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Updated: June 28, 2025
He was methodical and analytical; he divided what he wrote into chapters and sections. He had extracted from the works of Nicole and Fenelon, his favourite authors, three or four hundred concise and sententious phrases; these he had classed according to subject, and formed a work of them in the style of Montesquieu.
Montesquieu hath carried it very little farther in the case of the Africans; the real truth being that no man is born to be a slave, unless to him who is able to make him so.
The scheme of this charming and remarkable book was not original: some Eastern travellers were supposed to arrive in Paris, and to describe, in a correspondence with their countrymen in Persia, the principal features of life in the French capital. But the uses to which Montesquieu put this borrowed plot were all his own.
Voltaire is in favour of absolute power. Montesquieu would like the judicature to be a family office, that is to say hereditary like the profession of a soldier; this would make the judicial profession permanent like other professions. He demonstrates, as does Suidas, that the purchase system creates an aristocracy.
Our respect for such names as Montesquieu and Descartes causes us to regret that they should have been wasted on a cape and a bay that geography knows not; and our abiding interest in the sinister genius of Talleyrand fosters the wish that his patronymic had been reserved for some other feature than the curve of the coast which holds "the Rip" of Port Phillip, though in one sense he who was so wont to "fish in troubled waters" is not inaptly associated with that boil of sea."*
We may permit Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois II, 23, 14) to voice the French side of this question. "Les pais de pâturage sont pen peuplês. Les terres
The role assigned to her in the comedy of "The Philosophers" was not a flattering one, and some criticisms of Montesquieu wounded her so deeply that she succeeded in having them suppressed. She did not escape the shafts of envy, nor the sneers of the grandes dames who did not relish her popularity. But these were only spots on the surface of a singularly brilliant career.
The war cost one illustrious life, that of the brave and noble Duke of Berwick, whom Montesquieu likened to the best of the heroes of Plutarch, or rather in whom Montesquieu declared that he saw the best of Plutarch's heroes in the life. When Bolingbroke was denouncing the set of men who surrounded James Stuart at St. Germains he specially exempted Berwick from reproach.
Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline of a social contract more daring even than his own.
But the bêtes all flocked to the salon bourgeois, and consequently a more brilliant gathering never assembled in a salon; here sat, enjoying the liberal hospitalities, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Mairan, Marmontel, Helvétius, Diderot, D'Alembert, Thomas, D'Holbach, Hume, Morellet, Mlle. de Lespinasse, the Marquis de Duras, Comtesses d'Egmont and de Brionne.
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