Montesquieu, CHARLES DE SECONDAT, BARON DE LA BRÈDE ET DE, a celebrated French writer on politics and law, was born 18th January 1689, at the château La Brède, near Bordeaux. Jacques de Secondat, the father of the future author, was second son of the Baron de Montesquieu, president and chief-justice of the parliament of Guienne. Charles-Louis de la Brède, as Montesquieu was called, after studying the ancient classics, philosophy, and law, became councillor of the parliament of Bordeaux in 1714, and its president in 1716, succeeding his uncle, who left him all his property on condition of his assuming the name and title of Montesquieu. The young president discharged the duties of his office faithfully, but he gave himself by preference to the study of nature under the influence of Newton. In his discourses before the Academy of Sciences of Bordeaux he dealt with the causes of echoes and of the weight and transparency of bodies, and with the use of the renal glands, and sketched a project of a physical history of the earth (Discours Académiques, 1716-21). But defective vision compelled him to abandon experimental research. His first great literary success was the publication of his Lettres Persanes in 1721. These contain a satirical description of the contemporary manners, customs, and institutions of society in France, and owed much of their popularity to the ingenuity of their form and the piquancy of their style. Two Persians, Rica and Usbek, are represented as coming from Persia to Paris, and exchanging their impressions by letters to each other, as well as corresponding with their friends at home. The idea was borrowed from Dufresny, and it has been frequently imitated since. The libertine, the political decadence, and the irreligious insincerity of the first years of the regency that followed the death of Louis XIV. are limned with masterly art. For his delineations of Persian manners and institutions he drew from the accounts of Sir John Chardin and other travellers; but his vivid, and at times wantonly sensuous, imagination created most of his situations and characters. Along with much that is frivolous and ephemeral, the Persian Letters contain solid reflections on the nature and relations of social institutions, and an adumbration of the author's later views on government, toleration, and the influence of climate on population, customs, and religion. In 1725 Montesquieu wrote and published anonymously at Paris a prose poem entitled Le Temple de Gnide, in the artificial French style of the time. Returning to Bordeaux, he read to the Academy a treatise on duty from the Stoic standpoint, and delivered an admirable discourse on the motives which ought to give encouragement in the sciences (1725). Eager for larger observation and enjoyment of the life of society, and weary of the routine of his parliamentary duty, he sold his office in 1726, and then settled in Paris. Thereafter he travelled for three years in order to observe and study the political and social institutions of other countries. He visited Vienna, where he studied the constitutions of Hungary and Poland; Venice, where he formed a close friendship with Lord Chesterfield; and Rome, where he studied Italian art, and was favourably received by the pope. He then passed by Switzerland and the Rhine to Holland, where he again met Chesterfield, who took him to England. He remained in England from October 1729 to August 1731, mixing with its best society, frequenting the Houses of Parliament, studying the political writings of Locke, and analysing the organisation and working of the English constitution, whose essential principles he may be said to have discovered. After returning to France he divided his time between Paris and La Brède, mingling the pursuit of pleasure and an unostentatious charity with the preparation of his great works on the science of politics and law.
His Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur des Romains et de leur Décadence, the ablest, if not the most important, of his works, appeared in 1734. In it he surveys the vast political development of ancient Rome from the rude beginnings of the Eternal City till the Turks gathered around the walls of Constantinople, and his elucidation of the causes that determined the character and detail of the movement may be regarded as the first genuine application of the modern scientific spirit to history, and as an enduring contribution to its philosophy. His characterisations of the great Romans, his analysis of complex influences, his filiation of events, his estimates of political and social causation have been generally accepted and reproduced by subsequent historians. His great monumental work on the spirit of laws, De l'Esprit des Lois, appeared in 1748 in 2 vols. at Geneva. It was the product of all the work of his life, and of the deliberate and concentrated effort of twenty years. Although published anonymously and put on the Index, the work passed through twenty-two editions in less than two years; and it soon vindicated its claim to be the most original and popular book ever published on the science of law. Montesquieu indicated his consciousness of its originality by prefixing to it the epigraph: Prolem sine matre creatam. French Jurists of the 16th century, Cujas and others, had led the way to the historical treatment of Roman law, and Domat had written a chapter on 'the nature and spirit of laws,' but the universalisation of the historical and comparative method in dealing with the reason and relations of all laws is Montesquieu's own, and he applies it more lucidly, and also more widely than Vico did. By the spirit of laws he means their raison d'être in time, their historical causation, or the natural and social conditions by which their origination, development, and forms are determined. The discussion of the influence of climate was the most characteristic element of the work; it advances beyond the old abstract discussions of right, and, although pushed in some points too exclusively, it formed the prelude to all the more recent work of the positive and ethnological school. The analysis of the forms and principles of government carried the subject farther than had been done by any one since Aristotle; and the exposition of the constitutional government of England, with its clear distinction of the legislative and executive powers, made an advance upon Locke, and held up the free English constitution to the admiration and imitation of all Europe. The influence of Montesquieu's great work upon political and legal thought directly, and upon government and laws indirectly, was immense. It came too late to save France from the political errors that culminated in the Revolution, but it inspired and guided its best thinkers and its greatest men. In 1750 he published a clever Défense de l'Esprit des Lois, followed afterwards by Lysimaque (1748), a striking dialogue on despotism, Arsace et Isménie, a romance, and an essay on taste in the Encyclopédie. Severe study had exhausted his energy and still further weakened his eyes till he became totally blind. He died at Paris 10th February 1755, aged sixty-six, in the calm enjoyment of his great reputation.
The best edition of Montesquieu's works is that of E. Laboulaye (7 vols. Paris, 1875-79); that of Lahure (3 vols. 1856) is convenient and serviceable. There are English and other translations of the Lettres Persanes, and a commentary by Meyer (1841). The Spirit of Laws was soon translated into English by T. Nugent (new ed. by Prichard, with D'Alembert's Analysis, 2 vols. Bohn, 1878). Vian's Histoire de Montesquieu, sa Vie et ses Œuvres (2d ed. 1879) is the fullest biography and bibliography. The smaller monograph by A. Sorel (Eng. ed. by G. Masson, 1887) is excellent; that by Zevort (1887) may also be mentioned.