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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Persian Letters," Montesquieu ingeniously employs the epistolary form to explore the contrasts between Eastern and Western societies during the early 18th century. Through the fictional correspondence of two Persian travelers, Usbek and Rica, the text critiques European customs, politics, and social norms while revealing the absurdities and contradictions inherent in contemporary French society. The work is characterized by its sharp wit and incisive satire, allowing Montesquieu to deftly navigate complex themes such as individual liberty, governance, and cultural relativism within a growing Enlightenment context that sought to challenge established traditions and hierarchies. Montesquieu, a pivotal figure of the Enlightenment, combined philosophical inquiry with political analysis, influenced profoundly by his own experiences as a French nobleman and observer of absolute monarchy. His exposure to varying cultural practices and norms, alongside his advocacy for the separation of powers, are evident throughout "Persian Letters," where he questions the foundations of societal structures and encourages readers to re-evaluate their perspectives on civilization and progress. This seminal work is indispensable for readers interested in political theory, cultural studies, and the development of Enlightenment thought. Montesquieu's keen insights and compelling narrative make "Persian Letters" not only a critical exploration of 18th-century Europe but also a relevant commentary for contemporary discussions on cultural differences and the nature of governance. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Persian Letters
Table of Contents
Introduction
Seen through the traveling gaze of two Persians who write what they see and feel, Paris becomes a glittering mirror that both distorts and clarifies, exposing how power, faith, and desire are shaped by distance, how customs harden into masks, and how a society learns its own face when an outsider, amused and skeptical in equal measure, refuses to take its certainties for granted.
Persian Letters is a classic because it perfected a simple yet inexhaustible device: the foreign observer whose surprise becomes a scalpel. By yoking curiosity to irony, it made comparative perspective a literary engine and a method of critique. Its satire is not a passing sting but a way of thinking that travels beyond its century. Readers return to it for the precision of its wit, the agility of its form, and the ethical demand it makes to look twice at what seems natural. That double vision seeded practices central to modern narrative and social analysis.
Written by Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, and first published anonymously in 1721, Persian Letters belongs to the early Enlightenment and to the French Regency, when inherited certainties were visibly shifting. The book takes the form of an exchange of letters composed by two Persian travelers and their correspondents at home and abroad. Across these missives, the travelers recount encounters in France and reflect on matters of belief, government, manners, and private life. The setup is at once playful and rigorously designed: a moving vantage point that invites readers to compare societies without being told what to think.
Montesquieu was a magistrate and a political thinker who would later write The Spirit of the Laws, and Persian Letters previews his method by turning observation into argument. His purpose is not to catalogue oddities but to test assumptions. The epistolary frame lets him stage questions rather than deliver treatises, so that humor disarms, paradox unsettles, and detail compels attention. He wanted a book that entertains as it interrogates, creating a space where the ordinary becomes newly visible and where power is legible in everyday gestures. The travelers carry a lamp, not a hammer, and its light travels far.
The epistolary form serves as both structure and theme. Brief, quick letters admit multiple voices, tones, and angles, from gossip and anecdote to philosophical reflection and miniature case studies. Because no single narrator commands the whole, the reader must assemble meanings across contrasts and gaps, learning how perspective shapes truth. This mosaic captures social life as a collage of impressions rather than a single spectacle. It also connects the book to travel writing while letting it question the exoticism it seems to employ. The very act of writing a letter becomes a lesson in mediation, distance, and selective focus.
The historical moment matters. After the long reign of Louis XIV, France was negotiating new freedoms, anxieties, and experiments, from finance and fashion to sociability in salons and coffeehouses. Censorship existed, yet public conversation widened, and the Enlightenment sited argument in observation. Montesquieu harnessed this climate, using the polite, portable letter to smuggle analysis into entertainment. His Persian travelers cross thresholds between court and street, church and theater, study and drawing room, so that public and private domains reflect each other. The book is alive to the seductions of novelty and the pressures of conformity, charting tensions common to urban modernity.
Its influence is both literary and intellectual. Persian Letters helped popularize the epistolary novel in eighteenth century Europe, proving that fragmented form could sustain intricate storytelling and incisive critique. The foreign observer became a durable persona, echoing through later moral and social satire, notably in Oliver Goldsmiths Citizen of the World, among others. Even when authors chose different frames, the book validated the method of comparative seeing: to understand one culture, juxtapose it with another and listen for dissonance. Its deft blend of irony and inquiry set a model for fiction that thinks while it delights.
At its core, the book explores how authority justifies itself and how belief organizes conduct. It probes religious practice without dismissing faith, diagnoses the choreography of politeness as a theater of power, and weighs the promises and dangers of empire and commerce. Themes of liberty and constraint are traced in institutions and in intimate life, showing how laws and customs enter bodies and hearts. The travelers learn that difference complicates judgment, yet reason must still discriminate. The result is a study of cultural relativism tempered by moral testing, a poise that keeps the book balanced between sympathy and critique.
Readers often praise the sharpness of its style. The prose is lucid, economical, and agile; the letters move quickly, yet leave room for resonance. Comedy and seriousness alternate without cancelling each other, so that a joke can open onto an argument and a small scene can carry a large idea. Montesquieu uses understatement as a lever and juxtaposition as a microscope. Because each letter closes before the next begins, the book trains an active, connecting attention. The effect is conversational and analytic at once, an art of thinking in public that never loses the pleasures of narrative.
From its first appearance, Persian Letters found a wide readership and has since been translated into many languages, which has helped its insights travel beyond their original setting. That global circulation suits a book about crossing borders, since every translation renews the experiment of seeing from elsewhere. Editions have varied in number and order of letters, but the essential experience remains stable: a polyphonic journey that is at once satirical and meditative. The books adaptability across centuries and languages testifies to the solidity of its design and the durability of the questions it raises.
For contemporary readers, its relevance is immediate. Debates about cultural contact, migration, and the ethics of representation make the travelers gaze newly urgent. The book shows how easy it is to exoticize and how necessary it is to reflect on ones own filters. It offers a way to think about media as well, since letters behave like curated posts, partial yet revealing, networked yet intimate. Its reflections on fanaticism, spectacle, and the performance of status feel current. Most of all, it models curiosity disciplined by doubt, a habit of mind that resists both cynicism and credulity.
