Good men had themselves sometimes lent a hand to the work, beyond what they had intended or foreseen, perhaps; Montesquieu, despite the wise moderation of his great and strong mind, had been the first to awaken that yearning for novelty and reforms which had been silently brooding at the bottom of men’s hearts. 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. He was already councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a mortar-cap president’s (president d mortier) office, which had been given up to him by one of his uncles. “On leaving college,” he says, “there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of them.” Those profound researches, which were to last as long as his life, were more suited to his tastes than jurisprudence properly so called. “What has always given me rather a low opinion of myself,” he would say, “is that there are very few positions in the commonwealth for which I should be really fit. As for my office of president, I have my heart in the right place, I comprehend sufficiently well the questions in themselves; but as to the procedure I did not understand anything about it. I paid attention to it, nevertheless; but what disgusted me most was to see fools with that very talent which, so to speak, shunned me.” He resolved to deliver himself from the yoke which was intolerable to him, and resigned his office; but by this time the world knew his name, in spite of the care he had taken at first to conceal it. In 1721, when he still had his seat on the fleurs-de-lis, he had published his Lettres persanes, an imaginary trip of two exiled Parsees, freely criticising Paris and France. The book appeared under the Regency, and bears the imprint of it in the licentiousness of the descriptions and the witty irreverence of the criticisms. Sometimes, however, the future gravity of Montesquieu’s genius reveals itself amidst the shrewd or biting judgments. It is in the Lettres persanes that he seeks to set up the notion of justice above the idea of God himself. “Though there were no God,” he says, “we should still be bound to love justice, that is to say, make every effort to be like that Being of whom we have so grand an idea, and who, if He existed, would of necessity be just.” Holy Scripture, before Montesquieu, had affirmed more simply and more powerfully the unchangeable idea of justice in every soul of man. “He who is judge of all the earth, shall not He do right?” Abraham had said when interceding with God for the righteous shut up in Sodom.
The success of the Lettres persanes was great; Montesquieu had said what many people thought without daring to express it; the doubt which was nascent in his mind, and which he could only withstand by an effort of will, the excessive freedom of the tone and of the style scared the authorities, however; when he wanted to get into the French Academy, in the place of M. de Sacy, Cardinal Fleury opposed it formally. It was only on the 24th of January, 1728, that Montesquieu, recently elected, delivered his reception speech. He at once set out on some long travels; he went through Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and ended by settling in England for two years. The sight of political liberty had charmed him. “Ambassadors know no more about England than a six months’ infant,” he wrote in his journal; “when people see the devil to pay in the periodical publications, they believe that there is going to be a revolution next day; but all that is required is to remember that in England as elsewhere, the people are dissatisfied with the ministers and write what is only thought elsewhere. England is the freest country in the world; I do not except any republic.” He returned to France so smitten with the parliamentary or moderate form of government, as he called it, that he seemed sometimes to forget the prudent maxim of the Lettres persanes. “It is true,” said the Parsee Usbeck, “that, in consequence of a whimsicality (bizarrerie) which springs rather from the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws; but the case is rare, and, when it occurs, it should not be touched save with a trembling hand.”
On returning to his castle of La Brede after so many and such long travels, Montesquieu resolved to restore his tone by intercourse with the past. “I confess my liking for the ancients,” he used to say; “this antiquity enchants me, and I am always ready to say with Pliny, ‘You are going to Athens; revere the gods.’” It was not, however, on the Greeks that he concentrated the working of his mind; in 1734, he published his Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la decadence des Romaine. Montesquieu did not, as Bossuet did, seek to hit upon God’s plan touching the destinies of mankind; he discovers in the virtues and vices of the Romans themselves the secret of their triumphs and of their reverses. The contemplation of antiquity inspires him with language often worthy of Tacitus, curt, nervous, powerful in its grave simplicity. “It seemed,” he says, “that the Romans only conquered in order to give; but they remained so positively the masters that, when they made war on any prince, they crushed him, so to speak, with the weight of the whole universe.”
Montesquieu thus performed the prelude to the great work of his life; he had been working for twenty years at the Esprit des lois, when he published it in 1748. “In the course of twenty years,” he says, “I saw my work begin, grow, progress, and end.” He had placed as the motto to his book this Latin phrase, which at first excited the curiosity of readers: Prolem sine matre creatam (Offspring begotten without a mother). “Young man,” said Montesquieu, by this time advanced in years, to M. Suard (afterwards perpetual secretary to the French Academy), “young man, when a notable book is written, genius is its father, and liberty its mother; that is why I wrote upon the title-page of my work, Prolem sine matre creatam.”
It was liberty at the same time as justice that Montesquieu sought and claimed in his profound researches into the laws which have from time immemorial governed mankind; that new instinctive idea of natural rights, those new yearnings which were beginning to dawn in all hearts, remained as yet, for the most part, upon the surface of their minds and of their lives; what was demanded at that time in France was liberty to speak and write rather than to act and govern. Montesquieu, on the contrary, went to the bottom of things, and, despite the natural moderation of his mind, he propounded theories so perilous for absolute power that he dared not have his book printed at Paris, and brought it out in Geneva; its success was immense; before his death, Montesquieu saw twenty-one French editions published, and translations in all the languages of Europe. “Mankind had lost its titledeeds,” says Voltaire; “Montesquieu recovered and restored them.”
The intense labor, the immense courses of reading, to which Montesquieu had devoted himself, had exhausted his strength. “I am overcome with weariness,” he wrote in 1747; “I propose to rest myself for the remainder of my days.” “I have done,” he said to M. Suard; “I have burned all my powder, all my candles have gone out.” “I had conceived the design of giving greater breadth and depth to certain parts of my Esprit; I have become incapable of it; my reading has weakened my eyes, and it seems to me that what light I have left is but the dawn of the day when they will close forever.”
Montesquieu was at Paris, ill and sad at heart, in spite of his habitual serenity; notwithstanding the scoffs he had admitted into his Lettres persanes, he had always preserved some respect for religion; he considered it a necessary item in the order of societies; in his soul and on his own private account he hoped and desired rather than believed. “Though the immortality of the soul were an error,” he had said, “I should be sorry not to believe it; I confess that I am not so humble as the atheists. I know not what they think, but as for me I would not truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness. There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like God himself. Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to give up.” As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to become clearer. “What a wonderful thing!” he would say, “the Christian religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world, yet forms our happiness in this.” He had never looked to life for any very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful. “Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of life,” he wrote, “never having had any sorrow that an hour’s reading did not dispel. I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest of the day I am content. I pass the night without awaking, and in the evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving way to reflections.”
Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or of his writings. The priest of his parish brought him the sacraments, and, “Sir,” said he, “you know how great God is!” “Yes,” replied the dying man, “and how little men are!” He expired almost immediately on the 10th of February, 1755, at the age of sixty-six. He died at the beginning of the reign of the philosophers, whose way he had prepared before them without having ever belonged to their number. Diderot alone followed his bier. Fontenelle, nearly a hundred years old, was soon to follow him to the tomb.