# Montesquieu. Let There Be Enlightenment A book on [[Montesquieu (1689–1755)|Montesquieu]]. Als e-Book in meiner Kindle Library. Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine: *Montesquieu. Let There Be Enlightenment.* Übers. v. Philip Stewart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022. ## Takeaways Die Arbeit an den *Persischen Briefen* war für [[Montesquieu (1689–1755)|Montesquieu]] zunächst ein Muße-Projekt, das ihm schließlich – trotz anonymer [[publishing|Veröffentlichung]] – den Durchbruch bescherte, und den Zugang zu den Kreisen der *philosophes*. Es war ihm durch die besondere Form seines Werks (als Briefroman) auch gelungen, die Aufmerksamkeit der Leute zu bekommen, eine wichtige Fähigkeit, wenn man was zu sagen hat. Exotismus spielte dabei eine Rolle. %% >All he ever confided about the genesis of [[Persian Letters (1721)|Persian Letters]] is that for him they first represented a distraction, a [[recreation]]; that sense of delight permeates the whole book. In France, and soon thereafter in Europe, there was one great outburst of laughter: Montesquieu had won, especially since the person who at first laughed ended up reflecting. Even if he had a Cartesian soul and praised a brand-new rationality that confers on Europe an incontestable superiority over an Orient bogged down in its superstitions (which makes it possible also to denounce the equally numerous superstitions of the Occident), he knew as well that one has to learn how to get people’s attention. added: [[2024-01-17]] location: lookup edition: %% %% ## Highlight ### Introduction #### He lived in a castle In the beginning was La Brède : the barony, the château, the property. There, Montesquieu was born in 1689; he would become its master, but more importantly he would remain faithfully attached to it throughout his life. He would absent himself sometimes for years at a time, but would always return – even if it was in Paris that he was to die in 1755. From this strange edifice, still almost intact, the notion of a “feudal” Montesquieu springs immediately to mind: protected by moats and walls that issued from a medieval past, sustained by centuries of noble ancestry that illustrate his arms as a mere baron, ever attentive to maintaining his seigniorial rights on his lands (...) Note: Montesquieu was a nobleman who lived in a castle. Erinnert an das Feudalsystem des Mittelalters. [Location 382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=382) #### He was an aristocrat Did he not benefit, as eldest son, from the outsize, traditional privilege of receiving the entire family inheritance when his sisters and brother were placed in religious functions – in other words, sacrificed for his benefit? Did he not inherit his uncle’s practice as président à mortier in the Guyenne parlement, which offered him one of the highest ranks in Bordeaux and a title he would bear his entire life? All of this, from the tower of the Château de La Brède to his red président’s robe bordered in ermine, dignified by his function as director of the Académie Royale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres, et Arts of Bordeaux, makes of him an aristocrat – a judge, as his parlementary position would have it – and perhaps an interested party when he envisions the totality of human institutions in The Spirit of Law to discover their constants, their foundations, and their aberrations. [Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=389) #### Pleasure in obedience “If I could contrive things so that those who command would increase their knowledge about what they must prescribe, and those who obey would take new pleasure in their [[obedience|obedience]], I should think myself the happiest of mortals,” says the preface of The Spirit of Law in 1748. He who advanced bedecked with privileges, subjecting governments to an analysis which reveals the constant risk of despotism even in the oldest and apparently most solid monarchies, concluded from this that privileges were a rampart against that threat. [Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=399) Note: Privilegien seien also etwas Gutes. #### Nobility as pillar of monarchy Scarcely forty years after its publication, the French monarchy was about to collapse, along with what constituted it in Montesquieu’s eyes: the “intermediary bodies” which, as he saw it, assured the exercise of power from the king down to the least of his subjects, and at the same time limited it with all the muscle of their privileges, were now obliterated, and soon the monarchy itself would disappear. Then the time will have come for [[Rousseau (1712–1778)|Rousseau]] and the social contract, and the name of Montesquieu would only evoke a bygone era when people believed in kings and moderation, when it was possible to attribute to the nobility, as he had done, a sense of honor that made of it the pillar of the monarchy. Such a change was to require only slightly more than a single generation, or rather a few years of the French Revolution, many of the protagonists of which had nevertheless learned political analysis from The Spirit of Law. Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine. Montesquieu: Let There Be Enlightenment (p. 2). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. | [Location 403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=403) #### Think differently / Gravedigger of liberty For Montesquieu is first of all the person who enabled his contemporaries to think differently: Rica and Usbek in Persian Letters, respecting no taboo, see the pope as “an old idol who is worshipped out of habit” or observe that “the king of France is old” – another way of saying that he is naked under the ermine that billows down over the royal shoes in the Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV; in [[Considerations on the Romans (1734)|Considerations on the Romans]], all the heroes of the Roman republic disappear, pausing on the triumphant emperor [[Augustus (63–14)|Augustus]] only to see him designated as the gravedigger of liberty. That alone signals a strange relationship with absolute power in a subject who was born under [[Louis XIV (1643–1715)|Louis XIV]]. Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine. Montesquieu: Let There Be Enlightenment (p. 2). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. | [Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=410) #### Know them before you rule them As for The Spirit of Law, it reviews governments in all their forms, but it does not propose, as the tradition of political thought would have it, the “best” one which in its perfection will win over the world, and concludes that while the worst government exists (i.e., despotism), there is no better government for each nation than whichever one suits its particular disposition, for one must first know and respect men in order to govern them. Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine. Montesquieu: Let There Be Enlightenment (pp. 2-3). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. | [Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=420) Note: [[know before you rule]] [Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=423) This is the reason for which modern democracies remember him: not as an archeological vestige, as a great ancestor respectfully acknowledged; not only because of a principle of “separation of powers” which he never defined as such, and which is often abusively simplified; but because Montesquieu still and forever offers means of thinking about the world. Far from doing so by dint of abstractions, he considers a field of forces in which human action is infinitely delicate, a world in which everything is interconnected: social forms, political regimes, customs, and even “manners,” where the history of nations models minds;… [Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=429) Without Montesquieu, modern nations that believe in the primacy of liberty – “that good that makes it possible to enjoy other goods,”3 as he himself puts it – where the happiness of peoples is the supreme value, could not have formulated such thoughts, and above all would not have been able to avail themselves of means of realizing them – for they sometimes do. What this aristocrat still has to say to us, he who in 1721 ushered in the Enlightenment with Persian Letters , is that correcting an abuse is not enough to make a law, for… [Location 437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=437) Understand before you attempt reform: the rule seems obvious, but who applies it? In China “[i]t is quite indifferent in itself whether a daughter-in-law rises every morning to go render such-and-such duties to her mother-in-law”5; but if one day a daughter-in-law does not rise, the Chinese empire itself will be shaken, for family authority is its principle, from the emperor himself to the last peasant. The innumerable rites that testify to respect for the ancients, dead or alive, are its keystone; if someone begins to neglect them as so many formal and ultimately needless ceremonies, that is… [Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=455) What curiosities or uneasiness was it that coaxed this jurist away from the well-delineated path of a life divided between the pleasures of Parisian life and sometimes agreeable days as a member of the parlement in Bordeaux? Instead, he spent years devouring an almost immeasurable documentation which took him from Siberia to the depths of the Middle Ages. [Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=469) Would it suffice, to justify the exercise, to lard the successive chapters of a biography punctuated by a few critical dates with summaries of his writings? That would be forgetting that the writings plow their furrow through the life, and that the very labor of the philosopher is to transform event into experience, in other words into food for thought; and above all that philosophy for Montesquieu is practiced in the world, in contact with his contemporaries, or rather with his friends, his enemies, or simple relations, in the course of encounters and occasions that arose: repairs made to a road between La Brède and Martillac reveal the principles of his intellectual process as well as those of a lord dispensing high and low justice: these are the same, for the thought is one, as was his life. Montesquieu lived in harmony with himself, but without necessarily theorizing or claiming what for him was straightforward, and not the outcome of some combat. [Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=500) We do not know everything that Montesquieu did or said, but maybe we know a little better what he could not do, or say, or write, especially if we avoid the temptation, which is also the easy solution, of projecting today’s manners of living and thinking onto someone who lived more than two centuries ago: if Montesquieu was modern, that is not because he is like us, but because he did not wish to be like those who preceded him. False [Location 552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=552) It was customary in noble families to name children after a property, their baptismal name being used hardly at all. And inasmuch as, being the firstborn son, he was destined to become Baron de la Brède, this one was obvious.2 It is under this name that he was to be known in school and in Paris until such time as he inherited from his uncle the name and title of Baron de Montesquieu, in 1716. Only then, at age twenty-seven, did he become “Monsieur de Montesquieu”; but he had long known that he was to bear that name. False [Location 618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=618) M. de La Brède. She was of reasonable height, infinitely kind, with a charming countenance; she had the mind of a clever man for serious matters, no taste for trifles, an inexpressible affection for her children; continual attention to all things for which she was responsible; a firm piety that applied to everything; and above all such a dominant passion for the poor that she would willingly have become like them, giving them everything, had consideration for her