very inconvenient criticism of abuses in church and state. The fact is that the Lettres persanes is the first book of what is called the Philosophe movement. It is amusing to find Voltaire describing the Lettres as a “trumpery book,” a “book which anybody might have written easily.” It is not certain that, in its peculiar mixture of light badinage with not merely serious purpose but gentlemanlike moderation, Voltaire could have written it himself, and it is certain that no one else at that time could.
The reputation acquired by this book brought Montesquieu much into the literary society of the capital, and he composed for, or at any rate contributed to, one of the coteries of the day the clever but rather rhetorical Dialogue de Sylla et d’Eucrate, in which the dictator gives an apology for his conduct; For Mlle de Clermont, a lady of royal blood, a great beauty and a favourite queen of society, he wrote the curious prose-poem of the Temple de Gnide. This is half a narrative, half an allegory, in the semi-classical or rather pseudo-classical taste of the time, decidedly frivolous and dubiously moral, but of no small elegance in its peculiar style. A later jeu d’esprit of the same kind, which is almost but not quite certainly Montesquieu’s, is the Voyage à Paphos, in which his warmest admirers have found little to praise. In 1725 Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy, but an almost obsolete rule requiring residence in Paris was appealed to, and the election was annulled. It is doubtful whether a hankering after Parisian society, or an ambition to belong to the Academy, or a desire to devote himself to literary pursuits of greater importance, or simple weariness of not wholly congenial work determined him to give up his Bordeaux office. In 1726 he sold the life-tenure of his office, reserving the reversion for his son, and went to live in the capital, returning, however, for half of each year to La Brède. There was now no further formal obstacle to his reception in the Académie Française, but a new one arose. Ill-wishers had brought the Lettres persanes specially under the minister André Hercule de Fleury’s attention, and Fleury, a precisian in many ways, was shocked by them. There are various accounts of the way in which the difficulty was got over, but all seem to agree that Montesquieu made concessions which were more effectual than dignified. He was elected and received in January 1728.
Almost immediately afterwards he started on a tour through Europe to observe men, things and constitutions. He travelled through Austria to Hungary, but was unable to visit Turkey as he had proposed. Then he made for Italy, where he met Chesterfield. At Venice, and elsewhere in Italy, he remained nearly a year, and then journeyed by way of Piedmont and the Rhine to England. Here he stayed for some eighteen months, and acquired an admiration for English character and polity which never afterwards deserted him. He returned, not to Paris, but to La Brède, and to outward appearance might have seemed to be settling down as a squire. He altered his park in the English fashion, made sedulous inquiries into his own genealogy, arranged an entail, asserted, though not harshly, his seignorial rights, kept poachers in awe and so forth. But these matters by no means engrossed his thoughts. In his great study at La Brède (a hall rather than a study, some 60 ft. long by 40 wide) he was constantly dictating, making abstracts, revising essays, and in other ways preparing his main book. He may have thought it wise to soften the transition from the Lettres persanes to the Esprit des lois, by interposing a publication graver than the former and less elaborate than the latter. The Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la décadence des Romains appeared in 1734 at Amsterdam, without the author’s name. This, however, was perfectly well known; indeed, Montesquieu formally presented a copy to the French Academy. But the author’s reputation as a jester stuck to him, and the salons affected to consider the Lettres persanes and the new book respectively as the “grandeur” and the “décadence de” M. de Montesquieu; but more serious readers at once perceived its extraordinary merit, and it was eagerly read abroad. A copy of it exists or existed which had the singular misfortune to be annotated by Frederick the Great, and to be abstracted from the Potsdam library by Napoleon. It is said, moreover, by competent authorities to have been the most enduringly popular and the most widely read of all its author’s works in his own country, and it was certainly been the most frequently and carefully edited. Merely scholastic criticism may of course object to it, as to every other book of the time, the absence of the exactness of modern critical inquiry into the facts of history; but the virtue of Montesquieu’s book is in its views, not in its facts. It is (putting Bossuet and Giovanni Vico aside) almost the first important essay in the philosophy of history. The point of view is entirely different from that of Bossuet, and it seems entirely improbable that Montesquieu knew anything of Vico. In the Grandeur et decadence the characteristics of the Esprit des lois appear with the necessary subordination to a narrower subject. Two things are especially noticeable in it: a peculiarity of style, and a peculiarity of thought. The style has a superficial defect. The page is broken up into short paragraphs of but a few lines each, which look very ugly, which irritate the reader by breaking the sense, and which prepare him to expect an undue and ostentatious sententiousness. On the other hand, the merits of the expression are very great. It is grave and destitute of ornament, but extraordinarily luminous and full of what would be called epigram, if the word epigram had not a certain connotation of flippancy about it. It is a very short book; for, printed in large type with tolerably abundant notes, it fills but two hundred pages in the standard edition of Montesquieu’s works. But no work of the century, except Turgot’s second Sorbonne Discourse, contains, in proportion to its size, more weighty and original thought on historical subjects, while Montesquieu has over Turgot the immense advantage of style.
Although, however, this ballon d’essai, in the style of his great work, may be said to have been successful, and though much of that work was, as we have seen, in all probability already composed, Montesquieu was in no hurry to publish it. He went on “cultivating the garden” diligently both as a student and as an improving landowner. He wrote the sketch of Lysimaque for Stanislaus Leczinski; he published new and final editions of the Temple de Gnide, of the Lettres persanes, of Sylla et Eucrate (which indeed had never been published, properly speaking). After allowing the Grandeur et decadence to be reprinted without alterations some half-dozen times, he revised and corrected it. He also took great pains with the education of his son Charles and his daughter Denise, of whom he was extremely fond. He frequently visited Paris, where his favourite resorts were the salons of Mme de Tencin and Mme d’Aiguillon. Yet it seems that he did not begin the final task of composition till 1743. Two years of uninterrupted work at La Brède finished the greater part of it, and two more the rest. It was finally published at Geneva in the autumn of 1748, in two volumes quarto. The publication was, however, preceded by one of those odd incidents which in literature illustrate Clive’s well-known saying about courts-martial in war. Montesquieu summoned a committee of friends, according to a very common practice, to hear and give an opinion on his work. It was an imposing and certainly not an unfriendly one, consisting of Charles Jean François Hénault, Helvétius, the financier Étienne de Silhouette, the dramatist Joseph Saurin, Crébillon the younger, and, lastly, Fontenelle—in fact, all sorts and conditions of literary men. They unanimously advised the author not to publish a book which has been described as “one of the most important books ever written,” and which may be almost certainly ranked as the greatest book of the French 18th century.
Montesquieu, of course, did not take his friends’ advice. In such cases no man ever does, and in this case it was certainly fortunate. The Esprit des lois represents the reflections of a singularly clear, original, and comprehensive mind, corrected by forty years’ study of men and books, arranged in accordance with a long deliberated plan, and couched in language of remarkable freshness and idiosyncrasy. In the original editions the full title runs L’Esprit des lois : ou du rapport que les lois