To open Persian Letters is to enter an exchange that makes readers both hosts and guests. It invites attention to the fine grain of social life, tests the claims of power with tact and audacity, and treats difference as a resource for judgment rather than a slogan. The book endures because it joins clarity to play, analysis to narrative, and critique to charm. Its central promises remain intact: that perspective reveals truth, that conversation can refine reason, and that seeing from afar can teach us how to live at home. Those promises keep its wit and wisdom alive today.
Synopsis
Persian Letters by Montesquieu is an epistolary novel composed of correspondence between two Persian travelers, Usbek and Rica, and the circle they left behind in Isfahan. Seeking knowledge and respite from political tensions at home, they depart for Europe while entrusting Usbek’s secluded household, the seraglio, to eunuchs and wives bound by strict rules. The letters alternate between observations gathered along their route and messages from the distant harem. This structure juxtaposes public life and private authority, allowing the narrative to explore custom, belief, and power from multiple vantage points while following the travelers’ gradual immersion in European society.
The journey begins across the Ottoman domains and the Italian peninsula, with Usbek and Rica comparing rituals, manners, and institutions to those of Persia. They observe courts of law, religious ceremonies, and civic habits, noting both striking differences and unexpected similarities. Encounters with scholars and officials prompt reflections on the sources of obedience and the purposes of government. At the same time, letters from the seraglio describe routines of surveillance and devotion, as eunuchs report on conduct and the wives offer professions of fidelity. Distance subtly strains these bonds, and the formal assurances exchanged early on acquire a more anxious undertone.
An early cluster of letters presents the fable of the Troglodytes, a parable about a people who fail when self-interest eclipses civic duty and prosper when they embrace virtue and mutual obligation. This embedded narrative introduces a sustained inquiry into the foundations of political order. It contrasts arbitrary rule with consensual arrangements, suggesting how laws may arise from necessity and habit rather than mere command. The travelers do not prescribe a system; instead, they register how prosperity and stability depend on limited power, responsibility, and shared norms. The episode sets a baseline for later assessments of European institutions and Persian customs.
Arriving in Paris, Usbek and Rica enter salons, theaters, and academies, describing a society animated by conversation, fashion, and print culture. They remark on the curiosity aroused by their foreign dress and manners, while also noting how quickly novelty fades into routine sociability. Rica’s lighter tone captures urban wit and shifting trends, whereas Usbek’s letters incline to analysis. Libraries, scientific demonstrations, and learned debates showcase a culture of inquiry, even as the travelers question its limits. By moving among courtiers, savants, and tradespeople, they assemble a layered portrait of daily life and the public spaces that sustain it.
Religious topics prompt sustained comparison. The correspondents examine monastic orders, devotional practices, and ecclesiastical controversies, observing how belief shapes authority and community. They contrast clerical power with the claims of conscience and reason, often translating unfamiliar institutions into terms intelligible to themselves. Descriptions of pilgrimage, relics, and ritual sit alongside reports of astronomers and natural philosophers, balancing reverence and skepticism without settling on a single verdict. The travelers also reflect on how doctrines acquire force through ceremony, education, and habit. These assessments keep shifting as new encounters complicate their first impressions and widen the scope of their inquiry.
Political letters focus on monarchy, the regency, and the relations between courts, parlements, and administrative offices. Usbek notes the reach of royal edicts, the routines of bureaucracy, and the informal power of patronage. He compares French justice with Persian practice, considering the uses and abuses of secrecy, spectacle, and written law. Observations about policing and prisons illuminate the state’s mechanisms of control. Foreign policy and war appear at a distance, filtered through diplomatic gossip and public rumor. The cumulative effect is to map how authority circulates through offices and ceremonies while depending on opinion, compliance, and the delicate management of interests.
Economic and social letters describe markets, fashion, and speculation. The travelers recount the rise and volatility of paper credit, the allure of financial schemes, and the fortunes made and lost in rapid succession. They connect luxury to commerce, noting how desire sustains trades and crafts while reshaping tastes and hierarchies. Attention to women’s sociability in salons and households highlights their influence in conversation, matchmaking, and reputation. Discussions of marriage, education, and manners probe the interplay of appearance and substance. Together these reports reveal a society organized by exchange—of goods, words, and favors—whose stability depends on confidence as much as on material wealth.
Parallel letters from Isfahan give the seraglio plot increasing urgency. Reports from the chief eunuch emphasize vigilance and discipline, while the wives invoke loyalty and dignity under confinement. Minor transgressions, punishments, and petitions accumulate into a record of mounting tension. Usbek issues detailed regulations and moral admonitions, seeking to secure obedience from afar. As rumors multiply and rivalries harden, the limits of absentee authority become evident. The travelers’ inquiries in Paris thus mirror a private governance crisis at home: both domains test how rules operate when distance, interpretation, and competing interests erode the clarity of command.
Near the end, the correspondence tightens around questions of freedom, legitimacy, and the durability of institutions. Usbek measures the reach of laws against the stubbornness of custom, while Rica keeps cataloging the spectacle of European life. News from the seraglio foreshadows a decisive moment, but the narrative withholds particulars and dwells instead on the conditions that make such outcomes possible. The overarching message emerges from comparison: power requires limits; laws draw strength from consent; and perspective exposes the relativity of practices often deemed absolute. The book closes by leaving readers with a lens for judging authority, manners, and belief.
Historical Context
The narrative of Persian Letters unfolds primarily in Paris in the 1710s, with epistolary dates that track the last years of Louis XIV’s reign and the beginnings of the Regency (1715–1723). Its protagonists, Usbek and Rica, depart from Isfahan, then the capital of Safavid Iran, traveling across Ottoman territories and Italy before reaching France. Paris in this period was Europe’s largest city after London, a dense administrative and courtly center where royal authority, police surveillance, and new sociable spaces coexisted. The book’s Persian seraglio scenes anchor the story in Isfahan, juxtaposing a courtly East and a centralized French monarchy to explore parallels of power and discipline.
Paris offered a distinctive urban stage: cafés such as the Café Procope (opened 1686), the Palais-Royal promenades, theaters, law courts, and a royal post that made the letter an emblem of modern communication. The magistracy and the police managed order in an expanding metropolis of roughly half a million inhabitants. In Isfahan, the Naqsh-e Jahan Square and royal precincts embodied Safavid ceremonial power, with the harem and eunuch administration regulating domestic sovereignty. By setting letters between Paris and Persia, the work situates its observations within concrete places—policed streets and salons in France, guarded apartments and courtyards in Iran—where authority, surveillance, and custom are materially lived.