station not prevented her doing so. She knew religion to perfection: her customary reading was the New Testament. I found a whip and an iron belt of which she had made good use14 though I was unaware of it. What is an iron belt? [Location 629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=629) A death in childbirth, a marriage of ten years: such was the common experience of many couples in the eighteenth century. [Location 663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=663) the young Charles or rather Charles Louis owed his Christian name to a beggar who held him over the baptismal fonts the very day he was born “so that his godfather should remind him his whole life long that the poor are his brothers”22 – like Montaigne. Too coincidental? ... But what makes all this especially plausible is that the Christian name Charles does not appear among the earlier generations of the two families, although the custom was to give the baptismal name of some ancestor or relative whom they wished to honor. Moreover, what we now know of his mother and her “passion for the poor” (for it is she who is supposed to have insisted on calling on the beggar, who had come that day to the door of the château, to serve as godfather)25 also makes the anecdote entirely believable; it explains in any case why the child did not bear the names of his uncle, head of the family, whose heir he was to be. False [Location 713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=713) As it happens, it is an anachronism mainly that prevails: when so many children lost their mothers at birth (Rousseau comes to mind) or lived without any relationship with them (the case of D’Alembert ), it cannot be said of a child who loses his at seven that he is “without a mother.” Has the term been applied to Voltaire, whose situation was the same? [Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=784) The InstitutionBut first, the setting. About twenty kilometers from Meaux, forty from Paris, and more than six hundred from Bordeaux, near the village and the abbey whose name it bears, the Oratorian college in Juilly isolated the young boarders living there at the outer limits of Île de France. Nice beginning. Great writing so far. I learn to love biographies. [Location 799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=799) The pupils, divided into small groups (they numbered scarcely more than seventy in 1700, all ages combined, and around a hundred in the years following),41 studied under a master who remained with them from one level to the next. The days were long, from five o’clock in the morning to eight in the evening. Certain courses that require particular instruments (mathematics, natural sciences, history, and geography) took place in the “chambers,” rooms specially equipped for such purposes.42 Among the privileged subjects was history. There were no corporal punishments,43 as there were in Jesuit institutions, nor public remonstrances: this has been called “liberal pedagogy.” The pupils translated (into Latin and French), but mostly they commented and expanded on passages; they wrote imitations of the great writers: Cicero , Livy , and Horace . So it was a vast, deep, and continuous curriculum, attentive to the individual pupil, as such small numbers allowed. If we add that it was favorable to Descartes ’s physics, then forbidden, as opposed to Aristotle ’s, and that it was not limited to literary subject matter, as the work in the “chambers” shows, we conclude that Juilly appears as a sort of ideal institution, at least in theory. [Location 835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=835) Juilly thus made it possible for future parlementary counselors, lawyers, or présidents to know each other while mixing with other young men, much more numerous, of different social origins; besides the guarantee of a quality education, it offered to the Bordelais the means of getting outside their native milieu to discover new horizons, which would not have been the case had they remained in Aquitaine. Paradoxically, being shuttered up in Juilly was an opening onto the world. False [Location 909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=909) Every way has been attempted of comparing this document to Montesquieu’s future writings, but it is an impossible task. The notebook ends with the rise of Augustus , anticipating a grand future for the greater glory of the Roman people, as all Roman histories without exception repeat. But the element that triggered the Considerations on the Romans 59 was precisely the re-evaluation of this topos: for Montesquieu, the decline begins with Caesar and becomes definitive with the decisive turn imposed by Augustus. To consider “Historia romana ” as the seed of his historical reflections is to believe Einstein discovered the formula of relativity thanks to a book of ABCs. The Historia romana was a schoolboys work full of errors, no more. [Location 947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=947) Among positive points, the first is perhaps that Labrède was able to form lasting friendships with the likes of Jean-Jacques Bel , who entered the college three years after him; Bel was to become a counselor in the Bordeaux parlement , then Treasurer of France, but above all was to be in contact with many figures in the “Republic of Letters.” Montesquieu would later ask his opinion of the Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates (1724) and the Histoire véritable (“True Story ,” 1738), exchanging with him copious reflections on taste and the human mind. In Juilly [Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=965) ### The curiosity for new knowledge [[France|French]] universities then offered curricula only for law, medicine, and theology – all subjects dependent on specialized knowledge; history, literature, the sciences, and philosophy were accessible to those who took the trouble to read a great deal, to work by themselves, and in conjunction with a master for mathematics or physics, who practiced repeating the exercises contained in the