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Updated: June 20, 2025
When Madame du Deffand said that its title should have been De l'Esprit sur les Lois she put her finger on its weak spot. Montesquieu's generalizations are always bold, always original, always fine; unfortunately, they are too often unsound into the bargain. The fluid elusive facts slip through his neat sentences like water in a sieve.
Born in 1689 at the castle of La Brede, near Bordeaux, Montesquieu really belonged, in point of age, to the reign of Louis XIV., of which he bears the powerful imprint even amidst the boldness of his thoughts and expressions. Grandeur is the distinctive characteristic of Montesquieu's ideas, as it is of the seventeenth century altogether.
Madame de Graffigny had begged Turgot's opinion upon the manuscript of a work composed, as so many others were, after the pattern of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, now nearly thirty years old, and bearing the accurately imitative title of Lettres Peruviennes. A Peruvian comes to Europe, and sends to a friend or mistress in Peru a series of remarks on civilisation.
They professed their ignorance of the whole affair; and could only suspect they owed their father's release to that stranger to whose generosity they had before been so much obliged. Such, indeed, was the case; but it was not till after Montesquieu's death that the fact was known, when an account of the affair, with the sum remitted to Tripoli for the old man's ransom, was found among his papers.
These accounts of the deep depravity of mind attendant on the practice of slavery, verify the truth of Montesquieu's remark of its pernicious effects.
They had continually in their hands the observations of Machiavel on Livy. They had Montesquieu's Grandeur et Décadence des Romains as a manual; and they compared, with mortification, the systematic proceedings of a Roman Senate with the fluctuations of a monarchy.
Madame de Montesquieu's visits were made only at long intervals, which distressed Josephine greatly; but the child was growing larger, an indiscreet word lisped by him, a childish remembrance, the least thing, might offend Marie Louise, who feared Josephine.
A head becomes another head if the coiffure be but changed. A little room adjoining this one was where Montesquieu's secretary worked. He was the drudge of a literary man, who was probably not exempt from the constitutional irritability of those who carry a whirling grindstone within their brains for the sharpening and polishing of thought.
But he re-awakened critical inquiry; and any inquiry was certain to sap the base of the ancien régime in France. Montesquieu's teaching inspired the group of moderate reformers who in 1789 desired to re-fashion the institutions of France on the model of those of England. But popular sentiment speedily swept past these Anglophils towards the more attractive aims set forth by Voltaire.
As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: "To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail!".... The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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