government, whatever its form, was territorial aggrandizement. Whether it was a republic with a citizen militia or an empire with an army of foreign mercenaries, the exigencies of military expansion and the call of a bellicose spirit dominated its politics. Even its domestic politics were hostage to military projects. The willingness, indeed eagerness, of the Roman people to go to war was used by its various rulers to control the citizens. While a warring people was bound to be turbulent, the prospect of foreign war always pulled them together. This was particularly important for the patricians after the fall of the kings, because the plebeians were powerful enough to assert themselves, and it took all the sagacity of the Senate to curb them. The Senators therefore never ceased to plan for war and conducted a ruthless foreign policy. They deceived every foreign ruler with unscrupulous guile, and also used

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Montesquieu war to divert the people from domestic concerns and disorders (368-9). The elected magistrates were, in any case, even more war-prone than the old kings whom they replaced, because they only had a short time in which to establish a reputation (355). The very unruliness and civil violence of the Romans made them formidable, because they all knew the use of arms (414-15, 426). In republican Rome freedom and physical violence were inseparable. Its military success was due partly to luck, but mostly to the shrewdness of the Senate, which chose to fight only one enemy at a time until they had conquered all of Italy, picking off one people at a time. And when defeat did confront the Romans in the person of Hannibal, the Senate managed to steel the people to endurance until they prevailed (378-9). It was thus the combination of the endemic bellicosity of the people and the inherited political intelligence of the Senators that drove the Romans on to unending expansion. Because the people of Rome recognized the political talents of the Senators, they voluntarily agreed to share power with them after the expulsion of the kings, even though the balance of power had shifted to them. That did not mean that they were prepared to put up with oppressive policies. Nevertheless, for a long time Rome had a system of equal landholding and an unequal distribution of political authority. Even the tribunes maintained a defensive stance on behalf of the people for a while, until thanks to an 'eternal infirmity of mankind' they moved to an unbalancing aggressive position. Customs, censors who enforced frugal habits, and military discipline made the Romans a free and intensely public-spirited and military people. The Roman people was far from submissive in its republican days. 'What is called unity in a political body, is a very equivocal thing,' Montesquieu observed. 'When it is genuine it is a harmony which makes all the parts, however opposed they may seem to us, act together for the general good of society. . . . There can be unity in a state in which one can see only discord, and yet it is a real concord that brings 58

The rise and decline of the Romans happiness, which is the only real peace.' In this, free Rome was wholly unlike every immoderate and despotic state, in which there are real conflict and an apparent quiet, 'not of united citizens, but of dead bodies buried next to each other' (415). That pluralism and its perpetual tensions and quarrels are the fundamental and necessary social conditions of political freedom was another law of politics derived from history. It was not the constant political commotion within the city that weakened the republic. Military success and its consequences undid it. Just as the vitalistic medical writers, to whom Montesquieu referred occasionally, thought that the principle of health when disturbed became the source of disease, so the cause of Rome's greatness would also bring it down in time. It expanded beyond its ability to govern itself as a republic. Neither a monarchy nor a republic, it had become the head of a body composed of all the peoples of the world (400). The vast expansion of the territory under its control and the remoteness of the fields of battle kept the army too far from the city for too long. The soldiers came to depend more on their local generals than upon the home government, and the commanders acquired inordinate power as a result. It was only a matter of time and occasion that would decide which of the generals would make himself the master of Rome. Augustus was only the effective agent of the new order. That he should have been the first emperor was a mere accident, and his victory over his rivals was only the particular cause of the imperial state (431). Freedom had become politically impossible long before he came along. There was no will left in the city to resist ambitious generals. The plunder of the world had made some Romans very rich, luxury-loving, acquisitive, and corrupt. There were very poor and very wealthy citizens now, and both those who had made and those who had lost fortunes cared more about them than about the preservation of their ancestral institutions. They were no longer the same society and they were not prepared to take personal risks in order to be free. Their 59

Montesquieu passion for conquest remained unabated, and Montesquieu found the survival of their military heroism almost to the end of the Empire an astonishing proof of the force of moral causes in history (414-19). The deepest of the general causes of the transformation of the republican regime was the policy of extending Roman citizenship to all the Italian allies in order to meet the manpower needs of the extended empire. So large a population could not be self-governing in the old civic manner, and citizenship lost its emotional meaning (412-13). It had once been a strength of the Romans that they freely adopted any custom of a conquered people that seemed useful to them. This flexibility became a great weakness when the soldiers in outlying districts took on local customs that estranged them from the metropolis. And this source of disloyalty continued to enfeeble the Empire as it had the republican regime. Indeed, the new Empire lacked the sources of stability that the latter had enjoyed. Emperors were made and unmade by soldiers and their commanders upon whom they had to rely to run the huge empire, but on whose allegiance they could not count (460). They were just as unscrupulous as the old senators had been but, with a few exceptions, nowhere near as able. They were not as a class competent rulers, in Montesquieu's judgement, but the structure of the state itself was inherently unstable as well, so that even good emperors, like Trajan, could not really alter it permanently. Constantine was perhaps particularly unwise in tampering with a long-established system, which is always a very dangerous thing to do. For it is only in restrospect that we can recognize what the bases of its stability were (476). The obvious implication was that it was not just cutting the Empire in half, but the introduction of Christianity that was more than a military empire could bear. No wonder that one of Montesquieu's clerical friends said that he was more worried by some of the silences in the book than by anything that was overtly said in it. To be sure Constantine's policies were not the only general cause of

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The rise and decline of the Romans the weakness of the Western Empire. It was an insecure military regime all along, and when it allowed itself to be attacked by several armies at the same time, it perished. The governing classes of the Eastern Empire were even less capable than those of the West, but they survived longer because their neighbours were usually even less competent. They also had a monopoly of commerce in the world, although they were not a commercial people like the Carthaginians, who had made the pursuit of wealth the chief object of their policies. The spirit of the Eastern Empire was a mixture of war and religious bigotry, which Montesquieu carefully identified as a Greek characteristic (506-10). The idolatry of the Eastern rites, the ill-defined boundaries between secular and ecclesiastical authority, and the intolerance of both, added up to an unstable despotism. One result was a series of schisms, since religious reform seemed hopeless. This was to happen again in Europe with the rise of Calvinism (511-12). Politically enforced orthodoxy was clearly one of the diseases of religion. Nevertheless, even under these unfavourable circumstances, religion had acted as a restraint upon the Eastern emperors, and frustrated their efforts to become omnipotent (519). In the long run, however, bigotry is a liability, even though religious fanaticism can drive soldiers on for a while, as Cromwell's armies had recently shown (511). Its weakness is that it makes for ferocious and interminable civil wars. In a free state, civil conflict and religious diversity are sources of strength. Even in monarchies such as France violent civil wars that are only struggles for power eventually come to an end, but wars of religion are endless because the passions that cause them do not go away. There is clearly much to be said in favour of religious tolerance in any state. Christianity did not even make the later Romans less cruel. By forbidding the gladiatorial games Constantine had not made the people any gentler, but had only dampened their courage without improving their morals (476). They remained 'cruel men in a cruel state'. The Romans had been 61

Montesquieu made integrally cruel by their power over their children and wives, by their military obsessions, by their games, and by the deliberate policies of the Senate (451). Their ferocity was part of an ethos in which public purposes blotted out every personal impulse. Even the law of inheritance was a public matter, leaving no room for private disposition of property. Under the Empire, the subjects had only private concerns, and violence was monopolized by the emperors and their entourage, hence the regime of fear. Military skills survived to serve the despot, but then that was the only talent the Romans had ever developed. They never knew anything about the arts or crafts or commerce. Even in their days of corruption and servility they could still fight well (418-19). In all other respects, they had been transformed. There were, according to Montesquieu, two kinds of fundamental political change that must be explained in terms of general causes (Spirit, XI. 13). In one case the form of government changes, but the character of the society is unaltered. The transformation of Rome into a republic after the expulsion of its kings was an example of that sort of change, and it was clearly an improvement. The second sort of change occurs when the entire ethos of a people, or at least of those who govern it, is altered, and that is usually the result of corruption. That is what happened at the end of the Roman Republic, when personal ambition replaced public rapacity among both rulers and ruled under the impact of luxury and inequality. In the second case, the regime as well as the society was altered, although in Rome the ferocious character of the people was a constant element, and Montesquieu believed that he had traced it from one end of its history to the other (Pensees, 961). What did Montesquieu mean by corruption and what part did it play in his theories of political change? In the case of a free state, he used the word very much as we do, to imply that money is being used to buy political privileges and policies, and that the pursuit of personal wealth dominates public life in general. Bribery, reducing the public treasury to a 62

The rise and decline of the Romans common trough, and the use of political authority for selfenrichment are the marks of corruption in a free state. Corruption in a democratic republic must infect the entire people, since they rule, but in other regimes it is enough for the ruling classes to lose their ethical restraint for the rot to set in. The real harm done by illegal exchanges of wealth is that they erode the loyalty of both rulers and ruled to a free state. Only despotisms do not degenerate, since they are in a state of constant corruption; that is their nature. At times their ferocity is abated, but it reasserts itself very soon (Spirit, VIII. 1-10). Corruption had been at the very centre of the classical theory of historical cycles which had envisaged only one course of change, corruption followed by political transformation. In this view cities began as monarchies, whose rulers degenerated into selfish tyrants. They were eventually overthrown by patriotic aristocrats, who in turn would be corrupted into egotistical oligarchs. The people would rise against them and establish a law-abiding democracy, which would sooner or later decline into mob rule. Only Rome, with a constitution that contained elements of all three pure forms of government, would escape the life cycle of regimes. It could avoid their slide into laxity, because each part of the government would keep a sharp eye on the other. Montesquieu certainly retained many elements of this theory in his reflections on the history of Rome, which depended heavily on just those Latin historians who had relied on this pattern of explanation. Sometimes he considered an even gloomier cycle of the organic death and decay of polities, which also was based on the history of ancient cities. Nations move from barbarism to conquest and on to civilization. They then become refined, which enfeebles them, so that they are conquered and again reduced to barbarism (Pensees, 1917). He did not believe that the Romans lost their military heroism until the last days of the Western Empire, so the softening process must have been fairly slow (419, 480). The danger in this version of 63

Montesquieu corruption is not the money, but effeminacy and loss of physical vigour, which began to infect the Roman legions when they were seduced by oriental luxuries (387). On the whole Montesquieu tended to adopt a theory of political change that was rather more flexible than the classical cycle, although he also believed that all states must ultimately decline and perish. Democracies can change in two ways, both as a result of the loss of public rectitude of the people. Either they are overwhelmed by the desire for an excess of equality, in which case they fall into anarchy and are conquered by a more orderly foreign enemy. Or they may lose their spirit of equality and frugality and turn into an inegalitarian aristocracy. Aristocracies can become so egalitarian that they change into democratic republics, but they can also turn into arbitrary collective tyrannies. Monarchies become despotic when the intermediary bodies are destroyed by the prince. When the privileges of the estates and of the towns are abolished, the path to despotism seems open, but it is not inevitably followed. Both the Roman and the English peoples got rid of their absolute monarchs before they reached that point. Montesquieu had correspondingly less confidence in the durability of mixed regimes than Polybius. The Roman constitution had a dangerous flaw from the first. The judicial power was not separated from the others, but divided up between the magistrates, the Senate, and the people. When the new men, the knights, took it over they abused it and the constitution was irreparably compromised (Spirit, XI. 11-19). The character of corruption seems to depend on the regime in which it occurs. Luxury is fatal only to republics, in other forms of government money does not corrupt. The inordinate and uncontrolled pursuit of power is a far more universal cause of the decline of regimes. Whatever form the decline takes, however, it always begins at the top. Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar corrupted the Roman people (Romans, 439-40). Those who occupy the offices of government are corrupted first; then, to justify their loss of virtue, they 64

The rise and decline of the Romans corrupt the people. In aristocracies and monarchies it is only the rulers who lose their sense of public duty. The people, even the Romans, in Montesquieu's account are reactive rather than innovative. They respond to the call of the leaders, and they rise only on those extreme occasions when oppression threatens them. The initiative is always with the hereditary or elected rulers of the state. It is the elites who are, therefore, wholly responsible for the corruption of the state. The effects of wealth are not the same at all times. Montesquieu saw commercial England as a model modern empire, but in antiquity commercial Carthage seemed to him vastly inferior to Rome. He had certainly not left out a single wart on the face of republican Rome and its disheartening military ethos. The Carthaginians were, nevertheless, worse because commercial motives made them betray Hannibal and led them to their own destruction. Their commercial spirit rendered them unfit for public undertakings and made them contemptible (370-2). A modern commercial empire is, however, a completely different matter. It is wholly beneficial, as agreeable to the colonists as to England. Money might be used to unbalance the English constitution, but neither wealth, luxury, nor commerce was inherently corrupting in the modern world; their only danger was that they could be exploited to disturb the political equilibrium upon which political liberty depended. Imperialism for conquest, like the Spanish rule in the Americas and the European wars of Louis XIV, were now the real dangers. Even the Romans, who had devastated the world to achieve their universal state, were less barbaric than the modern Spaniards who had 'destroyed all to preserve all' in Mexico (400). They were nothing but the exterminators of the natives. A single empire in Europe had also become impossible, in Montesquieu's opinion (460). The simple cost of such a conquest had become prohibitive. Moreover, with printing, news travelled too fast now for the Roman practice of surprise attacks on one country after another (507-8). 65

Montesquieu Overseas empires were all that remained possible, and they could be prosperous commercial colonies or impoverished deserts. The choice for modern Europe was between English and Spanish imperialism, and the Roman example was very obviously intended as a warning to future conquerors. It was Montesquieu's most ardent hope that treaties and the law of nations could not now be disregarded with the impunity of the Roman Senate (Romans, 390-401; Spirit, X. 1—12). In spite of the vast differences that separated modern Europe from ancient Rome, Montesquieu believed that the history of that extraordinary people remained useful, especially when retold to illustrate universally valid laws of political change. Elistory in general is instructive as the panoramic display of human psychology, for it reveals our permanent traits in a variety of circumstances. The historian puts human actions and motives in a rational order so that one can come to understand the reasons for past conduct, institutions, and events (Pensees, 1795). That is how he can also bring us a message of self-understanding.