The long reign of Louis XIV (personal rule from 1661; died 1715) established a model of centralized monarchy. Versailles became the political theater of the realm (court installed in 1682), while intendants extended royal oversight into provinces. A standing army peaking near 400,000 in wartime, fiscal innovations, and regimented censorship underwrote the system. The Paris lieutenant general of police (institution created 1667) supervised public order and printed matter. Persian Letters mirrors this absolutist architecture by comparing monarchical power to domestic despotism in the seraglio and by recounting how routine obedience, ritual, and strategic favor bind subjects—courtier and eunuch alike—to the will at the apex.
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) ended legal toleration for French Protestants, triggering dragonnades, forced conversions, church demolitions, and the flight of perhaps 150,000–200,000 Huguenots. The policy had economic and demographic effects, while consolidating the crown’s alliance with Catholic orthodoxy. The book’s letters on religion weigh ceremonies against conscience and highlight the social costs of coercion. By having foreign observers puzzle over persecution carried out in the name of truth, the work recalls the post-1685 climate in which state power enforced doctrinal unity and invites comparisons with confessional enforcement in Safavid Iran.
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) pitted France and Spain against a Grand Alliance led by England, the Dutch Republic, and the Empire. Battles such as Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) bled resources; the Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714) redrew dynastic and colonial maps. Wartime taxation and requisitions pressed hard on subjects through the capitation (1695) and the dixième (1710). Against this backdrop, Persian Letters treats military glory with irony and attends to the taxpaying populace. Usbek and Rica observe the spectacle of martial prestige while remarking on its fiscal and human burdens in a capital habituated to propaganda and scarcity.
The Great Winter of 1709 devastated France with prolonged freezes, failed harvests, and bread shortages, raising mortality sharply in many regions. Price controls, grain policing, and emergency relief struggled to contain unrest. This crisis deepened a long fiscal grind and framed the last war years of Louis XIV with visible misery. In the book, the foreigners’ cool curiosity about social arrangements exposes how ordinary people absorb policy shocks while elites preserve pageantry. References to hunger, uneven taxation, and the fragility of subsistence highlight the distance between rulers’ rhetoric of order and the everyday contingency of life in streets policed for calm yet haunted by want.
The death of Louis XIV on 1 September 1715 inaugurated the Regency of Philippe II, duc d’Orléans (1715–1723). Early experiments like the polysynody (1715–1718) replaced ministers with councils; the Regent restored the Parlement of Paris’s right of remonstrance, briefly loosening political air. Court sociability shifted to the Palais-Royal and acquired a sharper libertine edge. Administrative trial-and-error, factional rivalries, and a tentative easing of censorship fostered a more talkative public space. Persian Letters draws on this atmosphere. Its Paris pages teem with observations of shifting manners and governance, the unsettled etiquette of a new regime, and the porousness between private vice and public authority.
No single episode better shaped the book’s satirical observations than the financial “System” of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble (1716–1720). Law, a Scottish projector, received authorization to found the Banque Générale (May 1716) in Paris, issuing banknotes to ease coin shortages and stimulate commerce. In 1717 he organized the Compagnie d’Occident (Mississippi Company), which obtained vast privileges over French Louisiana and later merged with other companies into the Compagnie des Indes. In December 1718 the bank became the Banque Royale, with notes guaranteed by the state. Speculation surged in 1719 on Rue Quincampoix, where crowds traded shares amid rumors of American silver, tobacco, and lands. Prices soared through late 1719 and early 1720 as the company absorbed tax farms and the mint, fusing public finance with private monopoly. To sustain confidence, the government issued decree after decree—limiting coin payments, altering note convertibility, and ordering tax payments in paper—until the edifice collapsed in mid-1720. A June edict devalued shares; panics and riots followed; Law fled in December. The bubble ruined many and enriched a few, shaking trust in money, officeholding, and the crown. Persian Letters registers this fever. Rica’s urban vignettes lampoon stock-jobbers, the alchemy of paper, and the credulity of crowds, while the foreigners’ detachment dissects how a regime sought to manufacture prosperity by decree. The letters’ cool weighing of value, imagination, and credit echoes the city’s streets, where fortunes turned on rumor and power, and exposes the intimate linkage between sovereign authority and speculative euphoria.
Conflicts between the Regent and the Parlement of Paris intensified between 1718 and 1720. A bed of justice in August 1718 curtailed the influence of legitimized princes (duc du Maine) and asserted royal authority. The Parlement used remonstrances to resist fiscal and monetary edicts tied to Law’s System; in August 1720 it was exiled to Pontoise for defiance, then recalled after accommodations. Montesquieu, serving as a président à mortier in the Parlement of Bordeaux from 1716, knew magistrates’ corporate culture, fees, and ceremonial. The book’s letters on justice and arbitrary commands reflect these struggles, exploring how institutional dignity collides with coercive expedients when money and sovereignty entwine.
Religious conflict sharpened around the papal bull Unigenitus (1713), which condemned 101 propositions associated with Jansenist moral rigor. A bloc of “Appellants” in 1717 challenged the bull’s registration, drawing in bishops, the Parlement, and the Parisian clergy; Archbishop Louis-Antoine de Noailles hesitated, and local enforcement varied. The dispute touched confessional discipline, episcopal authority, and the crown’s management of conscience. Persian Letters portrays theological polemics as worldly contests for influence. Its foreign narrators reduce lofty quarrels to social practices—fasts, censures, and denunciations—thereby marking the politics of grace and obedience that saturated French institutions after 1713.
Arbitrary detention through lettres de cachet and the expanding apparatus of urban policing framed public life. The office of lieutenant general of police (established 1667; held by Nicolas de La Reynie, then Marc-René d’Argenson to 1718) oversaw surveillance, censorship, guilds, and provisioning. The Bastille symbolized pretrial confinement by sovereign order. These tools managed sedition, scandal, and rumor. In Persian Letters, the control mechanisms of the seraglio—eunuch enforcement, seclusion, secret commands—mirror anxieties about hidden decrees and invisible chains in Paris. The correspondence thematizes the space between law and will, asking how security rationales blur into tyranny in both domestic and public realms.
Safavid Iran entered acute crisis under Shah Sultan Husayn (r. 1694–1722). Administrative paralysis, court faction, and frontier pressures culminated in the Afghan uprising led by Mahmud Hotak. After a siege beginning in March 1722, Isfahan capitulated in October, effectively ending Husayn’s rule; the dynasty fragmented until Nader’s ascendancy later in the 1730s. Reports of Safavid decay circulated in Europe through merchants and diplomats. The book’s Persian frame resonates with this turbulence: the climactic letters narrating rebellion in Usbek’s harem and the breakdown of authority in Isfahan transpose imperial collapse into domestic revolt, binding the theme of despotism’s brittleness to specific events in 1722.
