Charles-Louis Montesquieu - The Spirit of the Laws

CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

MONTESQUIEU

The Spirit of the Laws

CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

Series editors

RAYMOND GEUSS

Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

QUENTIN SKINNER

Professor of the Humanities, Queen Mary, University of London

Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought is now firmly established as the major student textbook series in political theory. It aims to make available to students all the most important texts in the history of western political thought, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century. All the familiar classic texts will be included, but the series seeks at the same time to enlarge the conventional canon by incorporating an extensive range of less well-known works, many of them never before available in a modern English edition. Wherever possible, texts are published in complete and unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. Each volume contains a critical introduction together with chronologies, biographical sketches, a guide to further reading and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. When completed, the series will aim to offer an outline of the entire evolution of western political thought.

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TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY

ANNE M. COHLER

BASIA CAROLYN MILLER

HAROLD SAMUEL STONE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press 1989

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First published 1989
17th printing 2013

Printed in the United States of America by Edwards Brothers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de. 16891755
The spirit of the laws.
(Cambridge texts in the history of political thought).
1. Government
I. Title. II. De lesprit de lois.
English
350

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 16891755.

[De lesprit des lois. English]

The spirit of the laws / Montesquieu: translated by

Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, Harold Stone.

p. cm.

(Cambridge texts in the history of political thought)

Translation of: De lesprit des lois.

Bibliography.

ISBN 0521361834. ISBN 0521369746 (pbk.)

1. Political science. 2. State, The. 3. Law Philosophy.

4. Jurisprudence. I. Cohler, Anne M. II. Miller, Basia C.

III. Stone, Harold, 1949 . IV. Title. V. Series.

JC179.M74 1989

320dcl9 8830006 CIP

ISBN 978-0-521-36974-9 Paperback

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Prolem sine matre creatum

OVID, Metamorphoses 2.553

In a letter written in 1748 when The Spirit of the Laws was first published Montesquieu wrote, I can say that I have worked on it my whole life: I was given some law books when I left my collge; I sought their spirit, I worked, but I did nothing worthwhile. I discovered my principles twenty years ago: they are quite simple; anyone else working as hard as I did would have done better. But I swear that this book nearly killed me; I am going to rest now; I shall work no more (Oeuvres de Montesquieu, ed. Andr Masson (3 vols., Paris, 19501954), vol. 3, p. 1200).

The publication of The Spirit of the Laws did mark the end of Montesquieus work. He was, like La Bruyre and Montaigne before him, a man who put all he knew into his one book. Although it was published as Diderot, dAlembert, and Rousseau were imagining the Enlightenment in the coffee houses and salons of Paris, and although the first volume of the Encyclopedia and Rousseaus Discourse on the Arts and Sciences appeared just three years later, these facts suggest the wrong context. Rather, The Spirit of the Laws belongs to the first half of the eighteenth century to a period of relative quiet when one could think of reform, muddling through, or marking time. Montesquieu, for example, wrote of Cromwell, It was a fine spectacle in the last century to see the impotent attempts of the English to establish democracy among themselves. As those who took part in public affairs had no virtue at all, as their ambition was excited by the success of the most audacious one and the spirit of one faction was repressed only by the spirit of another, the government was constantly changing; the people, stunned, sought democracy and found it nowhere. Finally, after much motion and many shocks and jolts, they had to come to rest on the very government that had been proscribed (3.3). Here Montesquieu lectured the English, as Burke was later to lecture the French, for forgetting the need to preserve the forms as they changed toward a popular government.

In retrospect we have identified three different ways of life in France before the revolution: that of the orders of the feudal monarchy, that of the absolute king and his servants, the bureaucrats, and their equal subjects, and that of those corners of society which supported the new thought and freedom. But in Montesquieus time the distinction was not so clear. An examination of Montesquieus life provides a view of the eighteenth century as it impinged upon Montesquieu; he was a feudal proprietor, wine merchant, parliamentarian, academician, man of letters. Although he took his place briefly in the Parliament of Bordeaux and toyed with the notion of serving the king in foreign relations, he principally worked to maintain his family and took part in the academies and other less formal gatherings of like-minded men and women. Here we shall first consider Montesquieus life as a noble landowner, then as an eighteenth-century man of letters, and finally as the author of The Spirit of the Laws. Then we shall proceed to the book itself and its reception.

Montesquieus family first appears among the provincial nobility of Bordeaux, when Jean de Secondat, whose wife was related to the Plantagenets, was ennobled in 1562. The title was raised to a barony in 1606 by Henry IV. Two generations later, Montesquieus grandfather, whose wife was the daughter of the First President of the parliament, became Prsident Mortier in the Parliament of Bordeaux. (The office of president was bought, sold, and inherited; there were, in the parliament, a number of Prsidents Mortier who served on various panels as judges and administrators and one First President.) This family offered its members the choice of either the parliamentary nobility of the robe or the military nobility of the sword; at the same time it saw to it that the family lands and goods all stayed within the family, that the children beyond those needed to continue the family joined religious orders, and that those who took up either robe or sword married well. This was a noble family, carefully built and maintained, depending on no single notion of honor or prosperity. Montesquieu was to write to his son, You are of the robe or the sword. It is up to you to choose when you have to answer as to your estate (