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4

The Spirit of the Laws: constraint and liberty

When one reads all of Montesquieu's published and unpublished writings from beginning to end, one realizes that he had been working on his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws, all his life. The book was published in 1748 in Geneva, and distributed freely, with neither the consent nor the interference of the censor, and it was an instant success. Two years after it had appeared Montesquieu wrote to a friend that there were twenty-two editions of his work and that it was read all over Europe. Eventually‘there were to be many critics, but they only enhanced the fame of the author. The latter was, in fact, perfectly aware of the originality and worth of his creation. He put a phrase from Ovid, 'an offspring made without a mother', at the head of the last preface he was able to prepare for it. This was not meant to imply that all his ideas were brand new, but that he had put together a distinctive political theory that was unlike any of its predecessors. And, indeed, while he referred frequently to other authors, he quite explicitly treated even the greatest of them, Plato and Aristotle, as reliable sources of information and not as philosophical authorities (Pensees, 1378). Montesquieu's evident pride in his work may have been partly due to his triumph over his blindness. To an old friend he confessed that he thought the book would have been much better if he had not been so hampered by his infirmity. The text had to be dictated to a succession of secretaries, which was frustrating. More significantly, however, Montesquieu knew that he had put all of his life's experiences into this, his final book. His entire intellectual capital as a judge, scientist, novelist, historian, and traveller was invested in it. The oldest of his preoccupations, though, proved to be the most enduring; for as the title proclaims

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Montesquieu plainly enough, the book is about law. And surprisingly, given its subject, it is more cheerful in its tone and message than his two earlier books. Reason and knowledge could, after all, do a great deal to prevent corruption and injustice, and even to control the natural obstacles to human wellbeing. While the devastations of despotism and fear haunt this book even more than The Persian Letters, we are presented with plausible political alternatives. And though he reworked a lot of the material assembled in Romans, we hear far more about the vigorous republic than about the decadent empire. The greatest difference is one of tone. This is the story not of personal despair and historical decline, but of what can be done to avert public disaster and to diminish the political cruelties that mar our lives. Montesquieu had been radicalized, possibly by his visit to England, and even by his young friends from the Encyclopedie. Unlike most people, he undeniably came to be more convinced of the possibility of positive political action as he grew older. He never lost his scepticism, and was as comfortable with his doubts as ever, but his notes indicate that he also became both socially and intellectually more self-confident in his last years. Like most great works of political theory The Spirit of the Laws has at least three purposes: philosophical, historical, and polemical. Its philosophical aim was to define the structure of law and to classify, under a few coherent headings, the whole variety of social rules and procedures in such a way as to reveal their place in any given society. Historical examples were not only to explain how the laws of a society at any time had acquired their peculiar character, but also to show their part in the 'nature of things'. This was one of Montesquieu's favourite phrases, and it stood for the entire social and physical situation of which law was a dynamic part. As the given state of affairs, it determined both the possibilities and the limits of effective legislation. History also provided the materials with which one could build an empirical science of human law that would be like one of the natural sciences. It was, finally, to be an eminently 68

Constraint and liberty practical doctrine, for Montesquieu was as determined as ever to warn his countrymen of the dangers of despotism and to encourage the liberalization and humanization of the law on every possible occasion. The politics of fear remained the supreme enemy. It cannot be said that Montesquieu was always careful to keep his various purposes apart. The word devoir is used to mean 'must' (as a natural necessity), 'should' (in order to bring about some end), and 'ought' (because it is right). Even the subtitle to his final edition is ambiguous: 'The relation that the laws doivent (must, should, ought to?) have with the constitution of every government, with mores, the climate, religion, commerce, etc.' In addition to this difficulty, there are so many illustrations and digressions in every chapter that many readers have found the book incoherent and confusing. Indeed, Montesquieu admitted that he sometimes had to be disorderly in order to be comprehensive (XIX. 1). Nevertheless, The Spirit of the Laws does have a clear design, and as soon as it is recognized, its individual parts fall into place quite readily. The first thirteen chapters deal with the function of law as both social constraint and liberation. The tensions and contrasts between these two equally necessary objects of law are the guiding theme of this part of the book. The second part discusses the natural necessities and cultural characteristics which both mould and limit mankind's ability to impose its will upon its environment. Only knowledge makes it possible for us to be at ease and to act effectively within the physical and historical world into which we are born. To disregard 'the nature of things' is to court both intellectual and political disaster. The lesson for legislators is that they must understand law first of all as part of the social whole which they rule, as well as an instrument of deliberate government. The spirit of the laws is thus a mixture of intentional human designs and of the deep circumstances which condition all the rules of a society. The last five chapters are an appendix, in which the Roman and early French laws of succession are analysed to demonstrate

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Montesquieu how the history of law should be studied. Above all, the book is about the spirit, not the letter of the law; about what it means in society and not what it says in the law-books. The brief opening book of The Spirit of the Laws, with a nod to convention, is modelled on one of the most venerable and best-known authorities, the second-century Roman jurist Ulpian. Like him, Montesquieu began with a definition of law in general, and then went on to an account of the specific types of law. He was particularly faithful to the original in covering the philosophical ground as quickly as he decently could before getting down to the real matter in hand, positive, man-made laws. His initial definition of law is cryptic: 'Laws, in their most general significance, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity has His laws, the material world has its laws, intelligences superior to man have their laws, the beasts have their laws, and man has his laws' (1.1). These sentences pleased hardly anyone. Sceptics like Hume complained that the word 'relation' was a meaningless metaphysical abstraction. This was unfair, since Montesquieu had no metaphysical aspirations whatsoever. He just wanted to discuss law as both cause and effect of all other social conditions. Clerical readers were also offended, because they saw a hierarchy of norms which enclosed God, man, and the beasts in a single self-perpetuating system. With some prudence, Montesquieu had actually added to his initial statement the reflection that without an intelligent Creator and first cause such a structure of rules was unthinkable. God was no longer active in it, but He had made it all. This may not have sufficed for any imaginable Christian reader, but it was very important for Montesquieu himself, because acts of legislation were at the very heart of his idea of law. In a notebook he wrote that when we see law in society we always have an idea of a legislator, just as there is an artisan for every machine. Everything in the world has a cause and for every artifact there must be a craftsman. Since the universe had surely been created, there must have been

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Constraint and liberty a Deity who had made it. Montesquieu was a deist, not an atheist. That the laws of the natural world should have been made by an intelligent being was both a symbolic necessity and a plausible proposition for him. Human legislators give their societies a great part of their form and character, and they are not just remote mythical figures, like Lycurgus. Montesquieu remembered that William Penn had done no less within living memory, indeed had done better, because peace, not war,'had been the aim of his laws. Moreover, in England Montesquieu had seen parliamentary legislating as an ongoing practice, not as just an initial founding. Important though legislative action was, it did not, however, define law. Montesquieu spoke of law as a relation precisely because, unlike Hobbes and Pufendorf, he did not regard it as the command of a superior or the will of a sovereign. Relation may indeed be a vague word, but what it does not mean may be more important than what it does imply, in this case. The second part of a preamble to a treatise on law was traditionally supposed to deal with the differences between natural and human law, and Montesquieu proceeded accordingly. Human bodies, our machines, are, like all material objects, subject to physical laws, but our soul and its will can make choices about conduct. That is why, unlike the animals, we are not wholly guided by instinct. Here, still closely following Ulpian, Montesquieu identified the law of nature as the instinct for self-preservation. Unhappily we are not as well-favoured by nature as are the beasts, who, without intelligence to lead them astray, live more happily and peacefully than we can. We are, in fact, nature s stepchildren and we must make all kinds of rules for ourselves to restrain and guide us. Deism allowed Montesquieu to think that the laws of physical motion, animal instinct, and social rules were somehow alike, except that we are able to refuse to follow the latter two. Justice also was not a part of Montesquieu's definition of law, which does not mean that he disregarded it. As Uzbek had remarked, if there is a God He must be just, otherwise 71

Montesquieu He would be a demon, and even if there is no God we should love justice, because it is a relationship of inherent fitness, which corresponds to what a perfect being would establish. At the very least we should believe that there is an inner voice that tells us what is right and wrong. Without that minimal act of faith we should fall into despair and live in perpetual fear (lxxxiii). In The Spirit of the Laws justice is not treated as a necessary myth. It is simply claimed that the ideas of justice and law arise simultaneously in the human mind, like a circle and its radii. Law and justice are inseparable, one implies the other. Justice may even be anterior in time to law, since we do have an innate sense of obligation to those who have benefited us, but nothing suggests that it has its origins in anything other than human intelligence. What counts most is that without laws we could not survive. A man who had spent more than a decade presiding over a criminal court was not likely to ignore the necessity of coercive law, but he did not draw the same conclusions as Hobbes had from this consideration. He had no use for the sort of law of nature that was supposed to prevail in Hobbes' fear- and aggression-ridden state of nature, mainly because he thought speculations about pre-social life irrelevant. In such an imaginary state men would probably be too timid and too simple to think of domination, which presupposes a considerable social experience. Montesquieu dismissed the ideas both of a pre-political hell and of Utopian perfection. Law deals with men as they exist in history, and at its best it is reason applied to the nature of things. Such reasoning is particularly necessary for Ulpian's final category of law, the law of nations [iusgentium). This is the law of war and peace between states which instructs them to do each other as little harm as possible in war, and all the good compatible with their own interests in time of peace. Eventually Montesquieu went far beyond Ulpian in his account of the relations between the different kinds of law. For in post-feudal and multi-religious Europe it was a matter of utmost importance that the various types of law be kept

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Constraint and liberty apart. The first task of modern law is to mark off private from public spheres of conduct, to regulate only the latter, and to organize legal procedures to protect the former. Otherwise there could be no liberty; for constraint is only one half of the aim of law. First of all the rules governing the structure and powers of government must be kept apart from the civil and criminal law which applies to private citizens. Rulers must not be allowed to treat their offices as their personal property. Nor is the feudal mix of private and public authority suitable now (XXVI. 15-17). If, in turn, the government interferes with civil law, the person and property of the citizens are in danger. To abrogate the 'palladium' of property and to seize private property for public purposes without due compensation can never be for the public good. For what is the public good but the security of property? These are compelling reasons for keeping public and private law in separate compartments, and Montesquieu thought that this section was the most original part of his book (Pensees, 1770). Religious law, as one might expect, was to be kept entirely apart from secular law. Religion deals with the eternal verities, and its precepts cannot be applied to an everchanging social world. It should speak to our hearts and rely on counsel, not on force. There must be no punishable religious crimes; therefore inquisitions and persecutions, which are incursions into the criminal law, are unacceptable assaults on personal security. To be sure, religious rules can contribute enormously to the stability of society, and when they do so the civil law should follow them, in matrimonial law for instance. Inheritance, dowries, and the legitimacy of children are, however, all matters of political economy and must be left to the civil law (XXVI.2, 9-13). So also are charitable bequests and the management of poor houses and the like (XXIII.29). Sexual and family relations are an extension of our instinct for self-preservation, and so fall under the law of nature, which should be beyond public control altogether. Partly because our security depends

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Montesquieu on a protected private sphere, but also because these forms of conduct are so relative to time and place, they ought not to be subjected to the rigours of the criminal law. Readers of The Persian Letters will not be surprised to find Montesquieu less than shocked by incest. The instinct of self-preservation plays its most creative part in the law of nations. It could not exist at all if it were not separated from political law, which always tries to reduce it to the mere expediency of governments. The law of nations forbids wars of extermination and permits only defensive wars and wars of liberation, which alone are compatible with human preservation (X.2-4). No law can justify permanent slavery: bondage is permitted, if at all, only during the first years of a military occupation. Finally, the laws of the conquerors may not replace the law of nations; the Spaniards had no right to kill Indian kings in America because they did not rule according to Spanish customs (XXVI.20-2). Humanity is always prior to citizenship (Pensees, 350). Above all, laws must be placed in appropriate compartments so that they will be neither too onerous nor uncertain. They will still remind us forcefully of what we may and may not do. Of all the possible fields of legislation, political (constitutional) law is by far the most important in setting the rules by which we must live. There are, Montesquieu argued, three forms of government, republican, monarchic, and despotic, and what distinguishes them is the number and character of those who rule. A republic may be governed by the many or the few, that is, the people or an aristocracy. In a monarchy, one man rules according to preestablished laws, while in a despotism there are no restraints upon him. This would have been a fairly conventional way of classifying regimes if it had not put such an emphasis on despotism. Lawless autocracy is, however, not just another form of government here, it is the limiting case, the very extremity of political corruption. All governments are judged by their distance from or proximity

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Constraint and liberty to this evil. It was for Montesquieu a yardstick with which he could measure both the psychological qualities of rulers and the structures of governments. For despotism is a passion of the soul, a political tendency, and a system of government. A state in which institutionalized power is too concentrated is moving structurally towards despotism, and this is particularly likely to occur in monarchies. Asiatic despotism is their ultimate end, and its prevalence was important for Montesquieu, because he wanted to make sure that his readers fully understood that such regimes really did exist. Forms of government do not adequately define regimes, something more dynamic must be added, the passions and the ethos of those who govern. They make up the ‘principles' which make states act and give them their effective character. They are what the soul is to an individual. Virtue in democracies, moderation in aristocracies, honour in monarchies, and fear in despotisms are integral to these regimes, and to change these principles is to transform the entire political order (III.2, 9). These principles are not ideologies (which are complex structures of thought) but common mentalities or shared dispositions. To complete the task of definition Montesquieu noted that while all states aim at their own preservation, each one has a special end as well: war for Sparta, glory for most monarchies, and liberty for England, for example (XI.5). This is the political psychology, the 'moral causes', which any scientific study of law must take into account. Since the survival of any regime depends on the disposition of its rulers to maintain its principle, education must be the first constraint that the law imposes upon them. The earliest impressions we receive are the most enduring and it is never too soon to begin to imprint the principles of government upon the young (IV. 1). This was much easier in antiquity, when there was only one set of ethical precepts to be absorbed, while in modern Europe, the family, religion, and the world all teach their own 75

Montesquieu lessons, even though the latter usually prevails (IV.4). There is no reason to believe, however, that Montesquieu resented the modern divided self. He was not given to that sort of introspection. What he did regret was the feeble public activity of the traditional French elites. Despotism, of course, shuns education, ignorance being its normal condition. How do governments constrain the citizens and how are rulers restrained? Montesquieu's representations of how the various regimes work are indissoluble mixtures of history and cautionary analysis. They are accounts of what was done to preserve a form of government, and what should have been done, and what very often was not done. The result is not so much a construction of models of the four types of government, as an artful collage of historical information about what policies had kept them alive, and might have continued to do so, as well as of those decisions that eventually caused their decline or transformation. In every case, he begins with the most important point of all: who rules? In a democratic republic, of which Athens was his chief example, all citizens rule and are ruled in turn. Its most important political decision, therefore, is who is to count as a citizen and a voter, for they will govern themselves directly. Montesquieu thought that the suffrage should be spread very widely, but exercised on a limited area of legislation, with most matters left to elected magistrates. Some of these may be chosen by lot, but most should be elected in open assemblies so that discussion and persuasion can play a part in the deliberations and choices of the people. Not all votes need be counted equally; voters can be divided into blocks which give the richer ones extra weight, but in general the people as a whole can be expected to make very sound electoral choices. Virtue, defined as patriotic zeal, and a passionate love of equality animate the citizens, which is possible only in a small society of similar members. The military dangers of smallness can be overcome by a confederation among similar polities (IX. 1-3). Because 76

Constraint and liberty Montesquieu thought that in a pure democracy the egalitarian rather than the military passions of a republican citizenry constituted their patriotism, social education, not martial discipline, seemed to be the first requirement of a democracy (V.3-7). Only in Rome was constant military ardour an essential part of patriotism. In either case, however, a tight, cohesive little society of mutually watchful citizens is essential to maintain democracy and its spirit of equality (VII. 16). Censors must reinforce these informal restraints upon the conduct of adults, but nothing is more important than the upbringing of the young, who must obey the old in rigidly patriarchal households. Such customs are no violation of equality, but a rotation of authority, since all men may expect to become wise fathers eventually. Next to education, law enforcement is the most urgent object of government in a democracy. The accused criminal must be given the most extensive protection, for the life of every citizen is equally precious, but once a sentence has been passed there can be no pardon. All crimes are, after all, public offences against one's fellow citizen-rulers. There can, therefore, also be no separate religious courts, everything being part of one public order. Sumptuary laws may be a good policy to maintain thrift and equality, which are social, not religious virtues. Since women are treated as articles of consumption in these societies, their chastity and domestication are part of the frugal probity of an egalitarian republic (VII.8-17). Because all relationships are public in a republic, male friendship is fully realized only there. Men there love and hate each other passionately, while in monarchies they feel only an instinctual affection or contempt for each other (Pensees, 1253, 1675). This was Athens at its best and it haunted Montesquieu's imagination. He was not the last political thinker to come under its spell. — The indoctrination of citizens in both democratic and aristocratic republics must be deep and subtle. If it fails, all is lost, for who is there to recall a corrupted people to patriotism and equality? Corruption, as we have seen, always 77