A sensational Persian embassy to France in 1715, led by Mohammad Reza Beg on behalf of Shah Sultan Husayn, captivated Paris. The envoy’s public entries, audiences, and published relations fed a vogue for “Persian” manners, curiosities, and dress. Newspapers and pamphlets chronicled his appearances at Versailles months before Louis XIV’s death. This high-profile diplomatic encounter offered contemporaries a living example of cross-cultural observation and misrecognition. Persian Letters appropriates that social memory: by installing Persians as observers of French life, it draws on a concrete episode that taught Parisians to see themselves reflected—often absurdly—in the astonished gaze of an Eastern visitor.
French commercial expansion and colonial slavery formed the social horizon of many port elites. The Code Noir (1685) codified slavery in French colonies; Saint-Domingue’s sugar economy accelerated after 1700, while the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) transferred the lucrative Asiento to Britain but left French merchants active in Atlantic trades. Bordeaux—near Montesquieu’s estate at La Brède—grew through wine exports and, later, slaving circuits linking to the Caribbean. The book’s discussions of domination, property in persons, and moral relativism echo debates that such commerce provoked. By analogizing the seraglio’s captive order to the ownership of human beings, it presses historical economies into ethical scrutiny.
Information regimes mattered. The royal post enabled sustained letter exchange; stagecoach routes and relays connected Paris to provinces and foreign cities. Periodicals like the Gazette de France and the Mercure Galant circulated court news; clandestine “nouvelles à la main” and foreign presses (notably Amsterdam) undercut censorship. Persian Letters itself appeared in 1721 through Dutch channels to avoid prior restraint. The narrative depends on postal reliability and interception risks, thematizing secrecy, delay, and surveillance. Its satire of censors and informers reflects the very conditions of print and police under which Parisians read about embassies, bubbles, and edicts—events that the work’s pages continuously anatomize.
As a social critique, the book exposes the mechanisms by which hierarchy naturalizes itself: ritual, dress, ceremony, and the disciplining of bodies. It contrasts urban poverty with court extravagance, interrogates the legitimacy of coerced religion, and foregrounds the vulnerability of women within patriarchal structures—from Parisian convents to the Persian harem. By filtering customs through foreign eyes, it relativizes French norms without romanticizing the “Orient,” using parallel tyrannies to reveal how consent is manufactured. Its scrutiny of policing, prisons, and gossip shows how reputations and freedoms are administratively produced, while reflections on money and credit spotlight the way new wealth unsettles inherited ranks.
As a political critique, the correspondence dissects absolute power’s grammar: secrecy, oaths, exemplary punishments, and instruments like lettres de cachet. It juxtaposes the Regent’s improvisations, magistrates’ remonstrances, and speculative finance to show sovereignty’s dependence on opinion and trust. The religious quarrel over Unigenitus dramatizes how conscience becomes a site of governance. In the Persian scenes, despotism’s domestic theater collapses, suggesting that fear cannot sustain order without justice. By anatomizing taxation, censorship, and administrative fiat with dates and places from 1685 to 1722, the book indicts the era’s injustices—confessional persecution, class exemption, and gendered confinement—as historically specific, corrigible failures of rule.
Author Biography
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), was a French magistrate, man of letters, and one of the central figures of the European Enlightenment. His writings joined legal training, historical inquiry, and a comparative approach to politics, shaping modern understandings of constitutional government. Best known for The Spirit of the Laws, he articulated a theory of separated powers and the diversity of legal orders, ideas that influenced debates across Europe and the Atlantic world. Earlier works such as the Persian Letters and the Considerations on the Romans displayed his distinctive blend of irony, erudition, and attention to the relationship between institutions, customs, and liberty.
Born at the family estate of La Brède near Bordeaux, Montesquieu received a classical and legal education, including study at the Collège de Juilly and training in law. In the 1710s he inherited a barony and a judicial office in the Parlement of Bordeaux, a regional high court, which oriented his early career toward jurisprudence and public life. Serving in that body exposed him to procedure, commerce, and provincial administration, and gave him material for later reflections on legal diversity. While he began with scholarly interests ranging from natural philosophy to moral questions, the law provided both a framework and a comparative lens for his mature political analysis.
Alongside his judicial work, Montesquieu participated in the learned culture of Bordeaux, contributing mémoires and exchanging ideas in scientific and literary circles. In the early 1720s he published the Persian Letters, an epistolary novel released anonymously. Through the vantage of fictional Persian travelers observing France, the book satirized absolutism, religious intolerance, and social conventions, while probing the relativity of customs. Its wit and cosmopolitan perspective brought swift renown and controversy, and it positioned him among the leading voices of the Enlightenment. The success encouraged further literary experimentation and broadened his audience beyond the legal profession and provincial academies.
After selling his judicial office in the mid-1720s, he undertook extended travel through parts of Europe, including Italy, the German states, the Dutch Republic, and England. Exposure to different polities and commercial regimes deepened his commitment to comparative inquiry. Time in England allowed him to observe parliamentary life and the balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and commoners, experiences that informed his later constitutional theory. By the late 1720s he had also been admitted to the Académie française, reflecting his growing stature in letters. Travel notes and reflections from these years fed into projects that joined history, economy, climate, and law into a single analytical framework.
In the 1730s Montesquieu turned to Roman history with Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. The book examined institutions, civic virtue, expansion, and corruption to explain both ascendancy and collapse without relying on providential narratives. It modeled a secular, causal history attentive to how laws, mores, and military organization interact. The work was widely read and admired for its clarity and method, consolidating his reputation as an analyst of power rather than a pamphleteer. It also prepared the ground for a more systematic account of political forms, suitable laws, and the conditions of liberty in different societies.
The culmination of this program came in the late 1740s with The Spirit of the Laws. There, Montesquieu compared republics, monarchies, and despotisms; discussed how climate, commerce, and religion shape legislation; and famously argued that liberty thrives when legislative, executive, and judicial powers are distinct and mutually checking. The book quickly circulated in multiple languages and sparked intense debate. Admirers viewed it as a foundational science of politics; critics objected to aspects of its theology and its treatment of authority. It faced clerical censure, prompting him to issue a defense. Nonetheless, jurists, administrators, and reformers drew lasting lessons from its method and conclusions.
