United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Though his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has become one of the political classics who are taken for granted rather than read. It is a profound and regrettable error.

"The people is admirably fitted to choose those to whom it has to entrust some part of its authority"; so Montesquieu; we must now examine this saying a little more closely. What reasons does the philosopher give? "The people can only be guided by things of which it cannot be ignorant, and which fall, so to speak, within its own observation.

The essential difference between Rousseau's theory of the state and that of Locke and Montesquieu consists in his rejection of the division of powers and of representation by delegates, hence in its unlimited democratic character. A generation after it was given to the world, the French Revolution made the attempt to translate it into practice.

Still, there could be distinguished at the Tuileries two parties in occult opposition, belonging respectively to the old and to the new nobility. At the head of the first stood the Count and the Countess of Montesquieu; of the second, the Duchess of Montebello, to whom the Empress's preference gave great authority.

The answer is different if we try him by a purely political test, and ask whether he desired power for the whole or freedom for the parts. Mirabeau was not only a friend of freedom, which is a term to be defined, but a friend of federalism, which both Montesquieu and Rousseau regarded as the condition of freedom.

It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even soared above themselves. It is here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative series, and sunk even below their own nothing.

What was my astonishment to perceive that the courtyard was filled with troops! The Grenadiers of the Guard were ranged in order of battle, with several squadrons of the chasseurs and the horse artillery; while a staff of general officers stood in the midst, among whom I recognized Belliard, Montesquieu, and Turenne, great names, and worthy to be recorded for an act of faithful devotion.

Every people where the aristocracy is aristocratic and where the democracy is democratic is a people destined to perish promptly, because it does not understand what a people is, it has not got beyond the stage of knowing what is a class and perhaps not even as far as that. Montesquieu praises highly the Athenians and the Romans for the following reason.

But Montesquieu and Blackstone, in their treatment of this point, had their eyes upon the legal fictions, and were blind to the real machinery which was working under them. They gave elegant expression to what the late Mr. Bagehot called the "literary theory" of the English Constitution. But the real thing differed essentially from the "literary theory" even in their day.

The mausolea of LE BRUN, LULLI, and JEROME BIGNON, the honour, the love, and the example of his age, terminate the series of monuments of that epoch, still more remarkable for its literati than its artists. We at last come to the Here we admire the statues of MONTESQUIEU, FONTENELLE, VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU, HELVETIUS, CREBILLON, PIRON, &c. &c.