Montesquieu begins at the top. Montesquieu had far more confidence in the Roman people than in the patricians, but in the end they also lost their virtue (VIII. 12-16). The greatest problem of republican regimes is to put off the evil moment when they lose their inner balance. Indeed, nothing reveals the brittleness of political elites more than the conduct of republican aristocracies, of whom the Roman patricians and the modern Venetians were the main examples. Here sovereignty, the power to make and enforce laws, is in the hands of a recognized nobility (II.3). The closer they are to the people the more stable they are, because some egalitarian restraints remain intact. When their status becomes hereditary all these are lost (VIII.5). It is also difficult to prevent the personal ambitions and mutual antagonisms of the individual members of an aristocracy from destroying the republic. Moderation must be their principle if they are to survive, and as the history of Venice shows, they are not capable of it. One way to force moderation upon them is to tax off any excessive wealth that they might acquire (VII.3). Marriage into plebeian families should also be encouraged and estates divided equally among all heirs, and commercial enrichment forbidden so that economic inequality is not added to already unequal political conditions. In the end, however, no law can keep an aristocracy within republican bounds; only their own moderation and good sense can do that, and that may not be enough (III.4). Liberty is not safe in the hands of aristocrats unless they have a collective selfinterest in maintaining it. What was Montesquieu trying to establish about republican government in general? First of all that these governments were quite rational and that there were very good reasons for their laws, which served their political stability and ethos. Nevertheless, there is also a record of mistakes and loss of public will which were detrimental to the constitutional survival of these states. Republican constitutions are exceptionally fragile because they depend 78

Constraint and liberty on the customs, habits, and attitudes of the citizens far more than on explicit legislation. They can really work only in societies that are deeply traditional, integrated, and totally geared to political purposes. Every institution, whether domestic or communal, must serve the republican order, and especially the egalitarian structure of politics. It is obviously not an easy system to copy and Montesquieu made no suggestions to that end, quite the contrary. His purposes in reconstructing the political experiences of republics were far more scientific than programmatic. The comparison between functioning and disturbed constitutions, which illustrates the heavy demands of republican government, is only a part of a general theory of political survival. It was evidently Montesquieu's hope that he had found standards by which the performance of governments could be judged, the onset of decay recognized, and the probable course of any republic foreseen. Once one fully grasps the structure and movements of a regime, one has not cures for its ills, but a new way of using history to understand the constitutional law of republics in general, and of other regimes as well. Monarchy preoccupied Montesquieu more than any other form of government. Most of Europe was, after all, governed by monarchs and he was writing mainly about and for France. In a monarchy the legislative power is in the hands of a single prince, but he is surrounded by laws and institutions that stop him imposing his will directly upon his subjects. Limitations upon the power of the prince are thus part of the very definition of monarchy (II.4). The necessity of intermediary institutions to stem the 'ocean' of royal power which always threatens to inundate the people cannot therefore be overestimated. Among the remaining barriers that stood between the king of France and the people, Montesquieu sometimes spoke respectfully of the parlements, but by no means always (Pensees, 589). He even thought that buying, selling, and inheriting judicial offices was appropriate, because it put their owners out of the reach of the prince's control, and probably provided better 79

Montesquieu magistrates than those that the king and his ministers would appoint (V. 19). He knew all about the inner weakness of the parlements, and he appreciated them, not as governing bodies, but only as bulwarks against the king. Was this special pleading for his own caste, or the counsel of despair? The Estates General had not met for over a century and even then had been a failure. The old nobility had become courtiers who, among other vices, were given to 'ambition in idleness; meanness mixed with pride; a desire for riches without industry; aversion to truth; flattery, perfidy, violation of engagements, and contempt for civil duties'. As one might expect, they set a bad example to the rest of the population (III.5). Their privileges and estates would have to be maintained to leave some sort of link between the people and the king, but as a ruling elite they were evidently hopeless. As for the Church, it could in principle control the prince, but as the clergy were beholden to the crown for their property, they were entirely dependent upon the king. Nothing could be expected from that quarter (II.4; Pensees, 214). Who was to govern France? Who was to thwart the prince? Montesquieu was obviously aware of the frailty of the ancien regime, and he attributed it to the decline of its countervailing powers. Honour is the energizing principle of monarchical constitutions, and it is the ethos of the military nobility. War is their joy, and they do not mind giving their lives for their prince, but their estates and privileges mean a lot more to them. Personal ambition and classconsciousness move them most of all and that is what makes the monarchy go as well. Education teaches the nobility what they owe to themselves, not to others. Frankness is important to them, because it is a mark of breeding and boldness, but a love of truth is not required. Pride should be cultivated at all costs to prevent the utter servility and politeness of courtiers (IV.2). For their politeness is not genuine civility,- it merely flatters the vices of others, while civility hides our own vices and protects others against our 80

Constraint and liberty worst impulses (XIX. 16). The French nobility had lost its independent political significance and with the clergy were so bound to the king that they must all sink or swim together. Montesquieu never imagined a political future for the commercial bourgeoisie or the lower reaches of the third estate; he did not even look in that direction. What he dreaded was the descent of French absolutism into a despotism on the Spanish model. Writing as he did before the middle of the eighteenth century, that was not an unreasonable apprehension, even though we know that this was not how it turned out. Although the honour of the nobility had been eroded, and though the clergy were the servants of the crown, law and policy could still do much to save the French monarchy from the Spanish shipwreck. The maintenance of an independent judiciary, and thus of the parlements, was one positive step still open to the regime, and that was a crucial issue for Montesquieu. The central and continuous theme of The Spirit of the Laws is that the independence of the courts of law more than any other institution separates moderate from despotic regimes. In a monarchy they are the essential barrier against tyranny, which is why neither the prince nor his advisers may act as judges; for if they replace the judiciary, the person and the property of the subject are at risk. The judicial process should be slow and complex in criminal cases, so as to afford the accused every opportunity to prove his innocence. The stability of law is also better ensured in this way than if judgements are made summarily by single judges or by some royal official (VI. 1, 5-6). If confusion arises in an unco-ordinated legal system it can always be put in order by timely legislation. The prince may, however, demonstrate his clemency by granting pardons, which though they are not in keeping with the rigours of republican justice are fitting acts of monarchical benevolence, since there is a personal, not a wholly public sovereign (VI.21). In punishing the guilty, the social position of the criminal is to be taken into account, since shame and dishonour are as 81

Montesquieu serious for some ranks as fines and imprisonment are for others. These were the minimal standards of judicial behaviour under a monarchical constitution, and not the best Montesquieu could hope for, as he was to show later on in the book. If the monarchy needed self-restraint in its judicial procedures it needed it even more in its military policies. Montesquieu's ideas on foreign affairs were largely inspired by his loathing of Louis XIV and all of his policies. The king's imperial ambitions were absurd. He was generally incompetent, obsessed by his need for glory and ostentation, and did not know either when to begin or when to end a war (Pensees, 1302). A monarchy should avoid conquests because they impoverish the provinces and corrupt the capital with plunder (X.9). Since only defensive wars should be contemplated, strategically placed fortresses offer the best protection (IX.5-6). A moderate territory is in any case best for a monarchy; otherwise, a too distant nobility will assert its independence from the capital, and rule the outlying localities despotically, as the conduct of the Spanish conquerors in America demonstrated only too well (VIII. 17-18). Military policy in a monarchy, no less than in a republic, should clearly be what it almost never is, subordinate to constitutional considerations and to the demands of political survival. Fear of despotism, rather than nostalgia for the old French feudal nobility, persuaded Montesquieu to look to the remnants of noble honour as a scaffolding on which to build a reformed monarchy. His notes on the early history of France cast the nobility in a particularly unflattering light. They were barbaric and superstitious, and they engaged in futile wars and oppressed the peasantry. Nor did they care if the king did the same as long as he left them alone (Pensees, 1184, 1302). As a form of government the monarchy, however, needs intermediary institutions to buffet the people and to restrain the prince. Otherwise it must assume a different form sooner or later. The core of Montesquieu's

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Constraint and liberty theory of monarchy is that when it is absolute it is unstable, whether in modern Europe or in ancient Rome. Unless there is a very wide dispersal of power it does not maintain its constitution, and is in danger of shifting toward either a republican or a despotic order, the latter being the more probable alternative now. The conditions for democracy no longer exist, as the English discovered after the execution of Charles I (VIII.6—9). France, on that premiss, stood poised between the Spanish and the English model, and Montesquieu ardently hoped that it would not follow the path of the former. The Spanish monarchy was well on its way to pure despotism. The clergy was the only remaining restraint upon the king, and it was a feeble fence (II.4). Indeed, it was so intolerant that it was despotic in its own right, as is usual in oppressive regimes. Spain's corruption began with its conquests and the stupid and cruel policy of extermination in America. The political attitudes thus acquired in Mexico were then brought back home to Spain (VIII. 18). And all of this had begun and been continued under the pretext of religion (XV.4; Pensees, 207, 1268). The erosion of the intermediary powers began when clerical and monarchical power were too closely joined. Montesquieu did not argue absurdly that the Spanish nobility had lost their sense of honour; far from it, but they had allowed the balance of power to shift to the king. The result was a structural political change, and not one of mentality. Despotism was not a new subject for Montesquieu. As a form of government despotism is exactly like Uzbek's rule over his seraglio. It is the uncontrolled power of a single man and its principle is fear. Everything else follows from that. Punishment takes the place of education and the instinct for self-preservation keeps the subjects in animal-like obedience (II.5; III.8-10; IV.3; V.14-16; VI.9). Terror undeniably works. There is no security of property, since creditors have no way of recovering debts and people are generally too frightened to be litigious and to go to court to claim their own 83

Montesquieu (V.l, 13-15; VI. 1-3). In military policy the despot cares only for himself and his capital, to which the exposed provinces are sacrificed in war. The laws of religion might temper the rule of a despotic prince, but do not in fact do so (III. 10). Generally religions tend to support despotism, because belief in an after-life makes people fatalistic, passive, and ready to endure oppression (XXIV. 11, 14). Religious doctrines and practices may also impoverish a country in ways that help the despot. Magnificent objects of veneration both bind believers deeply to the faith and make them love those who are most responsible for their misery (XXV.2). In addition compulsory gifts to the clergy, as well as clerical celibacy and idleness, contribute to the poverty of an already poor population (XXIII.21, 28). Montesquieu's case against religion was completely political, but it was aimed at the content, not only at the social power of belief, because he was convinced that religion added much to human fears and misery. Fear (crainte) was for Montesquieu a physiological reaction set in motion by a 'moral' impulse when a command is transmitted from the soul to all the fibres of the body with paralysing results. It is involuntary and far too imperious to be controlled, especially as it is a permanent state of foreboding, not a sudden response to danger (peur). That is why it is so characteristic of despotic states (Pensees, 1192). In the article Crainte, written by Montesquieu's disciple Jaucourt for the Encyclopedie, this sort of fear is defined as so tyrannical a passion that it prevents us from enjoying the present in anticipation of the future, especially after our death. The fear of dying is therefore easily exploited by a systematically cruel regime. This is where our physical and moral impulses meet and struggle, and where the former triumph. There is something uniquely physical about a fearridden despotism that separates it from every other form of government in Montesquieu's gallery of regimes. That is why he first mentioned the compelling force of climate in the discussion of despotism (V.15). Despotism is so unalterable 84

Constraint and liberty precisely because its principle is so physiological. It suffers from succession crises and riots, but nothing really changes. It is the social equivalent of death. That also is why it can occur anywhere, even if in Montesquieu's view it was most common in Asia. Why, finally, was he so obsessed by despotism? Napoleon was, after all, still a long way off, not to mention later dictators. Tyranny was an old notion, but Montesquieu was no longer interested in it, because it referred only to individual rulers. He was interested in political systems, not just in the personality of princes, because he understood that the entire ancien regime was at risk, whether it had a good or a bad man on the throne. France was structurally inclined toward despotism. With the analysis of despotism Montesquieu came to the most significant of his distinctions between regimes: the moderate and the immoderate. What did he mean by political moderation? Clearly it is more than just the principle of aristocratic republics. It is also more than the personal ability to inhibit, freely or under compulsion, the despotic impulses that afflict us all. Fully developed moderation is a political form of intelligence, the capacity to calculate correctly the most probable social consequences of our actions and to act accordingly. Because political power offers every opportunity and temptation to cast off one's inhibitions, moderation can be instilled only by rules and constraints. It is thus a public rather than a private virtue. The mountain of information and the diagnoses assembled in The Spirit of the Laws were meant not only to inspire a moderate temper, but also to show what was required to sustain it. It was in many ways a manual for a possible French ruling class. Without institutionally enforced restraints, whether formal or informal, moderate politics are not even imaginable. The best constitution is a system of interlocking and mutually checking interests and powers such as prevailed in republican Rome and in modern England. It is the ‘masterpiece of legislation' (V.14; Pensees, 892, 918). There was only one government in modern Europe that 85

Montesquieu made freedom the aim of its constitution and policies, England. Montesquieu did not see it as a heaven at the opposite pole of the hell of despotism. He did not make it into a utopia, but he admittedly presented an improved version of the actual government of England. It was what England could and was meant to be. Constitutional liberty meant the rule of law, a limited government whose various members were not subordinate to each other, and a people that enjoyed a high degree of personal security. What is liberty? According to Montesquieu it is not independence, which is just doing as one pleases, but rather the condition that causes people to feel that their person and property are secure (XI.3). If fear is the predominant emotion of the subjects of despots, a sense of security is normal among a free people. A free citizen may do what the law permits and what he ought to will, and he is not forced to abstain from what the law does not forbid. It is very much a matter of negative liberty, of not being interfered with. Montesquieu refused to engage in metaphysical speculations about the freedom of the will (XII.2). When he said that liberty was willing what one should will, he only meant that one should agree to what law and custom in a free society demand, because it is a supreme benefit. A man in a free state who has been condemned to hang in a fair trial still has more liberty than a Turkish pasha (XII.2). Freedom is not happiness, but it is the necessary precondition of all possible joys (Pensees, 1574). There is nothing anarchical about this notion of liberty. Freedom is above all the result of political arrangements that protect a people against the oppressive inclinations of its rulers, and the latter from their mutual aggression. Montesquieu never mentioned rights, natural or artificial, but only the deep assurance of personal security. In his notebook he described liberty as a good net in which the fish do not feel constrained (Pensees, 943). There are always rules and coercion in every state, but their impact upon the members of society is quite different when their aim is liberty rather than oppression. A free government is extremely complex, for it requires not