In his later years, Montesquieu divided his time between Parisian salons and work at his estate, revising texts and corresponding with scholars. He died in 1755 in Paris. His legacy is especially evident in constitutional thought: the Federalist Papers cited him, and the separation of powers became a touchstone for modern constitutions. Beyond law, his comparative approach influenced early social science and historical sociology. Today, readers approach the Persian Letters as a brilliant satire and cultural critique, and The Spirit of the Laws as a challenging, still fruitful inquiry into how institutions, mores, and material conditions sustain or threaten political liberty.
Persian Letters
John Davidson's Introduction
I
Of all the great French authors perhaps Montesquieu is the least known in this country. It is more than a hundred years since any work of his was translated into English, and no greater sign of the neglect which has befallen him could be instanced than the infrequency of the appearance of his name in our periodical and journalistic literature, at a time when our ideas of government are once more in the crucible. The greater fame of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the absorbing interest of the French Revolution, are the principal causes of this neglect; at the same time, had there been anything in the shape of a true biography of Montesquieu, a living picture of the man, the operation of these causes might have been in some degree obviated.
It was the custom under the ancien régime[1] in the great law-families for the eldest son to compose a life of his father: a document designed to hide the actual man behind a mask of the domestic and legal virtues so effectually that his friends and colleagues should be unable to recognize him. Such a mémoire pour servir in the highest style of the art, Montesquieu’s son prepared and published in 1755. The eulogies of D’Alembert, Maupertuis, and the Chevalier de Solignac, founded, all of them, so far as they refer to Montesquieu’s life, upon this filial effigy, represent only a mask with the conventional air proper to a great and good man.
This lack of a truthful picture has, of course, had a bad effect on Montesquieu’s fame in France as well as in England. Least known, until recently, as regards his life, of all the great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, he has had perhaps the most varied fortune of all writers of that or any other age. For about fifty years after his death, his reputation was unrivalled; but from 1789 till 1814, the alterations of feeling towards him in France were as extravagant as if he had been a living agent in the Revolution and its sequel, “now extolled to the clouds as the master of political science, as the man of genius who had rediscovered the title-deeds of the human race; now denounced as laudator temporis acti, the apostle of privilege, and the defender of abuses.” Abandoned and condemned in evil times, he has always reappeared when France has recognized its truest interests. Under the Consulate and the First Empire he is intentionally forgotten, but in 1814 he comes to the front once more. Publishers and editors were seized about that time with a “sort of fury” for the works of Montesquieu, and from 1819 till 1834 numerous annotated editions appeared. Then again there came a period of eclipse, and it was not until the close of the Second Empire that France, once more free, resumed the study of him who first tried to show it what freedom meant.
In 1875 M. Edouard Laboulaye’s edition of Montesquieu’s works, perhaps the best, was published in seven volumes; and in 1878 M. Louis Vian issued his “Histoire de Montesquieu,” the most important work on Montesquieu that has yet appeared. M. Vian had access to much unpublished matter; and his book, which is the result of fifteen years of study and research, supplies that biography for want of which Montesquieu's personality has hitherto been as vague as a spectre. In short, they seem at last in France in a fair way to get something like the true focus of Montesquieu, to have him placed in his proper niche: to understand him, even to label him, for he is not one of the very greatest whom it is criminal, and indeed impossible, to docket and define until one can look at them through the thought of many generations.
It is from M. Vian’s biography that the material for this introduction is mainly drawn. The writer is also indebted to M. Albert Sorel’s monograph on Montesquieu, and to the prefaces of M. Laboulaye. For the translation, the editions used were those of M. Laboulaye and M. Tourneux, the text of the former having been followed as a rule: the notes in both have been found very serviceable.
II
Like Montaigne, Montesquieu was a Gascon. His father, Jacques de Secondat, married Marie-Françoise de Penel, the desendant of an English family which had remained in France after the English rule had ceased there. She was an only child, and her husband received with her the title and barony of La Brède, an estate in Gascony, with a fantastic old Gothic donjon built in the thirteenth century. Montesquieu was the second of six children. The date of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on the 18th of January, 1689. His godfather, like the godfathers of Montaigne in 1553, of the lord of Beauvais in 1644, and of the Comte de Buffon in 1742, was a beggar belonging to the district, chosen “in order that his godchild might remember all his life that the poor are his brothers.” He was christened Charles-Louis, and bore, according to a curious custom of the time, the surname of De la Brède, the patronymic, De Secondat, being reserved for the head of the house.
His nurse was a miller’s wife, and the first three years of his life were spent with her. Most of those who have written of Montesquieu have attributed his constant use of the Gascon accent, and of certain idioms and solecisms, to these three years. Is it likely, if he had not heard the Gascon accent in his father’s household, and probably from his father’s lips, that the effect of his lisping in a patois in his earliest infancy would have remained with him all his life? If, however, he heard nothing in his father’s house but the best “French of Paris,” his close and lasting friendship with his foster-brother, Jean Demarennes, is a sufficient cause for the perpetuation of his Gasconisms. But the point is of small moment.
Montesquieu’s mother died when he was seven years old, and four years after, in 1700, he was sent to the college of the Oratorian Fathers at Juilly, near Meaux, in the department of Seine-et-Marne. There he remained till 1711. He was docile and diligent, and the solid foundation laid in Juilly enabled him to become the best informed writer of his time in France. In the year in which he left Juilly he wrote his first non-scholastic piece – the first, at least, of which we known anything. It was a refutation, in the form of a letter, of the doctrine of the eternal damnation of idolaters: the substance of it he afterwards incorporated in the “Persian Letters.”1
III
On leaving college Montesquieu began to study law. It was natural, as both his grandfathers had been presidents of the Parliament of Guienne, and his uncle occupied a similar position. Methodical in all things, he studied jurisprudence according to a plan of his own, the draft of which still exists; and found plenty of time to frequent the best salons in Bordeaux, in which the rank of his family and his own reputation as a young man of talent secured him a welcome. The chief figure in Bordeaux society was the Duke of Berwick,1 the son of James II. And Marlborough’s sister. This careful soldier and upright man, the only cool-headed and thoroughly sensible scion of the House of Stuart, perceived the merit of Montesquieu, and a friendship sprang up between them which ended only with the Duke’s death. Montesquieu cherished his memory, and among his papers was found a warm and eloquent eulogy of the victor of Almanza.