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Constraint and liberty only laws protecting the citizens, but also a constitutional law that ensures a wide play of interests among those who govern. England is a 'democracy disguised as a monarchy', in which the people agree to share power with a monarch and the nobility, as the Roman plebeians had once permitted the Senate to rule (XI.6, 13). Its principle is something more egalitarian than honour, widely shared political ambition, which is entirely in keeping with its institutional structure in which both the people and the nobility are involved. The House of Commons represents the people, because they are too numerous to meet directly. Representation is for Montesquieu a second best, not an inherently superior way for the people to participate in lawmaking. Its only advantage is that demagogues could do less damage* there than in popular assemblies (XIX.27). To fulfil its essential functions, the House of Commons must express the 'general will' of the people, and the vote is to be denied only to those who are too poor to be able to exercise an independent judgement. As the mirror of the nation, its members are not the leaders or the trustees of the people, but their spokesmen. The hereditary nobility need a legislative chamber of their own, since the majority might vote them out of existence otherwise and again attempt an impractical republican experiment without the necessary political virtues. On the whole, however, Montesquieu did not fear the turbulence of the people as much as he dreaded despotism, even though he was well aware of the dangers of popular violence. Nor did he think that civil war was the greatest calamity; a state of blind obedience was a lot worse (Pensees, 1252). The danger of despotism, not of discord, served him as a steady political measure. Thus if the nobility helps to maintain moderate government they are politically functional in a free government and so is the monarch. The House of Lords can in fact check the hasty impulses of the Commons and the king's veto serves the same end. The monarch enforces the law with dispatch and is also useful in convening and dissolving Parliament at the right intervals. His ministers 87

Montesquieu should be subject to impeachment proceedings, but not the monarch himself. And there must be no standing armies to tempt him to undertake political adventures, which are also discouraged by the legislative power of the purse. Every part of this constitutional order is free from the domination of the others, which is what Montesquieu meant by political liberty, as distinguished from personal freedom. The origin of this beautiful system was in German antiquity, Montesquieu claimed, thus starting a durable myth. Like many of Tacitus' readers he was much taken with the picture of free tribesmen choosing their chieftains, though he admitted that they had too many bondsmen. More immediately it permitted him to believe that European liberty was embedded in a common past and was not just an English invention. It could be recovered, given its deep and ancient roots. But if English history offered grounds for hope, its present course was not without dangers. The Crown seduced and corrupted the members of the House of Commons with patronage and money. Virtue was still firm among the middle classes, but elections were notoriously dishonest (Pensees, 1960). Precisely because it was meant to serve as a living model, Montesquieu did not choose to present the English constitution as an ideal state, but as the best known alternative to despotically inclined monarchies. The best government is one that suits a given people, and in Europe that meant moderate government of some sort, and a fair degree of liberty. The most essential institution for genuine political liberty is a judicial system manned by impartial, rigidly rule-bound, and predictable judges. Their decisions must have all the rigour of a syllogistic argument (VI.3; XI.6). Far more than Locke, Montesquieu put the burden of protecting liberty on the shoulders of the judiciary. And whatever else his celebrated theory of the separation of powers may involve, it means the absolute independence of the judiciary from all other agencies of government. Without that there can be no liberty. It was also on this point that he proceeded to

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Constraint and liberty democratize the English constitution far beyond its actuality. The judicial power is so terrible to mankind that it must be made invisible in some way; for it is before a judge that the ordinary citizen feels the full power of the state, when he is accused of a crime that he may or may not have committed. It is here that he discovers not only that all law is coercive and frightening, but also whether or not he enjoys any liberty. In a free constitution he should have to fear only the office, not the person of the magistrate. He should have some choice as to who is to judge him and juries should be selected by lot, as in Athens, to ensure their popular character. Finally, everyone should be judged by his peers. The nobility should be tried by the House of Lords, which may also act as an appeals court. Montesquieu's claim to being one of the greatest of liberal thinkers rests not on his famous homage to the English constitution, but on his theory of the criminal law and punishment. The liberty of the individual, according to that doctrine, depends radically on the extent of the criminal law and the kinds of punishment that it inflicts. This is a liberalism of fear, an effort to avoid oppression rather than directly to promote rights to political action or selfdevelopment, but its arguments in favour of an extensive sphere of personal liberty are just as compelling. For clearly there was more to Montesquieu's idea of liberty than the separation of governmental powers and the general sense of security. The single most important requirement for the realization of liberty is that only a very few misdeeds should be criminalized at all. Religious errors can safely be left to God for correction. Posterity would think it horrible that Europeans were ever so uncivilized as to burn Jews. Sexual deviations are, at worst, forms of self-neglect, and as such not the business of the public law. The very notion of the guilt of parents being visited upon their children is abhorrent and inherently despotic. Any charter of our liberties is now simply impossible without the complete exclusion of religion from politics in general, and from the criminal law 89

Montesquieu especially. Disturbers of the public peace may be put in prison or exiled, but there is only one crime that must always be punished: any act of violence against the person or property of a private individual. Words are not acts and therefore cannot be crimes unless they are the equivalent of performative utterances, such as calling for a riot in a crowded market. The dangerous thoughts of our neighbours are also not actions and cannot concern the law. Secret accusations might have a place in a virtuous republic, but in all other states the tribe of secret informers should be outlawed (VI.8). It is, moreover, very important to define all crimes very exactly so that no arbitrary sentences can be imposed. Especially the crime of high treason must be carefully spelled out and very narrowly defined. Unless the reach of the criminal law is shackled in these ways, there simply is no liberty for anyone (XII. 1-30). The scope of criminal law is only half of the story. The severity of punishments is just as important for a liberal theory. Montesquieu believed that an excessive harshness of penalties was both intolerable and useless (VI.9-20). Even despotic governments do not get all the results they want. People simply become mentally and physiologically hardened and cease to respond to threats. As for torture, nothing can excuse it. Montesquieu must have tortured many people during his years as a criminal judge in Bordeaux, and he came to regard the practice as utterly irrational. He said that he had observed that nine out of ten people put to the rack and to other tortures endured them. 'If so many innocent people were condemned to such horrible pain, what cruelty! If so many criminals escaped death, what an injustice!' (Pensees, 643, 1540). The death penalty itself was a symptom of a diseased society, and not at all necessary. 'Our ancestors, the Germans' did without it, imposing only fines and no corporal punishments at all (VI. 17; XII.4). What is punishment meant to achieve, after all? It is supposed to deter potential criminal acts, and the fear of harsh physical punishments may not serve that end nearly as well as fear of

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Constraint and liberty social disgrace and shame (VI. 12). Justice is to be found in a proportion between crime and punishment, but in weighing the two, the danger of oppressive government must always be taken into account. The protection of the innocent is, moreover, no less important than the punishment of the guilty. In extreme emergencies a government may imprison suspects briefly, but it must always be an exception. He had mixed feelings about bills of attainder in England. Sometimes he thought them a necessary infringement upon liberty that would preserve it in the long run, but in his notebooks he called them barbaric and intolerable (XII. 199; Pensees, 1665). One thread runs through all of Montesquieu's reflections on crime and punishment: how to lessen the burden of fear in the minds of ordinary citizens. Cruelty and fear are physically and psychologically so damaging that they make life worthless. They cripple their victims just as Uzbek infantilizes his tormented wives. A moderate government may not contribute directly to our happiness and the absence of fear may not make us virtuous, but without them all hope for these goods is extinguished. To prevent that bitter end is the chief object of Montesquieu's liberalism, and especially of his theory of criminal law. It is a liberalism devoid of Utopian aspirations, which were not in any case in keeping with his severe relativism. In his notebook he did once put down a few thoughts on the best state. Its main features were the equal distribution of wealth and of inheritances, and a simple judicial process before five judges and without lawyers (Pensees, 185). The most revealing thing about that brief sketch is the importance Montesquieu attached, even in his fantasies, to the law of inheritance and to the judiciary. Both touch the liberty and well-being of individuals very nearly, and they remind us of an indelibly democratic element in his thought. No list of the constraints that governments must impose upon the citizens is complete if it does not mention taxes, and Montesquieu did not ignore them. Even in a free state we 91

Montesquieu cannot have complete control over our property, but we should be given good reasons for having to part with it. The people should not be deprived of necessities in order to satisfy the imaginary wants of rulers, such as glory, arms races, and extraordinary projects, or to pay for the greed and general incompetence of officials. Tax farming is an oppressive curse. The best taxes are sales taxes, which the merchants simply pass on to the customers, who do not even know that they are being taxed. On the whole, it is less dangerous if some people do not pay enough than if everyone has to pay too much (XIII. 1-20). This may well have been a bit of special pleading from a wine grower and landowner. The main point, however, was that excessive taxes are a form of enslavement and not compatible with freedom, especially as a free people would be ready to pay very high taxes in order to preserve its liberty. The first part of The Spirit of the Laws closes with the burdens of taxation. The second part deals with the sources of wealth and poverty, and above all with the physical conditions of political development. Having set out a moral morphology and an analysis of how governments alter their form for better or for worse, Montesquieu now turned to the limits that nature and history impose upon political choice. Law is not just a matter of the will of lawmakers; the spirit of the people also impinges upon its character. Culture and climate constitute a realm of necessity to which men must adjust, but which they may also understand, thus vindicating their claim to rationality.

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5

The Spirit of the Laws: necessity and freedom

The second part of The Spirit of the Laws deals with the ways in which the physical environment and the acquired culture of a people shape its actual and potential laws. This is the realm of necessity, of climates that dominate our physical and emotional development, and of compulsive habits and beliefs that are passed down from one generation to the next. Geography, history, and economic resources exert inexorable pressures on every society, and the nature of things so constituted determines the degree of freedom and wealth a people may enjoy. According to Montesquieu a combination of 'physical and moral causes' will, in time, give a people a distinct character or 'spirit', which both limits and structures its political possibilities. While these forces would seem to leave no scope for deliberate political action, Montesquieu did not see them as shackles. The material world was for him first and foremost an object of scientific understanding. To know physical nature is to be able to control it intelligently or at least to resign oneself to it consciously, not as a victim but as an agent. For the climate and the collective psychology one can trace from its effects are not a new sort of fate, any more than the laws of gravitation. The rational lawmaker must begin by understanding the conditions legislation confronts. They set his agenda and he must adjust to them, but he can also overcome and counteract the given world. A scientific jurisprudence must know even more: it must understand the character of the lawmakers, as Montesquieu had already shown. While the object of Montesquieu's science was clearly to illuminate and encourage the practical understanding that he called political moderation or rationality, his model of science seemed to leave no room for such choices of conduct. His theory of climate appeared to make human volition

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Montesquieu illusory. It was a very 'hard' determinism which made it seem easy to grasp social patterns and to diagnose their malfunctions, but not to change them. Societies were natural, predictable wholes, created by automatic human responses to climate and topography. How could one interfere with their set course, or alter them by design? That the climate, heat and cold, north and south, had a profound effect upon health and wealth was, of course, not a new idea. Among modern political theorists, Bodin had already claimed that the climate had a significant impact upon society, but he was still enmeshed in astrological speculations. Much of the serious travel literature discussed the subject soberly, and an official survey of France made for the heir to the throne in 1697 had also dwelt on the effect of local climates upon the people. Montesquieu was interested above all in medical literature on the climate. He particularly admired Hippocrates' writings, which, at the very beginnings of medical thinking, had paid much attention to the effects of the air on human illnesses (Spicilege, 11.1322). The most advanced physicians of Montesquieu's time shared this clinical approach, especially in describing the likely causes and course of epidemics. Both French and English medical authorities believed that substances in the air mixed with human 'animal fluids' caused and spread disease. Montesquieu himself had remarked that stagnant pools of water could produce disease-bearing vapours, and in time alter the character of a neighbourhood (Reflexions sur les Habitants de Rome, O.C., 1.910-12). among his contemporaries, writers on aesthetics discussed the effect of climate on our sensibility and on the variety and changes in artistic taste. And, not insignificantly, sceptical philosophers used the climate and the different mentalities it created to cast doubt upon the certainty of their own and everyone else's opinions, knowledge, and judgement. Only Hume thought that climate had nothing to do with shaping national character. Montesquieu was clearly drawn to the materialists among 94

Necessity and freedom the medical writers. He certainly shared their model of scientific knowledge: if you cannot measure it, it does not exist. Heat expands and cold contracts the fibres of the body, he thought. The speed with which the blood reaches the heart and the amount of juice extracted from food all depend upon the texture of the fibres, and these physiological processes have an immediate effect upon our character. They account for the languor of southerners and the energy of northerners. The effect of extreme cold on a sheep's tongue that he had observed under a microscope convinced him that freezing reduced sensation. From this he inferred that one must indeed flail Muscovites to make them respond at all. Southerners feel too much, in contrast, and have excessively lively imaginations. He also at once drew lessons for lawgivers from these observations. Southerners need good laws to control the effects of the climate more than do northerners (Spirit, XIV.3-5). Although political action is not powerless against these apparently overwhelming physical forces, it was nevertheless one of Montesquieu's purposes to demonstrate the narrow reach of legislation. The English, for example, commit suicide not out of despair like Roxane, nor like the Romans to make a public statement, but out of recurrent depressions brought on solely by the climate. The climate here functions as an extenuating circumstance because it is a compelling necessity that accounts for what we cannot help doing. The only appropriate public response to something so exigent is forbearance and tolerance. This is the liberal face of relativism and determinism. Its more awkward aspect is that it justifies irresponsibility and inaction. Relativism has its uses against the culture-blind efforts of political and religious bigots and missionaries, but it serves the defenders of despotic government and cruelty just as well. Liberty, Montesquieu assumed, is not the fruit of all climates, just as fresh air is disagreeable for people used to swamps. Freedom is intolerable for those not accustomed to it (XIX.2). In China, where law, religion, manners, and morals are all tied into a single system of civility, it is 95

Montesquieu impossible to introduce Christianity or to alter the prevailing order. Why should missionaries meddle so vainly in the lives of the Chinese (XIX. 16-19)? Did not Montezuma know better than the Spaniards what religion was best for Mexico (XXIV.24-5)? In Europe Catholicism is suited to the south, but Protestantism is natural in the north, where the spirit of liberty cannot abide a monarchical church (XXIV.5). If relativism can do much for religious tolerance, it can, however, also condone despotism. And indeed Montesquieu did not doubt that China was a despotic state and that most of Asia was compelled by physical causes to remain utterly unfree (VII.21; XVII. 6). It is as if a double empire dominated the entire continent. Nature and government combined seem to rule Asia with inordinate rigour. Chinese despotism, which responds effectively to a very hostile natural environment, cannot even be called irrational. The tensions inherent in Montesquieu's theory of climate become particularly acute in his chapters on slavery (XV-XVII). He had no doubt that slavery was absolutely evil. It degrades the slave and demoralizes the master. Without freedom the slave can never act out of motives of virtue, while unlimited power makes his owner 'fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel' (XV. 1). Slavery can have no place in any moderate government, since there cannot be such a degree of inequality in a republic or such human debasement in a monarchy. It is also against the law of nations, for prisoners of war may be disarmed and then detained only as long as the emergency lasts. No right to sell oneself can be imputed to anyone, since it is impossible to put a price on a life. Certainly religion cannot claim a right to enslave people in order to hasten their conversion, as those 'superbly Christian' Spaniards did in America. In spite of Aristotle, moreover, there are no natural slaves. Slavery makes men dull, not the other way around. Montesquieu's deepest scorn and blackest humour, however, were reserved for racist defences of slavery. It was his hope, though he was not certain, that no climate was so hot that free men could

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Necessity and freedom not somehow be induced to work, thus making slavery unnecessary everywhere, which was only half a qualification. There was also the assumption that, since no one is free in despotic states, slavery might be less intolerable there. Finally, having so unconditionally denounced it, Montesquieu went on to discuss all the ways in which slave systems had in fact been run more or less effectively and safely. To explain is not, of course, to excuse, but if we must make allowances for suicide in England, why not slavery in Asia, since the hot climate impels peoples' fibres and tempers so uncontrollably? The question seems especially obvious when we consider Montesquieu's explanation of 'domestic slavery', or polygamy that amounts to enslaving women and shutting them up in seraglios (XVI. 1-10). Girls mature early in hot countries and marry before they have any common sense and so are easily dominated by their older spouses. As they age quickly and learn nothing, they are readily replaced. In the north women marry later when they already know how to look after themselves. Moreover, men drink too much in the north while women remain sober, which gives them a hold over their sodden mates. It would be absurd even to think of putting them in a harem. But as a response to the climate and as part of a generally despotic society, 'domestic slavery' corresponds to the nature of things. Montesquieu did not say that polygamy was an admirable institution. It does nothing for morality and encourages homosexuality, but it is a necessary part of a given order and not something northerners should meddle with. In its place polygamy is just as appropriate as monogamy is in its locality. It is not entirely surprising that his clerical critics accused him of defending polygamy and of treating morality like an anatomist. His reply that he was only describing, not judging, was disingenuous and evasive. Montesquieu's theory of climate was morally completely out of keeping with the entire burden of The Persian Letters and the universalism implicit in the political judgements, such as those on slavery, throughout the Spirit of the Laws.

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Montesquieu What makes his social comparisons at all possible is that at the very least 'they' (women, blacks, eunuchs, foreigners) feel exactly what 'we' do. That is why we should think of mankind as consisting of sentient rather than rational beings. The question 'how can one be a Persian?' is either an offensive parochialism that is an insult to the unity of humanity, or a sceptical solipsism that precludes any mutual identification. Montesquieu did not think that we were doomed to be like that, but because he assumed that the climate determines the way we feel, it follows that we are separated by it just at the level where we are supposed to be most alike. Do the Russians really suffer less because of their ice-thickened fibres and are they not to be pitied, because they are different? The doctrine is also politically confused. If climate, the demands of survival, and ages of habit, manners, and belief have conditioned the Chinese people and their rulers to a highly industrious and regimented life, the state cannot be called despotic and the rule of fear. Since the citizens know that this is how they must live and appear not only to accept it rationally but to like it as well, then it is not a regime based on fear in the way conquerors and arbitrary tyrants are feared. For fear like pain is a universal physiological, not a cultural reaction. If the Chinese live in fear and are ruled by it, then their regime is not the rule- and custombound state that Montesquieu ascribed to them when he discussed their climate and its effects. Finally, the theory is hard to defend. Why are cold Russia and Sweden not free? That the Russiarj nobility might become restless and the Swedish kings w|ere a temporary aberration were the best answers Montesquieu could invent (XVII.3). All islands are free, we are told (XVIII.5). That does not fit Japan, as he was forced to admit. The physiology of social development had all the attractions of a hard science for Montesquieu, but it was morally inconsistent, politically incoherent, and factually false. In spite of the manifest difficulties that it presented, Montesquieu never abandoned the theory of climates, but he

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Necessity and freedom subordinated it to a far more flexible theory of culture. We are not, after all, the supine victims of temperature. 'Mankind is influenced by various causes: by the climate, by religion, by the laws, by the maxims of government, by precedents, morals, and customs; whence is formed a general spirit of nations' (XIX.4). All but the first of these are what Montesquieu would have called 'moral causes'. A society is now a 'union of spirits' and each one has a character of its own which it has slowly acquired through the ages. Each century, in fact, has a spirit of its own. In the Gothic years a spirit of independence and disorder prevailed. Under Charlemagne a monkish spirit reigned. Then came the spirit of chivalry, which was succeeded by the spirit of conquest as soon as regular armies were organized. Now it was the spirit of commerce that predominated in the civilized world (Pensees, 810). Thanks to the discovery of the compass and all that followed, 'Europe has arrived at so high a degree of power that nothing in history can be compared with it' (XXI.21). These are wholly political definitions of the collective spirit of Europe at least. Indeed in his own age, Montesquieu thought that the spirit of a people was directed by the court and the capital from which they were ruled. 'It is Paris that makes the French. Without it some of the provinces would be more German than Germany.' The modern world is a culture in which politics, not the climate, matters most (Pensees, 1581, 1584). In England, the model of a modern state, conduct is shaped indirectly by the laws. In ancient Rome, by contrast, mores ruled, and laws were enacted only when the force of mores had failed (XIX.23, 27). That does not imply progress. For laws are adapted to regulate only the actions of a citizen, mores those of a man in his inner being, while manners only teach external behaviour (XIX. 16). Nevertheless, in The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu recognized a steady development of the spirit of peoples which was far less pessimistic than the essentially cyclical view of history that had informed his history of the Romans. Mankind has moved from the most

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Montesquieu primitive stage of being herdsmen, to settled agriculture, to the discovery of metal, and to the use of money. The last is a decisive moral moment. Craft replaces violence, and injustice becomes common. It is, moreover, not only practised, but understood as wrongdoing, so that one can speak of an ethical awakening. Only the prehistory of society is a matter of purely economic growth. Moral causes have their origin with civil law and government. They are a mixed blessing, but this is nevertheless the beginning of civilization, of wealth, and of the possibility of rational law. For it is also the first imposition of intelligence over nature (XVIII.8-17). 'Mankind by its industry and the influence of good laws have rendered the earth more proper for its abode' (XVIII.7). The very notion of need has been transformed. From being the static measure of what is required to keep us alive, it has become a flexible notion that corresponds to the wants that wealth inspires and our imagination projects and urges us to satisfy. Bare needs can never be eliminated, hence the lasting importance of agriculture; however, the pain of biting necessity that prevailed in our impoverished and mindless past is gone. In an unpublished essay Montesquieu had as usual engaged in some physiological speculations to explain the ascent of intellectual man. The fewer our experiences, the thicker the fibres and the grosser and fewer our ideas. The soul scarcely moves within primitive man. It is with the accumulation of ideas as it is with the accumulation of capital: thanks to the labour of the senses it multiplies. Wealth and inherited learning, physically and socially transmitted, create a national spirit that once had its roots in the climate, but is no longer in its thrall. Europe is the end product of ages of learning and is increasingly governed by intelligence and driven by the quest for wealth and knowledge. To what extent did Montesquieu rely on the ancient analogy between the human body and the body politic? Was the spirit of a people somehow like that of an individual? It is

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Necessity and freedom unlikely that he would resort to such a prescientific and traditional notion. If anything is the 'soul' of a state, it is its principle, as equality, for example, was the 'soul of democracy', but that was only a turn of phrase, not a sustained analogy. What he would have liked to do, but found impossible, was somehow to show how the structure and motions of the individual's 'machine', as he liked to call it, explained the development of that 'unity of spirits' which defines a society. Society is a system of norms which are related to each other and can be understood historically and as functioning to maintain the social whole. What active part does the spirit of individual people, who make up this whole, play in this construct? Montesquieu found it easy to account for its general constitutive elements, but he found no clue to the mystery of how exactly individuals learn the rules, or how the variety of individual personalities is aggregated to form a homogeneous collective spirit. The last question troubled him deeply and to no avail. In his last essay, On Taste, written for the Encyclopedic, he spoke of the soul as having two kinds of passions, those that are inherent in its being and those that it acquires through the body as our 'vital spirits' carry physical sensations to it. Among the former, curiosity, the desire for knowledge, comes first, because the soul's inherent passions are those of any thinking being. The sentiments that come to it from the body are added to and modified by what is already there, so creating a 'natural' whole. There are also 'acquired' sentiments, which come to us from the society in which we live. Spirit (esprit) in an individual is to have the right sort of organs required for any skill, what is called talent, taste, intelligence, or the capacity to perform the tasks societies set. It is a socially acquired, adaptive characteristic. Not the soul, but the spirit of an individual is relative to society. It is the learned ability to satisfy its demands, but how social signals travel up through the fibres is completely obscure. Montesquieu seems to have been aware of his difficulties, for the mechanics of learning preoccupied him a good deal while 101

Montesquieu he was working on the book. We have some notes he composed under the heading 'Causes that May Affect Men's Minds and Characters' that show him grappling with the problem. It was at best a set of jottings revealing a perplexed mind. As usual the physical causes that affect individual personalities were described in great detail and very mechanically as messages sent by juices from and to the soul. 'In our body the soul is like a spider in its web. It cannot move without shaking one of the threads which are extended at a distance, and similarly, none of these threads can be stirred without moving the spider.' As all of us have different fibres and different sensations impinging upon us there is an enormous difference between the bodies and characters of individuals. The moral causes, or education, which shape us also differ, and Montesquieu was very brief and vague about them. He could not finish that part of the essay, or even organize his notes on moral causality. The general idea was that the education each one of us receives is the totality of our social experiences. Among these some are shared by members of the same social group, but this cannot alter the uniqueness of the individual. What Montesquieu called the spirit of a people on this account can only be the sum of common experiences. These yield more or less accurate statistical regularities of conduct among otherwise diverse individuals. The spirit of a people is thus unlike either the soul or the spirit of an individual because it is not an active but a reactive social force. The fact that experiences are shared by members of a culture explains their similarities less than their differences from other peoples. It is in no sense like the spider that is our personal soul. Montesquieu simply did not have a coherent theory of psychological development or of education to explain how the enormous differences between individual members of a society could be compatible with the notion of a discernible, single, politically meaningful, collective spirit. Montesquieu often confused statistical regularity with causality, which is not uncommon. In his book on the

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Necessity and freedom Romans he had treated their military spirit as a 'general' long-range, deep conditioning cause of their political development. In The Spirit of the Laws that idea was retained, but the new emphasis on the physiological sources of the spirit of the people made it a less plausible explanation. In fact the purpose of the idea of the spirit of a people had altered. It was no longer meant only to explain social rules, but to set out the practical limits of legislation. The spirit is seen less as contributing directly to the creation of laws than as indicating their probable effectiveness. A government that violates popular attitudes will destroy itself, as Charles I of England was undone because he could do nothing that did not offend the spirit of the people (O. C. III.545—6). The cleverest Machiavellian schemers among politicians are in fact helpless against the primordial force of the popular spirit. This ethos is not what intelligence is to a person, but is an expression of old habits and responses which legislation should not ignore. It is like a natural fact, which an intelligent legislator must understand fully. If anything plays the part of human reason in society in Montesquieu's political sociology, it is law itself. 'Law in general is human reason, to the extent that it rules all the peoples of the earth; and the political and civil laws of every nation should be nothing but particular cases to which this human reason is applied' (1.3). Moreover, in all but the most primitive societies, the laws made by those who govern determine the spirit of a people more decisively than anything else. That is why Montesquieu protested to his clerical critics that his book demonstrated the perpetual victory of moral causes over physical ones, and congratulated David Hume for having said so too. The triumph of law over all other determinants of human conduct also permitted Montesquieu to demonstrate that political and personal morality were quite distinct. Modern regimes especially do not have to impose moral rules upon their citizens, or limit their freedom in these matters, because political stability does not depend on it. English society proved to him that bad men make excellent modern

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Montesquieu citizens, which is a powerful liberal as well as an anticlerical argument. English laws do not educate men for a life of virtue, but prepare them for liberty and political ambition, which animate their admirable regime, and which require very little in the way of domestic discipline (XIX.26). Since they are free to say whatever they wish unless the law explicitly forbids it, and as it does not matter in a free country whether people reason well, so long as they assert themselves, every passion is on public display. This, as well as a multiplicity of religious sects, is entirely functional and so is the constant and open conflict of interests. Only wealth and political merit impress these people, and if they are not happy it is only partly due to the climate. Their uncouth manners and generally bad social character do not make for felicity, only for free institutions. The rules of law and party strife have politically educated a people to be self-assertive, commercial, free, and, in a crisis, patriotic. Law is quite adequate to guide them, nothing educationally more intense is required. Montesquieu thought that separating law and morality was generally a sound policy everywhere, not just in modern England. In China, for example, the distance between social custom and our idea of morality is just as wide. The Chinese have to be so thrifty that they become terrible cheats to survive. The Spaniards are devout, haughty, despise work, and live in proud poverty as a result. A wise legislator would know how to stimulate their vanity to better ends. All of which proves that not all moral vices are political ones, and that not all political vices are immoral (XIX.9-11). For the stability of regimes it matters only that the spirit of the people and the principles of government do not clash (V.l; XIX.5). Thus in England political interests give way to commercial ones as a matter of national policy, because wealth is generally preferred to military glory. The English, in fact, really know how to appreciate religion, commerce, and liberty. They care nothing for the first, are only interested in the second, and would sacrifice everything for

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Necessity and freedom the last (XX.7). In a modern state commerce and political self-interest are the principles that sustain a regime, not classical virtue or Christian morality. Because law does not touch the inner life of people, it can secure a sphere of freedom for individuals in a way custom does not (XIX. 14-16). Laws may have regrettable moral limitations, since by looking to the public good they may have to offend personal values, as laws of inheritance sometimes must (XVII. 1). That is unfortunate, and it again suggests that only necessary laws should ever be established at all. For free men, however, it is an advantage to be ruled only by law, for only overt actions come under its control. Not that Montesquieu expected rational or free order to emerge in all modern societies or to see perfection anywhere. 'An excess of reason is not always desirable. . . . Mankind generally accommodates itself better to mediums than to extremes' (XI.6). Popular culture sets boundaries which governments overstep at their peril. If one fully understands the spirit of a people one is likely to pursue moderate rather than reckless policies. Planned change can, after all, cause a lot of suffering (XXIX. 18). One needs only to recall the changes introduced by the Emperor Constantine. Even reform can be very arbitrary. Montesquieu thought that many policies that affected the manners and customs of a people were harsh and frequently self-defeating. He did not think of social change as the work of popular pressure or protest, but as innovations undertaken by governments. Law is an agent of change expressing the preferences and aims of lawmakers. In the infancy of societies they make the institutions, and even if in time rulers are made by institutions, they always have the opportunity for legislation, especially in modern Europe. There is, however, always a tension between the lawgivers and those for whom they legislate. 'Laws are established, manners are inspired' (XIX. 12). A wise legislation can alter the latter and even deep-seated customs, but it is not easy and is rarely wise. It is therefore the first task of intelligent, or 105

Montesquieu what he called moderate, government to take culture into account. Political culture is a notion that serves policy makers well even if its scientific standing is poor. Montesquieu used it as a counsel of caution, though he mentioned several examples of deliberate legislation that had proved to be beneficial and enduring (XXVIII.29, 45). He assumed throughout that there was a huge gulf between the group that rules and the spirit of the people. His advice was directed entirely at those who more or less consciously order the latter. That puts his theory of political culture into some disarray. For in effect it places the rulers outside the orbit of the spirit of the people. The mentality of the rulers, the principle of any government, is no part of that spirit, apparently. Indeed it is the task of intelligent legislation to see to it that these two normative orders never come into conflict. By making his theory ultimately too uniform and too dependent on physiology, he had left himself no way of accounting for cultural variety within a society. There is a general spirit, but rulers and lawgivers inexplicably stand outside and above it. So, of course, do reason and science. And if these are ever to guide legislation, then law too will in some way rise above the culture it must manipulate. There is much hope in this apparent confusion. There is also, of course, the reality that in a monarchy the distance between the ruler and the people is enormous. Of all the fields of legislative activity open to a modern state none seemed to Montesquieu more important than commercial activity. The wealth of nations, he knew, depends on agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. Natural resources are important, but law, especially the laws of inheritance and land ownership, have always had a far deeper impact upon the prosperity of a people (XVIII. 1-8). Now commerce must also be regulated, or rather merchants must be constrained to act so as to advance it (XX. 12). Generally the flow of goods between nations should be unimpaired, with tariffs to be imposed only in extreme cases. Nowhere 106