In 1713 Montesquieu’s father died, and his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu, took upon himself the duties of guardian. Two months after his nephew had reached his twenty-fifth year, he caused him to be appointed a lay-councillor of the Parliament of Guienne; and a year later, on the 30th of April 1715, Montesquieu married the girl of his uncle’s choice, the Demoiselle Jeanne Lartigue, a plain-looking Calvinist, inclined to limp,2 but frank, good-natured, and with a dowry of a hundred thousand livres. Love had nothing to do with the marriage: Montesquieu’s wife was his housekeeper, and the mother of his heir.
In the beginning of 1716 his uncle died, leaving him sole legatee on condition that he should call himself Montesquieu. Besides the name, which he had already adopted on the day of his marriage, he inherited a house in Bordeaux, lands in Agénois, and the position of President à mortier in the Parliament of Guienne. His installation took place in July, 1716, and he retained his presidentship till 1728.
Of the twelve provincial parliaments of France, that of Guienne, which sat at Bordeaux, ranked third with regard to the extent of its jurisdiction. It was directed by six presidents à mortier[3],3 and as it possessed political, religious, administrative, and judicial attributes, the proper performance of the duties of a president entailed considerable study, and were in themselves by no means light. Montesquieu is believed to have given them sufficient attention, although on his own showing, he did not understand legal procedure; but no trace remains of his judicial functions.
His official duties did not by any means occupy him exclusively. After the Academies of Caen and Paris, that of Bordeaux, having been established in 1712, is the most ancient. Three years after its constitution, Montesquieu was admitted, and became one of its most enthusiastic members. Wherever he was, and in whatever me might be engaged, he had always time to attend to its interests. More than once in acknowledgment of his many services he was appointed president. Much of the work he prepared for the Academy has been lost; of the dissertation which was considered the most remarkable, only the title remains – “The Religious Policy of the Romans.” Medicine, physics, natural history, were all studied, and numerous discourses written. The effect of these studies is to be found throughout all his works, the principal definitions in “L’Esprit des Lois” itself being, not those of a lawyer or metaphysician, but rather of a geometer and naturalist.
IV
In all likelihood the idea of the “Persian Letters” occurred to Montesquieu before he left college. The first of them, dated the 21st of the moon of Muharram (January), 1711, was written in his twenty-second year; the last in his thirty-second. Reflections of his favourite reading are to be found in their framework, and critics have pointed out the many resemblances to Dufresney’s “Amusements,” “The Turkish Spy,” “The Spectator,” the “Decameron,” with borrowings from Erasmus and other less-known writers. But Montesquieu has at least spoiled nothing that he has used. The “Letters” were printed in Amsterdam, and published anonymously in 1721; and at once, as a friend of Montesquieu’s had predicted, “they sold like loaves.” No French writer had ever before said so perfectly what all felt and were trying to say; and it was done so skillfully, so pleasantly, like a man telling a story after supper.
At the time they appeared the social order of the ancien régime was beginning to crumble about the monarchy. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, by exiling the Huguenots, had deprived the country of many of its most industrious subjects, and struck a disastrous blow at its trade; the power of France, build up peacefully by Mazarin and Colbert, had been shattered at Ramilies and Malplaquet; and Louis XIV[2].’s acceptance of the Bull Unigenitus, directed against the Jansenists, had destroyed the last remnant of religious liberty. As for the parliaments, they were only able to mumble and grumble, endless edicts having pulled their teeth, as it were, one by one; and the condition of the people was desperate in the extreme. It is no wonder that when Louis XIV. Died, the middle and lower classes thanked God with “scandalous frankness” as for a long-expected and certain deliverance. The upper classes were delighted also, although they hardly returned thanks in the same quarter, nor for the same reason. It was not a lightening of taxation, some liberty of conscience, more equal laws, that the latter anticipated, but the old licence, the “unchained libertinage,” the idea of which had never disappeared, but had been handed down, as Sainte-Beuve says, in direct and uninterrupted descent from the Renaissance to the Fronde, from the Fronde to the Regency, through De Retz, Saint-Evremond, Vendome, Bayle, to the Epicureans, Pyrrhonists, professors of an imperturbable impiety, the unbelievers, as full and certain in their unbelief as Bossuet was in his faith, who made a byword of the eight years from the death of Louis XIV. To his successor’s assumption of power. Grown sanctimonious in his old age, Louis XIV. Had made his subjects hypocrites. At his death the boast of vice succeeded to ostentatious devotion; the court like one man changed from Tartuffe into Don Juan. All things were discussed, examined, and torn to shreds. The intestine quarrels of the Church gave scoffers the opportunity they would have made. Dubois debauched politics; Law, finance; and the populace debauched themselves: for gaming, which had before been confined to people of quality, became the common amusement. Incest, too, was quite à la mode; and those who could not be in the height of the fashion had to be satisfied with lesser vices. The autocratic rule of the Grand Monarque gave place to the laissez-aller of Philip of Orleans, the “unbelieving Regent.” Hope, desire, speculation, knew no bounds, all things in heaven above and in the earth beneath having become common and unclean. It is this period that is reflected and criticized in the “Persian Letters.”
V
The “Persian Letters” are the correspondence of several Persians, on a visit to Europe, with each other and their friends in Ispahan. Rica, the younger of the two principal writers, is good-humoured, sarcastic, and represents the lighter side of Montesqiueu’s nature. His lively intellect makes him a keen observer; his youth and health enable him to go everywhere, see everybody, and experience everything. He describes the surface of society with a quick glance that sometimes pierces deep enough, too. The King of France, although he has no mines of gold and silver, like the King of Spain, is much wealthier, deriving supplies from an inexhaustible source, the vanity of his subjects. He is likewise a magician, for his dominion extends to the minds of his subjects.[1q] If he has a costly war on hand, and is short of money, he simply suggests that a piece of paper is a coin of the realm, and his people are straightway convinced of it. But this is a small matter. There is a much more powerful magician, the Pope, to wit, who sometimes makes the King believe that three are no more than one; that the bread he eats is not bread, and the wine he drinks not wine. It is Rica who makes the discovery that the Christian religion practically consists in the non-fulfilment of an immense number of tedious duties; and it is he who quotes the epitaph on the diner-out which recalls by its numerical exactness Teufelsdröck’s epitaph on Philippus Zaehdarm. “Here,” it runs, “rests one who never rested before. He assisted at five hundred and thirty funerals. He made merry at the births of two thousand six hundred and eighty children. He wished his friends joy, always varying the phrase, upon pensions amounting to two millions six hundred thousand livres; in town he walked nine thousand six hundred furlongs, in the country thirty-six furlongs. His conversation was pleasing; he made a ready-made stock of three hundred and sixty-five stories; he was acquainted also from his youth with a hundred and eighteen apophthegms derived from the ancients, which he employed on special occasions. He died at last in the sixtieth year of his age. I say no more, stranger; for how could I ever have done telling you all that he did and all that he saw.”1 It is Rica who sketches the alchemist in his garret, praying fatuously that God would enable him to make a good use of his wealth; the people whose conversation is a mirror which relects only their own impertinent faces; the professional wits planning a conversation of an hour’s length to consist entirely of bons-mots; the compilers who produce masterpieces by shifting the books in a library from one shelf to another; the universal “decider,” who knew more about Ispahan than his Persian interlocutor; the French Academy, a body with a chokeful of tropes, metaphors, and antitheses; the geometer, a martyr to his own accuracy, who was offended by a witty remark, as weak eyes are annoyed by too strong a light; the quidnuncs, petits-maîtres[5], lazy magistrates, financiers, bankrupts, and opera-dancers.