Necessity and freedom did Montesquieu reveal himself more clearly as a citizen of Bordeaux than in his appreciation of commerce. No landed aristocrat ever sang its praises more enthusiastically. Commerce might stunt the highest Platonic virtues, but that was a small price to pay since it had cured Europe of its worst social vices, barbarity and Machiavellism (XX. 1-2). Not only was Montesquieu free of aristocratic disdain for commerce, he also rejected Christian objections to the pursuit of gain and Aristotelian strictures upon usury. Commerce is the object of free states, while conquest is the aim of despotic ones and, as he knew, of all continental monarchies as well. The cost of wars of expansion is there for all to see in impoverished, oppressive Spain and devastated Spanish America. This is the anti-England, the political pole opposed to a free, commercial society. Commerce means peace among nations. It is the best policy imaginable. The political benefits of commerce pale before its moral ones. It has not only encouraged peace, but also reduced prejudice, refined manners, and promoted justice. After centuries of barbarism, commerce has brought prosperity, probity, and learning to Europe. Much of the credit for making all this possible should go to the Jews, who alone had kept the spirit of commerce alive for bleak centuries (XXI. 19-20). Tolerance in general is a good bargain; the exiled Huguenots have brought prosperity to Protestant countries much to France's loss. Far from being corrupting, commerce even encourages such public virtues as 'frugality, economy, moderation, labour, prudence, tranquillity, order, and rule' (V. 6). These are qualities that democratic republics need especially, but any society can use them. If commerce has any defect it is in the realm of manners. People in Holland, for instance, would never do anything for you except for money. Politeness does not flourish among traders. There are of course moral limits to commercial greed. Interest should not be extortionate, and it is wrong of Europeans to trade junk to Africans in return for their precious metals (XXI.2). 107

Montesquieu Since stability and the dispersion of power are politically so important, governments should regulate who may and who may not take part in commerce. In a monarchy the nobility should not engage in commerce and neither should the king, because they would use their power to create monopolies and this would disturb the balance of power as well as discouraging commoners from entering the field (XX. 19-22). In aristocratic republics the rulers should also stay out of trade, because it would create too much inequality and destroy their moderation (V.8). Despotisms are too insecure for commerce. The best commercial regime would appear to be some sort of democracy. That commerce and freedom go together seemed obvious to him. That does not mean that the government should remain inactive. Montesquieu believed that it has a responsibility for preventing extreme poverty. More specifically, the proper supply of money is extremely important in stimulating economic growth. The disasters of the Spanish inflation are to be avoided at all costs. The optimal situation is one in which the value and quantity of money are in exact equilibrium with the value and quantity of commodities. Each one represents the other exactly in that case, and money can perform flawlessly its function as a medium of exchange. This is what governments ought to aim for. Prices would be stable and the confidence of buyers, sellers, debtors, and creditors in the currency and in the economy as a whole would be perfect. Investment and consumer spending would both be high (XXI.21-3, XXII.3-10). In monarchies, luxury trades, profitable in the short run, are best, because they require moderate banking services. For in a monarchy bankers are a danger, since they can dominate the royal finances and thus the prince (XX. 10). Republics can engage in large, long-term enterprises more readily, since banks do not pose any threat to them. The rate of interest is determined at any moment by the demand for money, and governments should only act to prevent excesses. In general the need for liquidity should be allowed to determine interest rates.

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Necessity and freedom Finally, there should be no public debt, and if it cannot be avoided it should be funded. Like almost all of Montesquieu's advice, this was meant to prevent governments from altering the economy and social power in any particular direction. Economic policy is very much a matter of modern knowledge. Even the Romans knew and cared nothing about commerce. It is the moment where social science and political authority seem to meet. That was surely one of its attractions for Montesquieu. For The Spirit of the Laws is a hymn to knowledge. The sciences we need are those that help us plan our environment, because it is easier to alter it than to control our desires directly. Our passions are fixed, but not the ways in which we may satisfy them. The science of legislation can, at least in principle, attempt to structure the rules in ways that would make us less miserable and oppressed than we usually are. All law manifests a purposeful will, that is its spirit. It is not just a reaction to circumstances beyond human control. To know what its aims can and must be under various regimes, at different times, and under different historical and physical conditions is to know enough to prevent political disintegration and despotism. Even in the unlettered past laws were not fantasies or accidents, but the necessary expressions of the political will to survive under varying constraints. Montesquieu had said at the outset of The Spirit of the Laws that law must be looked at as 'relative' to heat and cold, to the quality and extent of the terrain, to the way subsistence is gained, to religion, to the degree of liberty the constitution can bear, and to the number, inclinations, wealth, customs, and manners of the people. The laws are related to each other, to their origins, to the aims of the legislators, and to the matters that they address. And they must be studied in all these aspects. This was what he meant to do, and this is what he achieved. Europe on this showing was capable of freedom and prosperity, but there were no assurances that it would fulfil its possibilities. Montesquieu 109

Montesquieu certainly believed in the healing powers of knowledge. That is why in spite of his caution and apprehensions he was the most perfect representative of the hopes of the Enlightenment. He was utterly convinced of the moral and political dignity of scientific knowledge and of its power to improve our lives. He had begun his great book with the declaration that he would be the happiest of men 'if he could cure mankind of its prejudices'. By prejudices, he had explained, he did not mean what makes people ignorant of some matters, but 'what makes them ignorant of themselves'. He did not find a cure, but he certainly did identify the chief political diseases that make us incapable of judging and acting in our own interests. The scientific study of political mistakes was, moreover, far from futile, because it came to provide an enduring intellectual basis for constitutional government and personal freedom.

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6

The father of constitutions

Written constitutions deliberately designed by the elected representatives of the people to establish their basic political institutions and to protect the rights of individuals are a modern American invention. Montesquieu probably knew about the efforts to write a constitution for Civil War England and he mentioned great modern legislators such as William Penn, but he knew nothing of constitutional conventions and might well have been surprised had he been told that they would soon make fundamental laws that would prove very enduring. He might have been astounded had he known that he was to contribute a great deal to the intellectual development of the men who wrote the United States Constitution in 1787, and that all sides of the debates that preceded its acceptance would quote him as an authority. Two years later he was to be the most frequently cited author in the pamphlets that accompanied the meeting of the Estates General in France. From the first, however, there were many Frenchmen who disagreed with him and as the conflict became more intense he lost his significance for the revolutionary generation. Montesquieu was able to become an oracle on two continents because The Spirit of the Laws served as a bridge between a traditional and a modern idea of constitutional government. When Montesquieu spoke of the fundamental laws of a monarchy, he referred to the rules of royal succession and to the customary limits that the nobility and other corporate groups placed upon monarchical authority, especially in relation to their property and status. These laws depended on the intermediary powers that Montesquieu thought necessary in a moderate monarchy. If one replaces hereditary orders with a plurality of diverse politically effective groups, as the Americans did after the

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Montesquieu Revolution then their importance for any modern constitutional system is evident. Some of the basic laws were perhaps written down, others were conventions, but none were planned systematically. In his account of England Montesquieu was still dealing with an unwritten constitution, even if it was modern in its aims. Its legal object, he pointed out, was not only a limited but a popular representative government with the judicial enforcement of personal liberties, what we call the rule of law. It was in fact a new order that was neither a classical republic nor a feudal monarchy. It was a modern constitutional state. By explaining it so succinctly and clearly, Montesquieu in effect wrote out the English constitution, and Blackstone in copying it gave that version a semi-official standing, especially in the American colonies. By making the English constitution so explicit they made the equivalent of a first draft available to constitution-makers on a distant continent. Montesquieu not only moved from medieval to modern constitutionalism; he also turned the classical notion of the mixed constitution into the more adaptable theory of the separation of powers. By comparing the Roman and the English political systems he explained the difference between these two forms of free government, and showed why the latter was more stable. A mixed constitution allowed Roman patricians as well as the people to participate in every function of government and also gave elected magistrates a great deal of authority. Each class and each part of the government could veto or check the other, so each was free to act within its limits. Moreover, the advantages of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were preserved without their weaknesses. Dispatch, inherited authority, and popular patriotism were all there, but without running to excess. There was thus a balance as well as a mixture of powers. This meant freedom to govern, but not personal liberty. Moreover, there was no specialization of function; each part of the state had judicial powers, 112

The father of constitutions which meant a political judiciary, a grave defect in Montesquieu's view. In many ways England, with its two Houses of Parliament and Crown and mutual vetoes, was also a mixed constitution. Its aim, however, unlike Rome's, was the liberty of the individual, and so the separation of powers was the cornerstone of its constitution. That meant, first and foremost, an absolutely independent judiciary. The division of labour, moreover, made for a better balance. Parliament legislated, the king carried out its laws, and the judiciary applied them to individual cases. The separated persons not only checked each other,- they were functionally specialized. Representation was another welcome innovation, but the obvious advantage of constitutional government as a separation of powers rather than as a mixture of castes was that it was much more in keeping with post-feudal political realities and a perfect fit for relatively class-free Americans. Montesquieu's doctrine was made for them and they appreciated it. Montesquieu's impact on his French readers was from the first conditioned by their views about their shared history. His American admirers were indifferent to the past generally, and especially to that of the European continent. They abstracted their hero from his social context and treated him as the finest political scientist of his age, which may well have been his own aspiration. They did not distort his meaning, and have left us one of the most significant readings of his great work. Montesquieu's reputation among the men of 1787 and 1789 is the denouement of his intellectual career and it can tell us something not only about their mentality, but also about the meaning of his most famous book. How did Montesquieu's posthumous reputation arise? Montesquieu tended not to respond to his critics and made no replies to his non-clerical reviewers, except in a few private letters. Only Hume was thanked warmly for both praise and a few minor corrections of fact. All the other men of letters were ignored, presumably because Montesquieu did not 113

Montesquieu want to think of himself as one of them. Voltaire, who criticized The Spirit of the Laws with obsessive frequency, certainly got no answer. His criticisms were shrugged off with the comment that the poet was unable to understand anything but his own writings. In restrospect one wishes that Montesquieu had chosen to take Voltaire's objections more seriously, because they were the first in an unbroken line of criticisms which, with a few variations, reached their culmination in the French Revolution. Voltaire did not stint on praise for Montesquieu and he defended him boldly and nobly against the orthodox, but he also indulged in a lot of petty fault-finding. It was not jealousy so much as uneasiness. Scepticism without agony was not Voltaire's line. This was, he noted shrewdly, 'Michel Montaigne as legislator', but he meant it as a proof of the incoherence of The Spirit of the Laws, which is odd, since the Essays surely reveal a very consistent mind. In any case, Voltaire found many real errors of fact and such a general disorder that he called the book a ‘labyrinth without a thread'. He recognized at once that the theory of climate was absurd, and that the effect of cold on a sheep's tongue proved nothing. Religion and government, especially when acting together, accounted for most of the characteristics of peoples and for most social change as well. Religious faith had nothing to do with the air, though rituals in the form of dietary prohibitions might. China was not a despotic state at all, but a rational absolutism. Despotism was not really a form of government, just a tendency of governments. And while Voltaire also admired England, he did not for a moment believe that it owed its liberty to the habits of primitive Germans. His young friend Helvetius was only echoing him when he accused Montesquieu of not being able to rise above his class. He remained too feudal and too blind to the oppressive function of privileged castes. What mankind needed was a simple government that acted directly upon the people for their good. Indeed there were only two kinds of government, good and bad. Helvetius no longer looked on England as a

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The father of constitutions model, and for once he and Rousseau agreed. Representative institutions, like those of England, were mere shadows of self-government, not its substance, according to the Social Contract. One might let Bentham put the nail into the coffin. Montesquieu had simply not understood that feudalism was not a 'fine oak' but a 'fatal tree'. From the second half of the century onward French liberals resented not only the Church and the monarchy, but the entire social order,- and that put a distance between Montesquieu and his ideological successors. Rousseau had, moreover, raised a troubling and fundamental intellectual issue. Much as he admired and had learned from Montesquieu, he dismissed him because he talked only about what prevailed, not about what ought to be. This is the enduring case against 'positivism'. To present social phenomena without implicitly and explicitly indicating their faults and the ways in which they might be transformed, is to condone the status quo and even to make it appear inevitable and insuperable. It is not an entirely fair view of Montesquieu, considering what he actually said about the Church and the state of his time and place. His theories of climate and of Asiatic despotism, however, were fatalistic, and his sense of the limits of the possible was rigid compared to the more utopian temper of his critics. Not that his capacity for outrage was smaller than Rousseau's, but he exerted it on different occasions, because freedom, not equality, was his primary concern. Unlike Rousseau, moreover, he believed in the absolute moral value of scientific knowledge. That, surely, was at the heart of the younger man's rejection of his master. These pre-revolutionary comments owed much to Montesquieu's contribution to the debate about the origins of the French monarchy that had been going on with some heat for a considerable time. It was the French counterpart of those English discussions about 'the ancient constitution and the feudal law' which John Pocock has now made clear to us. The real issue was whether the French monarchy had 115

Montesquieu always been absolutist, or whether the kings had usurped the powers of the old nobility. The defender of the 'thesis of the nobility' was an older contemporary and acquaintance of Montesquieu's, Count de Boulainvilliers. On the basis of copious documentation, he argued that when the Franks had invaded Gaul they had subjugated both the indigenous and the local Roman population and had ruled them under the laws of conquest. Clovis, their king, was merely an elected military chieftain, for the Frankish warriors maintained a perfect equality among themselves. Step by step the kings had, however, eaten away the powers of their fellow Franks, although these had remained a homogeneous group marked by the purity of inherited blood. The upshot was that the nobility should play a far greater part in governing France, as they still had in the later middle ages. Montesquieu called this excursion into the remote past 'a conspiracy against the third estate'. The nobility of the robe did not care for Boulainvilliers's history, since it reduced them to the general serf status of non-Franks. Their version of French constitutional history was far more modest. At one time they thought the government of France had been a mixed system in which they certainly had no legislative powers, but could exercise a veto over royal acts. They thought of themselves as the heirs of ancient German assemblies, but were entirely promonarchical in their general attitude, though they still could and did offer futile remonstrances to royal acts. Montesquieu's theory of intermediary powers naturally appealed to them and they were to use him in pamphlets, though it was forbidden to cite him in decisions or briefs. Against all these stood Voltaire's friend, the abbe Dubos. He was the standard-bearer of the ‘royal thesis'. Gaul, according to his history, had never been conquered at all. Clovis had entered and ruled it as the ally and deputy of the Roman emperors. His and his heirs' authority was therefore as absolute as that of the Roman rulers in whose place he had originally reigned. Unhappily, the feeble sons of 116