Usbek is older, graver, given to meditation and reflection. Although from his earliest youth a courtier, he has remained uncorrupted. As he could not flatter, his sincerity made him enemies, and brought upon him the jealousy of the ministers. His life being in danger, he forsook the court, and retired to his country-house. Even there persecution followed him, and he determined on the journey to Europe. Rica went as his companion.
The opening paragraph of Letter XLVIII., in which Usbek characterizes himself, is undoubtedly descriptive of Montesquieu. “Although I am not employed in any business of importance, I am yet constantly occupied. I spend my time observing, and at night I write down what I have noticed, what I have seen, what I have heard during the day. I am interested in everything, astonished at everything: I am like a child, whose organs, still over-sensitive, are vividly impressed by the merest trifles.” Usbek can be as brilliant and satirical on occasion as his younger companion, but his aim is to probe to the heart of things, and he knows that truth will only reveal itself to a reverent search. To him all religions are worthy of respect, and their ministers also, for “God has chosen for Himself, in every corner of the earth, souls purer than the rest, whom He has separated from the impious world that their mortification and their fervent prayers may suspend His wrath.” He thinks that the surest way to please God is to obey the laws of society, and to do our duty towards men. Every religion assumes that God loves men, since He establishes a religion for their happiness;[2q] and since He loves men we are certain of pleasing Him in loving them, too. Usbek’s prayer in Letter XLVI. Is not yet out of date. “Lord, I do not understand any of those discussions that are carried on without end regarding Thee: I would serve Thee according to Thy will; but each man whom I consult would have me serve Thee according to his.” He insists that religion is intended for man’s happiness; and that, in order to love it and fulfil its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to our beliefs – not necessary even to attempt to convert them. Indeed, he holds that variety of belief is beneficial to the state. A new sect is always the surest means of correcting the abuses of an old faith; and those who profess tolerated creeds usually prove more useful to their country than those who profess the established religion, because, being excluded from all honours, their endeavour to distinguish themselves by becoming wealthy improves trade and commerce. Proselytism, with its intolerance, its affliction of the consciences of others, its wars and inquisitions, is an epidemic disease which the Jews caught from the Egyptians, and which passed from them to the Christians and Mohammedans, a capricious mood which can be compared only to a total eclipse of human reason. “He who would have me change my religion is led to that, without doubt, because he would not change his own, although force were employed; and yet he finds it strange that I will not do a thing which he himself will not do, perhaps for the empire of the world.”2 Usbek is a sophist, but it is quite evident that he is no bigot; he even goes further than Montesquieu himself, a wit of the Regency, felt to be right; and when he praises suicide as being no more a disturbance of the order of Providence than the making a round stone square, he is rapped over the knuckles with the reminder that the preservation of the union of body and soul is the chief sign of submission to the decrees of the Creator.
Usbek has his character-sketches as well as Rica. He gives a lively description of those geniuses who frequent the coffee-houses, and on quitting them believe themselves four times wittier than when they entered. The savage king sitting on his block of wood, dressed in his own skin, and inquiring of the sailors if they talked much of him in France, is an illustration of his. One letter, the forty-eighth, is quite a picture-gallery. Usbek is in the country at the house of a man of some note; and he describes to his friend Rhedi various members of the company he meets. There are vulgar farmers-general who brag of their cooks; jaunty confessors, necessities of female existence, who can cure a headache better than any medicine; poets, the grotesquest of humankind, declaring that they are born so; the old soldier, who cannot endure the thought that France has gained any battles without him; and last, but not least, the lady-killer who has a talk with Usbek. “’It is fine weather,’ he said. ‘Will you take a turn with me in the garden?’ I replied as civilly as I could, and we went out together. ‘I have come to the country,’ said he, ‘to please the mistress of the house, with whom I am not on the worst of terms. There is a certain woman in the world who will be rather out of humour; but what can one do? I visit the finest women in Paris; but I do not confine my attentions to one; they have plenty to do to look after me, for, between you and me, I am a sad dog.’ ‘In that case, sir,’ said I, ‘you doubtless have some office or employment which prevents you from waiting on them more assiduously?’ ‘No, sir; I have no other business than to provoke husbands, and drive fathers mad; I delight in alarming a woman who thinks me hers, and in bringing her within an ace of losing me. A set of us young fellows divide up Paris among us in this pursuit, and keep it wondering at everything we do.’ ‘From what I understand,’ said I, ‘you make more stir than the most valorous warrior, and are more regarded than a grave magistrate. If you were in Persia you would not enjoy all these advantages; you would be held fitter to guard our women than to please them.’ The blood mounted to my face; and I believe had I gone on speaking, I could not have refrained from affronting him.” Then there are casuists, great lords, men of sense and men of none, bishops, philosophers and philosophasters, all pricked off as deftly as any of Rica’s acquaintances, and with less exaggeration, if with more sobriety. One brief dramatic sketch must not be omitted. Has any one failed to meet the gentleman who says, “I believe in the immortality of the soul for six months at a time; my opinions depend entirely on my bodily condition: I am a Spinozist, a Socinian, a Catholic, ungodly or devout, according to the state of my animal spirits, the quality of my digestion, the rarity or heaviness of the air I breathe, the lightness or solidity of the food I eat?”3
Montesquieu has distinguished the characters of Rica and Usbek with care; and during the first months of their stay in Europe, he succeeds with fair success in depicting their state of mind in the midst of, what was to them, a new world. Soon, however, they become in all except their domestic matters merely mouthpieces for the author’s satire and criticism, and expounders of his theories. It is Usbek who in several letters explains those ideas which Montesquieu afterwards developed in “L’Esprit des Lois.” On this subject he writes as a legislator, with the well-balanced judgment, the restraint and reserve which always temper Montesquieu’s enthusiasm and control his expressions of opinion. Here in one sentence is the policy of “L’Esprit des Lois”: “I have often inquired which form of government is most conformable to reason. It seems to me that the most perfect is that which obtains its object with the least friction; so that the government which leads men by following their propensities and inclinations is the most perfect.”4 And in the following has been detected the philosophy of Montesquieu’s great book: “Nature always works tardily, and, as it were, thriftily; her operations are never violent; even in her productions she requires temperance; she never works but by rule and measure; if she be hurried she soon falls into decline.”5 In fact, the latter portion of the “Persian Letters” is edited from Montesquieu’s commonplace-book. It reveals his ideas on international law, on the advancement of science, and on the origin of liberty; and states those problems which were to be the study of his life.