The father of constitutions Charlemagne had dissipated their powers and in the resulting anarchy the nobles had usurped the authority of the kings, now happily restored. Montesquieu said of this proposition that it was 'a conspiracy against the nobles'. It was more than that, however. Voltaire and most of Montesquieu's critics thought that real reform in France could only come from the king. Only he could establish a government that would abolish inherited privileges and rule with the advice of locally elected councils. It would be a royal democracy. In addition, the physiocrats saw the economy as a natural, self-sustaining order that required very little government, preferably by a 'legal despotism'. For all these reformers the past mattered relatively little, but they had every reason to prefer Dubos's constitutional theory to that of Boulainvilliers. In the last chapters of The Spirit of the Laws (XXVII-XXXI) Montesquieu tried to rise above this too partisan historiography and to set matters right. Since he did not believe that conquest gave victors the sorts of rights that both Boulainvilliers and Dubos attributed to their respective claimants, he stood outside the frame of their argument as a matter of principle. His purpose was, as he said very plainly, to illustrate how legal history should be treated. As he had throughout the book, he wanted to show how important the laws governing the inheritance of property and power were in any society. He began, accordingly, with an account of the transformation of the Roman law of succession under Augustus. He then went on to argue that the Franks had indeed conquered Gaul. They had, however, not destroyed but become a part of the Roman and Gallic society they had found there. One result was that fiefs had very early become hereditary under prevailing local law. Kingship had become so as well, though in various ways. By the beginning of the Capetian monarchy the king was both the greatest feudal landlord and a hereditary ruler. What Montesquieu was describing was the feudal monarchy in which power, property, and 117

Montesquieu status were hereditary, usually by primogeniture. If he drew any specific moral from this model, it was that to combine civil and political law, which was the core feature of feudalism, was a dangerous political practice (XXVI. 16). To say that English liberty had its origin in the German woods did not in his case amount to confusing two very remote ages. Montesquieu thought that the freedom of the Franks was that of a nomadic, primitive people, and their assemblies were suitable to that stage of social development. The English with their representative institutions were very distant from their Teutonic ancestors, but they had retained some of their spirit. The contemporary French nobility were not the direct heirs of the Franks, and in any case Montesquieu valued them only as a functional necessity, as intermediary powers in a monarchy. Without them the fundamental law inhibiting princes was inoperative. There was a hint that in a modern state, such as England, the conflict between political interests and religious sects might impose equivalent limitations on governmental excesses. As history, to be sure, this was closer to Boulainvilliers's story than to Dubos's and it displayed a decided interest in the past. To many of his contemporaries it seemed that his eyes were turned in the wrong direction. Why did he bother with those fiefs? Fielvetius found it incomprehensible and somehow immoral to be so immersed in a past that was by definition evil. That anyone should be so concerned about the mutations between private and public law seemed politically aberrant. Voltaire's heirs had discovered the future and from that vantage point Montesquieu was what would soon be called reactionary. When the French Revolution broke out it became clear that the quarrels about the old constitution were still alive. Unlike the more successful Americans, the French could not simply get rid of the king and the aristocracy once and for all, but had to devise ways of excluding them from the government of the nation. In the struggle to abolish the three estates and replace them with a single national assembly the

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The father of constitutions entire ancien regime was on trial. In a thundering pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?, the abbe Sieyes declared himself to be only too glad to have read that the nobility were foreign invaders and no part of the nation. It was time they packed up. The Third Estate would be everything, and it would not ape England either. The government would express a single national will and liberty would be ensured by its laws, not by intermediary and privileged and divisive powers. Sieyes and his many followers regarded Montesquieu as too feudal and time-bound. Condorcet was particularly harsh. Not being a mathematician, Montesquieu had written an empirical hodgepodge, not a political forecast based on the calculation of probabilities, which was the only valid political science. A genuine political science would hold for all mankind and all times and it would tell all men what the best laws to preserve justice and equal rights were. Government was above all to be simple. Montesquieu had, in short, failed both as a scientist and as a moralist, but then Condorcet's model of a political science was architecture, not pathology. Yet most of the writers who favoured the Third Estate had spoken with great admiration of Montesquieu. They admired his pages on religion and on republican virtues and institutions, and his chapters on the reform of the criminal law especially. And a radical woman who thought that women should be represented in the legislature quoted The Persian Letters at length. But Montesquieu did not really contribute much even to the first of the revolutionary constitutions. The Constitution of 1791 provided for only one assembly representing a unified sovereign nation. Its liberties were enshrined in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and Montesquieu's hand could be seen there, especially in Article 16, which declared that 'Every society in which the separation of powers is not determined has no constitution at all'. His influence was also at work in the humanization of the criminal law and the establishment of the independence of the judiciary and of double juries in 119

Montesquieu criminal cases, but not in the provision for an elected judiciary. And while he had certainly done his bit for anticlericalism and getting the Church out of government, a State Church was the last thing he had in mind. The constitutional ethos of the Revolution was based on universalist, not local assumptions, and above all on the hope that the future could dispense entirely with the past. Among the nobles Montesquieu had his admirers, especially among the more radical members of his class. Most, however, quoted only one line of his: that there could be no monarchy without a nobility. By 1793 Montesquieu had lost his relevance for them as well as for the radicalized revolutionaries. Burke remains the best witness for the counter-revolutionary temper, and he was certainly very remote from Montesquieu by the time he was forced to contemplate the French Revolution. He had spoken of Montesquieu as 'the greatest genius that has enlightened this age' and he never changed his mind, but he clearly believed that providence guided history and thought in conspiratorial rather than sociological terms about the decline and fall of regimes. Bentham's prediction that Montesquieu would not outlast his century seemed to be right. The last commentary written on The Spirit of the Laws by a surviving member of the revolutionary intellectual elite was by Destutt de Tracy. It was explicitly prepared for his friend Thomas Jefferson, 'the man of two worlds whom I respect most', and was meant not to undo Montesquieu's work but to perfect it, by correcting some errors and bringing it up to date. Jefferson was very pleased with this book, translated some of it himself, and arranged for its publication in 1811. A large democratic republic was not impossible. The USA had proved Montesquieu wrong on that score. In defence of radical legal reform Destutt argued that simple uniform laws need not be a danger to freedom, and that to abolish the death penalty, as Montesquieu had suggested, was not advisable if the criminal law was to have its full

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The father of constitutions deterrent effect. The usual refutation of the theory of climate was also added. Finally, luxury and inequality could not be tolerated under any circumstances. Jefferson had complained that there were too many paradoxes in Montesquieu's book, but in fact he agreed with him, and not with Destutt de Tracy, on the most important point. Power had to be divided up. The idea of a republic, one and indivisible, had ruined the French Revolution. A federal system was far safer. It is, of course, the equivalent of the old intermediary powers in a democratic society. Jefferson was in Paris while the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia, and he remained there long enough to take part discreetly in the early phases of the French Revolution. Condorcet was one of his best friends and he continued to be closer to the last men of the Enlightenment than were most Americans of his generation. He remained to the end of his life as deeply hostile to England as he had been in 1776. It was his hope that America might be wholly emancipated from its former rulers and from their legal and social traditions. In this also he was unlike most of the constitution makers of 1787. To them Montesquieu was an oracle. In the 1760s Locke and Montesquieu were the two Enlightenment philosophers most often quoted in every sort of political discourse. By the 1780s Montesquieu had far outstripped all other modern authors. To be sure, the Bible was cited far more often than all of them put together. To ask why a group of middle-class, Protestant Americans should find an aristocratic, Catholic Frenchman so inspiring may be to put a false question, but it is not an unanswerable one. The more interesting fact, though, is that both those who supported the new constitution and those who opposed it relied heavily on Montesquieu for their arguments. Both sides could feel that he was writing for them. They had come to think of themselves as the last true Englishmen, since the European English had for decades betrayed the constitution that Montesquieu had so perfectly described. Those pages no less than his analysis of republican government seemed to be

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Montesquieu directly addressed to them. Both sides, moreover, appreciated Montesquieu as a scientist, though in The Spirit of the Laws one side found a political science of institutional change, while the other discovered a sociology of continuity. One side knew that it must take legislative action to create a new nation, the other that South and North were as far apart in America as anywhere else and could not be united. Since in the end the final document owed much to the debate between these two parties, one can say that they wrote the Constitution together and that Montesquieu was indeed its presiding legislator. Hamilton and Madison, the two energetic young men who under the name Publius wrote most of the Federalist Papers, were not afraid of novelty. They knew that the 'fate of an empire' was at stake and that nothing less than the question 'whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitution on accident and force' was before them (1). They were confident of the answer because 'the science of politics like most other sciences has received great improvement' (9). And no social scientist impressed them more than Montesquieu. He was, Madison was to note later, 'in his particular science, what Bacon was in universal science'. One consequence of this advance in our knowledge was that no one need feel the slightest nostalgia for the republics of classical antiquity. A 'blind veneration for antiquity, for custom or for names' was not to be one of the new republic's infirmities (14). The example of those little old cities had become irrelevant, partly because even the smallest of the States was vastly larger, and partly because representation had replaced and improved democracy. If they copied the classical model, they too would become 'little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord and the miserable objects of universal pity and contempt' (9). When Montesquieu had said that republics were possible in small

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The father of constitutions territories, he had only shown that all this was behind us. And it is true that Montesquieu never suggested that one might return to Sparta or Rome, but had mentioned favourably a federation of otherwise defenceless republics, and that was what Publius also had in mind, especially a central army to put down local riots. In fact, he had a close and powerful union in mind. His opponents were not fooled (43). Democratic Pennsylvanians thought that a central government would be remote from the people. Had not 'the celebrated Montesquieu' shown that the representative legislature should speak for the 'general will', that in a free state the legislative 'ought to reside in the whole body of the people', and that the suffrage of the people defined democracy? He had indeed. This new House of Representatives would consist of rich and educated people only, because no one else could get elected in such large districts. This was going to be an oligarchy and they wanted none of it. The proposed Senate was far too close to the executive, thus violating Montesquieu's doctrine of the separation of powers according to virtually all anti-federalists. In New England the culture of the South seemed alien. Southerners were indolent, lived on large plantations, and owned slaves. Northerners were industrious townsmen who thought slavery wicked. If freedom meant that the laws had to fit the customs of a people, as Montesquieu had explained, then the same government could not suit both North and South. One or the other must be oppressed. The vision of New Hampshire militiamen enforcing the law in Georgia, and vice versa, was frightening. Nor was the most subtle part of Montesquieu's sociology missed. A clever New York antifederalist used his text to show that in modern nations law has by far the greatest influence on the spirit of the people. A distant president and an aristocratic Senate would soon coalesce to form an elite with its own manners and interests. They would create a capital and a court, which would be like that of the courtiers whom Montesquieu had described 123

Montesquieu with such venom. The quotations from these pages were ample. This elite would in due course form the spirit of the people, making it as servile as they would want it to become. Insensibly Americans would adjust to the culture of this new ruling class. It was not only that all the critics of the proposed constitution felt that the separation of powers was not as great as Montesquieu had prescribed; they were also concerned about the cultural impact of a unified governing class. Publius answered these accusations by offering a different picture of the American people, and by insisting on the primacy of political institutions. Americans were more unified than the anti-federalists believed, and they would indeed become even more alike as they lived under one government (27, 53). There was no reason to worry about such change because, as Montesquieu had noted, in modern states interests dominate. The conflicts between them, like those of hostile religious sects, were the best ground for freedom. Competitive minorities, whether ideological or material in their aims, would, together with federalism, achieve everything that intermediary powers had been able to do in a traditional monarchy. Publius simply translated Montesquieu's pluralism of orders into the egalitarian pluralism of a modern constitutional state. That was also why the three branches of government would effectively check one another. Ambitions would clash. Finally, the larger a nation was the greater the number of its diverse interests, and therefore its prospects for free government were especially good (10, 51). As for the separation of powers, it was true that 'The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to didactic writers of epic poetry . . . the perfect model'. And what he so admired was not the total isolation of the three powers, but a separation sufficient to prevent any one of them from monopolizing governmental power and a balance to deter its abuse. And this was exactly what the new constitution would achieve, especially as it provided for a perfectly independent judiciary (47, 78). After 124

The father of constitutions the adoption of the constitution Montesquieu ceased to interest Americans, but he was on occasion cited in federal court opinions. This did not happen often, but the issues have been significant. He was quoted, naturally, on the separation of powers, on impartial and fair trials, and finally on the difference between words and actions in criminal cases involving political subversion. The latter, as much as anything we owe Montesquieu, is an essential distinction for liberal government, however difficult it may be to draw. The debate on the future government of the USA offers one as good a way of interpreting Montesquieu as one may find. He was a political scientist in Publius' sense of that term, a guide to rational calculation for legislation based on a reflective analysis of the historical record and the known possibilities of various regimes. The Spirit of the Laws is a science of lawmaking in the context of the natural and cultural laws that constitute the character of a people. Publius found in its pages a guide to the spirit of new laws and institutions. The anti-federalists saw a science of political culture and they fully understood what it was for. It was the counsel of prudence and of moderation, understood as practical intelligence. Political culture as a concept may not explain social conduct, but it can be used by an informed political observer to devise intelligent questions about what the likely and the unlikely consequences of political actions will be. In both cases these anxious readers recognized that this was, as a science, meant to support liberal politics and the rule of law. The practical interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws by a revolutionary generation allowed Montesquieu to claim the title that d'Alembert had prophetically bestowed upon him: he was the 'legislator of nations'. There is much to be said for still reading him in that way. To be sure, it is no longer possible to believe, as he did, that science makes us gentle, tolerant, and responsible. We know better by now. There are, however, other parts of Montesquieu's doctrine that have an enduring claim on our attention. It can serve us well as a

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Montesquieu model of how to think about politics and what sort of questions we should ask. The illusions of both convention and power and the psychology of despotism and fear are as significant as they ever were. The liberalism of fear, with its distrust of all governments, remains an essential part of any complete theory of political freedom, and so does the recognition that the criminal law is always expansive unless checked. Nor should we disregard Montesquieu's example as a political scientist. Narrative history, informed by philosophical and social analysis and a critical spirit, remains our likeliest route to political understanding. There is a lot for us in Montesquieu, and as long as we care about liberal politics and the social understanding we can read him as profitably as his first admirers did.

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Further reading

Bibliography D. C. Cabeen, Montesquieu: A Bibliography (New York, 1947); 'A Supplementary Montesquieu Bibliography', Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1955), pp. 409-34. R. Shackleton, 'Montesquieu in 1948', French Studies (1949), pp. 299-323. J. Ehrard, 'Les etudes sur Montesquieu et L’Esprit des lois\ Information Litteraire (1959), pp. 55-66. C. Rosso, 'Montesquieu present: etudes et travaux depuis I960', Le XVIIT Siecle (1976), pp. 373-404.

Works by Montesquieu CEuvres completes, ed. A. Masson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950-5), is the most complete edition and contains the correspondence and d'Alembert's Eloge de Montesquieu. CEuvres, ed R. Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1951), is much easier to use. The main individual works with excellent notes are: L'Esprit des lois, ed. R. Derathe (Paris, 1973). Les Lettres persanes, ed. P. Verniere (Paris, 1975).

Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence, ed. G. True (Paris, 1967). Essai sur le Gout, ed. C.-J. Beyer (Geneva, 1976). English Translations The Spirit of the Laws, tr. Thomas Nugent, ed. F. Neumann (New York, 1949), is the original eighteenth-century translation, and Montesquieu as well as his English friends were very pleased with it, though it seems very inaccurate to readers now. There is an abbreviated version by D. W. Carrithers, ‘The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. A Compendium of the First English Translation with an English Translation of

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Further reading ‘ 'An Essay on the Causes Affecting Minds and Characters" '

(Berkeley, CA, 1977).

The Persian Letters, tr. (with notes) J. R. Loy (New York,

1961), is by far the best translation.

The Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, tr. D.

Lowenthal (Ithaca, NY, 1965).