From the travels of Chardin and Tavernier, Montesquieu derived his knowledge of Persia. To Chardin he is particularly indebted, not only for the background, but for his theory of despotism 6 and his theory of climates.7 The story of the revolt of Usbek’s harem, though belonging to a style long out of fashion, is skillfully told, and will be found to interest the most prudish reader in spite of some disgust. The forsaken wives, the long-winded pedantic eunuchs, are all French, of course, French people of the Regency; and Usbek himself is as jealous as a petit-maître. As for the story of Anais, and the sexual love of brother and sister in “Apheridon and Astarte,” all that need be said of them is that they are characteristic of the mood of the Regency. The translator gave a passing thought to the propriety of omitting the former; but the author did not omit it, so it appears. One word more on this subject, and it shall be a word from Montesquieu himself. He found his daughter one day with the “Persian Letters” in her hand. “Let it alone, my child, he said. “It is a work of my youth unsuited to yours.”
VI
Soon after the publication of the “Persian Letters” Montesquieu went to the capital to enjoy his reputation. There he found society more agreeable in Paris than in Versailles, because in the small world of the latter intrigue was the rule, whereas in the former people amused themselves. He became a member of the informal Club de l’Entre-sol, which met on Saturdays in the house of President Hénault. Bolingbroke was the founder of this club, and its most distinguished member. Among those who frequented it were the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, D’Argenson, “secretary to the Republic of Plato,” and Ramsai. Probably the principal benefit which Montesquieu derived from his attendance at the Entre-sol was his introduction to Lord Chesterfield; but he continued a member until Cardinal Fleury interdicted the club in 1730, on account of the active part it began to take in politics.
With the aid of Mademoiselle de Clermont, Louis XIV.’s unspeakable tenth muse, Montesquieu was elected to the Academy in 1725; but his election was invalidated on account of his non-residence in Paris. He then returned to Bordeaux, sold his presidentship, acquired the necessary qualification, and, not without a questionable intrigue, was elected in 1728 to the chair rendered vacant by the death of De Sacy, a forgotten translator.
In the spring of the same year Montesquieu set out on his travels with a nephew of the Duke of Berwick, whose affairs called him to Vienna. It was during this journey that he applied for nomination to some diplomatic post. In urging his claim he pointed out that he was not duller than other men; that, being of independent means, honour was the only reward he sought; that he was accustomed to society, and had toiled (beaucoup travaillé) to make himself capable. The powers that then were, however, elected to dispense with his services.
Montesquieu was much disappointed with his reception at the hands of the great. On his first entrance into society he had been announced as a man of genius, and had been looked on favourably by people in place; but when the success of the “Persian Letters” proved that he actually had ability, and brought him the esteem of the public, people in place began to be shy of him. It was no consolation for him to tell himself that officialdom, secretly wounded by the reputation of a celebrated man, takes vengeance by humiliating him, and that he who can endure to hear another praised must merit much praise himself.1 He was deeply disappointed. In his youth he had written, “Cicero, of all the ancients, is he whom I should most wish to be like.” A public career was denied him and he suffered, having set his heart on it; but he was more of an ancient Roman than Cicero, if that was his ambition; and it is surely better to be famous as the author of “L’Esprit des Lois,” than to be infamous as one of Louis XV.’s ministers.
In Italy he found Lord Chesterfield. The two men had already tested each other in the Entre-sol, and they were now glad to travel together. Journeying to Venice, they met Law, the creator of credit, who, having preserved his taste for speculation and a fine diamond, passed his time in staking the latter at the gaming-table. Montesquieu had dealt severely with him in the “Persian Letters,” but that did not prevent Law from receiving him pleasantly; nor did the ruined financier’s complaisance prevent Montesquieu from applying the lash again in “L’Esprit des Lois.”
From Venice they went to Rome. Montesquieu frequented the salon of Cardinal Polignac, the French ambassador; and the city, both ancient and modern, had its due effect. Before leaving it, he paid a visit to the Pope, Benedict XIII., who said to him, “My dear president, I wish you to carry away some souvenir of my friendship. To you and yours I grant permission to eat meat every day for the term of your natural lives.” Montesquieu thanked the Pope and withdrew. Next day they brought him the dispensation with a note of charges. “The Pope,” said Montesquieu, returning the papers, “is an honest man; I will not doubt his word; and I hope God has no reason to doubt it either.” An answer becoming a shrewd economic Gascon. After visiting Naples, Pisa, Florence, Turin, and the Rhine country, they arrived at the Hague, where Chesterfield was English ambassador. From the Hague they sailed to England, reaching London in November, 1729.
VII
Although Montesquieu lived in England for eighteen months, there is but little to tell of his visit. According to his custom he went everywhere, and saw, if not everybody, certainly Walpole, Pope, and Swift. Montesquieu derived immense benefit from his travels, because he was always pliant to the manners of the country in which he sojourned. “When I am in France,” he said, “I swear friendship with everybody; in England, with nobody; in Italy, I do the agreeable all round; in Germany, I drink with the whole world.” He found England the most useful country to visit. Germany, he thought, was made to travel in, Italy to rest in, England to think in, and France to live in.
Montesquieu left behind him a set of notes on England, from which we can gather and condense his impressions.
In London the people eat much fleshmeat, with the result that they become very stout, and collapse at forty or forty-five.