Biography and Background R. Shackleton, Montesquieu. A Critical Biography (Oxford,

1961), supersedes all previous biographical works. The only additional information about Montesquieu's career is in J. Dalat, Montesquieu magistrat (Archives des Lettres Modernes, 1971 and 1972). J. Starobinski, Montesquieu par lui-meme (Paris, 1953), is as much of an autobiography as one can get out of Montesquieu and supplemented by a commentary. For beginners in history: J. Lough, An Introduction to Eighteenth Century France (New York, I960)’. P. Goubert, LAncienRegime, 2vols. (Paris, 1969and 1973). F. G. Pariset e (ed.), Bordeaux au 18 siecle (Bordeaux, 1968). W. Doyle,

The Parlement of Bordeaux and the End of the Old Regime,

1770-89 (New York, 1974), begins with a very full account of the earlier years of the century. F. L. Ford, Robe and Sword:

The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV

(Cambridge, MA, 1953). R. Forster, 'The Noble Wine Producers of the Bordelais in the 18th Century', Economic History Review (2nd series) (1961), pp. 18-38, and 'The Provincial Noble: A Reappraisal', American Historical Review (1963), pp. 681-91. P. Barriere, VAcademie de Bordeaux (Bordeaux and Paris, 1951). D. Roche, Le Siecle

des lumieres en province: academies et academiciens provinciaux 1680-1789, 2vols. (Paris, 1978).

The following are the most immediately relevant works on the intellectual world in which Montesquieu lived, and also deal with him directly as a member of it: M. Dodds, Les Recits de voyage. Sources de TEsprit des lois (Paris, 1929). f. Ehrard, L Idee de nature en France a Taube des lumieres 128

Further reading

(Paris, 1970). R. Etiemble, L’Orientphilosophique au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1956-7), particularly good on sinophiles and sinophobes. P. Gay, The Enlightenment, 2 vols. (New York, 1966 and 1969). G. Gusdorf, Les Sciences humaines et la pensee occidentale, vols. 4, 5, and 6 (Paris, 1971-3). R. Mauzi, LTdee du bonheur an XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1965). D. Richet, 'Autour des causes lointaines de la revolution francaise: elites et despotisme', Annales (1969), pp. 1-23, deals with the formation of a liberal ideology. J. Roger, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensee francaise du XVIIT siecle

(Paris, 1963).

Commentaries on Montesquieu's Philosophy

Many of the following works have self-explanatory titles: L. Althusser, Politics and History, tr. B. Brewster (London, 1972), pp. 13-115, a Marxist appreciation of a trailblazer whose class commitments are no longer significant. R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1, tr. R. Howard and H. Weaver (New York, 1968), pp. 13-72, sees Montesquieu as the first modern sociologist and precursor of Comte. I. Berlin, Against the Current (New York, 1980), pp. 130-61, sees Montesquieu as too rationalistic and given to a priori thinking. C.-J. Beyer, 'Montesquieu et Pesprit cartesien', Actesdu Congres Montesquieu (Bordeaux, 1956), pp. 159-73, makes a case for Montesquieu as deeply influenced by Descartes. E. Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le

probleme de la Constitution Francaise au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1927), indispensable. E. Callot, La Philosophie de la vie au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1965), pp. 65-148, presents

Montesquieu's biological views as a pre-Bergsonian organic vitalism. D. Carrithers, 'Montesquieu's Philosophy of History', Journal of the History of Ideas (1986), pp. 61-80, discusses Gibbon's admiration for Montesquieu. A. Cotta, 'Le developpement economique dans la pensee de Montesquieu', Revue d’Histoire Economique et Sociale (1957), pp. 370-415. C. P. Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke (Oxford, 1963). I. Cox, 'Montesquieu and the History /

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Further reading of French Law', Studies in Voltaire and the 18th Century (Oxford, 1983). J. Dedieu, Montesquieu (Paris, 1913) and Montesquieu et la tradition anglaise en France (Paris, 1909). N. E. Devletoglou, Montesquieu and the Wealth of Nations (Athens, 1963). R. Galliani, 'Les fortunes de Montesquieu en 1789: un sondage', Archives des Lettres Modernes (1981), pp. 31-61. J. Geffriaud-Rossi, Montesquieu et la feminite (Pisa, 1977). S. Goyard-Fabre, La Philosophie du droit de Montesquieu (Paris, 1973), is especially good on predecessors. B. Groethuysen, Philosophie de la Revolution, precedee de Montesquieu (Paris, 1956). A. Grosrichard,

Structure du serail. La fiction du despotisme asiatique dans VOccident classique (Paris, 1979), is mostly about The Persian Letters, from a subtle political as well as Freudian psychological perspective. N. Hampson, Will and Circumstance. Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution (London, 1983). M. Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley, CA, 1976). N. O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J., 1980),

pp. 392-419, sees Montesquieu as mainly an admirer of ancient virtue. R. Laufer, Style rococo, style des Lumieres (Paris, 1963), pp. 51-72, reads The Persian Letters as reflecting the static social condition of the Regency. A. f. Lynch, 'Montesquieu's Ecclesiastical Critics', Journal of the History of Ideas (1977), pp. 487-500. A. Mathiez, 'Laplace de Montesquieu dans l'histoire des doctrines politiques du XVIIIe siecle', Annales Historiques de la Revolution Francaise (1930), pp. 97-112, is an unscholarly but extremely influential article showing Montesquieu to have been a reactionary member of his class. R. Mercier, 'La theorie du climat. Des Reflexions critiques a VEsprit des lois\ Revue d’Histoire Litteraire de la France (1953), pp. 17-37 and 159-74. F. Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (New York, 1957), pp. 96-148, sees Montesquieu's idea of the separation of powers as a reactionary device. R. B. Oake, 'Montesquieu and Hume', Modern Language Quarterly (1941), pp. 25-41 and 225-48, 130

Further reading and 'Montesquieu's Analysis of Roman History', Journal of the History of Ideas (1955), pp. 44-59. T. L. Pangle, Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism. A Commentary on ‘The Spirit of the Laws' (Chicago, 1973). P. Riley, The General Will before Rousseau (Princeton, NJ, 1986), discusses Malebranche's influence on Montesquieu's conceptual framework. C. Rosso, Montesquieu moraliste (Paris, 1971). J. Rostand, 'Montesquieu (1689-1755) et la biologie', Revue d'Histoire des Sciences (1955), pp. 129-36. G. C. Vlachos, La Politique de Montesquieu (Paris, 1974), emphasizes Montesquieu's originality and liberalism. M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, 1967). D. Young, 'LibertarianDemography. Montesquieu's Essay on Depopulation in the Lettres persanes', Journal of the History of Ideas (1975), pp. 669-82.

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Index

absolutism, 81 Academie des Sciences (Paris), 8, 10 Academie of Bordeaux, 5-17, 19 Africa, 107 Alembert, Jean le Rond d', 10, 22, 49, 125 America, 50, 54, 65, 74, 82-3, 96, 107, 118-25 Amsterdam, 29 ancien regime, 80 aristocracies, 64 Aristotle, 36, 67, 96 Asia, 85, 96-7 Athens, 76-7, 88 Augustus, 59, 117 autocracy, 74 Bacon, Francis, 10, 122 Ben tham, Jeremy, 115, 120 biology, 10 Blackstone, Sir William, 112 blindness, 67 body, human, 100-1 body politic, 100-1 Bonnet, Charles, 10 Bordeaux, 3 Bordeaux, University of, 2 Bossuet, Bishop, Discourse of Universal History, 53 Boulainvilliers, Count de, 116-18 Buffon, George-Louis, Comte de, 10 Caesar, Julius, 52, 64 Calvinism, 61 Carthage, 61, 65

132

Catholicism, 96 causality, natural, 11 causes, moral, 100 censorship, 29-30 change, political, 62 character, individual, 101-2 Charlemagne, 99, 117 Charles I, king of England, 16, 40, 83, 103 checks and balances, constitutional, 85, 113, 121 China, 95-6, 104, 114 Christianity, 60 Church, the, 80, 83 Cicero: Offices, 15 citizenship, 60, 74 clergy/ see Church, the climate, and character, 54 93-4, 96-9 Clovis, king of the Franks, 116 commerce, 107-8 Commons, House of, 87 Condorcet, Marquis de, 119 121 conduct: causes of, 14; consequences of, 52; public, 73; and the law, 103 Congregation of the Oratory, 2 Constantine, Emperor, 56, 60-1, 105 Constantinople, 50 Constitution of the United States of America, 111-13 120-5 constitutions: republican, 78-9; M's influence on, 111-26; see also checks and balances, constitutional

Index corruption, 63-4, 83 court: and corruption, 16 Crassus, 64 Cromwell, Oliver, 61 cultures, theory of, 99-100 custom, 43, 55 debt, public, 17-18, 108-9 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 119 Deffand, Madame du, 19, 24 deism, 71; see also God democracy, 64, 76-7 demography, 46 Descartes, Rene, 7, 14-15; Second Meditation, 44 despotism, 31, 33, 68-9, 74, 76, 81-4 Destutt de Tracy, 120-1 determinism, 68, 93^1 devoir, 69 Diderot, Denis, 23 doubt, 8 dualism, 14 Dubos, abbe, 116-18 duties, treatise on, 15 economics, 93 education, 76-7, 80 effectiveness, of laws, 103 Empire, Roman, 60-1 Encyclopedie, the, 22, 27, 68, 84, 101 England, 17, 22, 65, 71, 75, 83, 85-6, 97, 99, 104, 111-12, 114, 119, 121 Enlightenment, the, 110, 121 epigenecists, 12 Estates General, 80, 111 Europe, 50 expansion, Roman, 58 fear, 68-9, 84-5, 91 finance, public, 18; see also debt, public

Fleury, Cardinal, 19 Folkes, Martin, 21 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 8 Force, due de, 6 France, 22, 30, 79, 82-3, 111 Franks, the, 116—17 freedom, 37, 46, 59, 86-8, 93-110 friendship, 77 Fronde, the, 3 Gaul, 116-17 Geneva, 67 geography, 93 Germany, 17, 88, 99, 114 Gibbon, Edward, 49 God, 13 Goths, the, 56 government, 35-6, 64, 74, 100 Hamilton, Alexander, 122 Hannibal, 58, 65 happiness, 36 Helvetius, 114, 118 Henri IV, king of France, 1 Henry VII, king of England, 55-6 Hippocrates, 15, 94 history, 49, 72, 79, 93 Hobbes, Thomas, 38, 71-2 Holland, 17, 45, 49, 107 Homer, 31, 124 humanity, 74 Hume, David, 26, 46, 70, 94, 103, 113 Hungary, 17 imperialism, 66; see also Empire, Roman incest, 37, 74 intent, 49 interest, 108 James II, king of England, 40

133

Index Japan, 98 Jaucourt, Louis, Chevalier de, 22, 84 jealousy, 39 Jefferson, Thomas, 120-1 judgment, by peers, 89 judiciary, independent, 81 Juilly, 2 Julian the Apostate, 56 justice, 71 Keynes, John Maynard, Lord, 17 knowledge, 68 La Brede, chateau de, 1, 15 Lartigue, Jeanne de, see Secondat, Jeanne de law, 67-8; criminal, 73, 89-91; religious, 73; enforcement of, 77constitutional, 87; civil, 100 Law, John, 18 legislation, 68, 73; see also law legislators, 70-1 Leibniz, G. W., 10 liberty, see freedom Locke, John, 88, 121 Lords, House of, 87, 89 Louis XIV, king of France, 3, 17, 29, 53, 65, 82 Louis XV, king of France, 18 Lucretia, 55 Lycurgus, 71 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 53; Discourses, 51 Madison, James, 122 materialism, 94-5; see also determinism mathematics, 10 Maupertuis, P.-L. M. de, 10 medicine, 10, 94 Mexico, 65, 83, 96

134

Michelet, 32 Mississippi, 18 moderation, 85 monarchy, 64, 74, 79-83 money, 65 Montaigne, 26-7, 114; Essays, 15, 114 Montesquieu, Baron de, Charles-Louis de Secondat: CAREER:

born, 1; education,

2- 3; member of Bordeaux parlement, 3-5; and Academie of Bordeaux, 3- 17; in Paris, 19-20; elected to Academie Frangaise, 20; elected to Royal Society, 21; travels, 21-2; death, 22-3; nature, 23-8 WORKS: The Persian Letters, 3, 19-20, 25, 29-48, 74, 97, 119; 'A Discourse on the Motives which Ought to Encourage us to Pursue the Sciences', 8; The Spirit of the Laws, 16, 20-1, 49, 62-4, 66-110, 117, 120, 122, 125; Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, 20-1, 49-66, 102-3; On Taste, 22; Pensees, 42, 48, 55, 62, 73-4, 77, 82-4, 86, 99; Histoire veritable, 47; Le Temple de Gnide, 47; Reflexions sur les Habitants de Rome, 94; 'Causes that May Affect Men's Minds and Characters', 102 Montezuma, 96 morality, 104

Index Napoleon I, emperor of France, 85 necessity, 93-110 Newton, Isaac, 10-11 nobility, 3-4, 80-1 Odoacer, 56 Ovid, 67 Paris, 19, 20, 99, 121 pailemenf. Bordeaux, 3-5, 20; powers of, 79-81 Parliament, Houses of, 113; see also Commons, House of; Lords, House of Penn, William, 71, 111 Pesnel, Marie-Francoise de, see Secondat, MarieFrancoise de Philadelphia, 121 physics, 10 Plato, 67; The Republic, 37 pluralism, 124 Plutarch, 15-16 Polybius, 51, 64 Pompey, 64 power, 121 powers, separation of, 124; see also checks and balances preformation, 12 Protestantism, 96, 107 psychology, political, 75 'Publius' (pseud. Hamilton, A. and Madison, J.), 122, 124-5 Pufendorf, Samuel, 71 punishment, 89-91 reason, 68 relationships, 77 relativism, 95 religion, 44, 61, 73, 84 representation, 113 Representatives, House of, 123 republicanism, 60

republics, 74, 76, 78-9, 122-3 Revolution, French, 114, 118, 120 Rome, 77, 85, 99, 112-13, 117, 123 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, 115 Russia, 98 scepticism, 27, 41 science, 7, 9-10, 12 Secondat, Charles-Louis de, Baron de Montesquieu, see Montesquieu, Baron de, Charles-Louis de Secondat Secondat, Jacques de (father), 1-2 Secondat, Jean-Baptiste (brother), 1-2 Secondat, Jeanne de, Baronne de Montesquieu (nee de Lartigue; wife), 2-3 Secondat, Marie-Francoise de (nee de Pesnel; mother), 1 security, personal, 73 self-preservation, 71 Senate, 123 Seven Years War, 54 Sieyes, abbe, What is the Third Estate!, 119 slavery, 4, 96-7 social development, physiology of, 98; see also climate, theory of society, rules of, 69 Spain, 16-17, 74, 83, 96, 104, 107 Sparta, 75, 123 suicide, 40 Sulla, 52 Sweden, 98 Switzerland, 45 Tacitus, 88 taxation, 91-2

135

Index Thucydides, 16; The

Peloponnesian War, 51

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 27 tolerance, 107 torture, 90 trade, see commerce Trajan, 60 Ulpian, 70, 72

136

Venice, 18, 78 Virginia, 56 Voltaire, 6, 22, 26, 46, 114, 116, 118 war, 74 Warburton, Bishop, 13 Weber, Max, 44 wine trade, 3