books and discussed them with others. The ability to pursue and to self-educate in this way, but also the [[curiosity|curiosity]] for new knowledge, are things Juilly had given Montesquieu, as the best colleges ought to do, though we cannot here recognize a method specific to Oratorian pedagogy. Note: The best things a school can give is the ability to self-educate and the curiosity for new knowledge. [Location 1031](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1031) Thinking Like a PhilosopherIn short, did Juilly , did this mecca of Cartesian and Malebranchian philosophy, not fully play its role? There are times when Montesquieu evokes, as he writes, the way in which he “argued one day over the Cartesian principle that God can change the essences of things”70: for him this is a living philosophy, including its purely metaphysical part.71 Soon, Persian Letters would celebrate the role of those who “follow in silence the traces of human reason,” avoiding all recourse to religion, and articulate the rules of Cartesian physics.72 For as long as he lived, Montesquieu would consider Descartes the philosopher par excellence, even though he was from another time, and the eighteenth century was the century of Newton. [Location 1042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1042) For him it was Descartes who taught men to think for themselves; evidence of this is the Discourse on the motives that should encourage us toward the sciences, read before the Academy of Bordeaux in 1725: Had a Descartes come to Mexico or Peru a hundred years before Cortés and Pizarro , and taught those peoples that men, made as they are, cannot be immortal, that the springs of their machine73 wear out like those of all machines, and that the effects of nature are but a consequence of the laws and the transmissions of motions, Cortés would never have destroyed the Mexican empire with a handful of men, nor Pizarro the Peruvian one. Who would have said that that destruction, the greatest that history has ever recorded, had been merely a simple effect of the ignorance of a philosophical principle? Yet such is the case, as I am about to prove.74 [Location 1053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1053) Montesquieu enumerates the reasons why the Spanish and the Portuguese could and even should have been driven out of America if the Peruvians and the Mexicans had reasoned correctly, and if they had believed they could win. Here is how he summarizes his thought: “Descartes is like the man who would cut the fetters of those who are bound: he would run with them; he would stop along the way, and perhaps not make it all the way. But who would have given the… [Location 1061](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1061) Thus, the importance of the “machine” in the sensorial domain, in affective and even intellectual life, as it is expressed by the Oratorian in the lineage of Descartes, is constantly encountered in Montesquieu. But a gulf forms between them, for Malebranche rejects any outside influence as harmful in order to privilege the pure intellect76; besides the fact that Montesquieu does not proceed as a normative moralist, he considers, like many of his time, following Locke , that the mind, “that perpetual worker,”77 tests and constructs itself on the basis of external data – which causes him to deny the notion of “vision in God.” According to Malebranche,… #### Interest for Descartes Montesquieu’s library included not only works by [[René Descartes|Descartes]] himself (just four), but, more importantly, close to twenty works for or against Cartesian philosophy [...]; one could even speak of a veritable Cartesian nebula in that library. Montesquieu might have inherited all those works; but considering his own interest for Descartes, this can be doubted. – [Location 1317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1317) [Location 1356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1356) Only after completing this journey would he become “Monsieur de Montesquieu,” and especially upon inheriting his father’s estate in 1713, then his uncle’s in 1716. But it was in this interval that the Oratorians’ good pupil discovered law, and even more, another world, another life: while the reign of Louis XIV went on and on, imposing his weighty authority, Paris was already bubbling, rich with promise. [Location 1382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1382) That was in any case the first consequence of his university studies: between 1705 and 1708, under his father’s tutelage, his reaction to the reading of Roman law – which is the meaning of the word “code” – spawned, in La Brède or in Bordeaux, the first work of the Enlightenment. [Location 1401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1401) It is later that Montesquieu was to become interested in slavery, to the point of devoting Book XV of The Spirit of Law to it. False [Location 1521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1521) The End of a ReignBut he did not waste his time, for he had discovered Paris during the last years of the reign of Louis XIV , in a France suffocated by bigotry and strict obeisance and exhausted by too many wars. Persian Letters will say in 1721 what everyone in Paris, France, and Europe was already saying: “The king of France is old.”29 Never had such a long reign been seen, nor one so ponderous; the only thing left of the “great” Louis was the epithet.30 That is what Labrède learned during those years, and what he would remember. [Location 1555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1555) A GroundswellAt just twenty years of age, Labrède, who was destined to become a member of the Bordeaux Parlement , was absorbing this resentment. But he was also frequenting intellectual milieux that were beginning to stir without awaiting the old king’s disappearance, so greatly had been felt – for over a century – the slow rise of the critical spirit and the skepticism bequeathed by the Renaissance. Despite the Church’s attempts to seize back the principles of rationality, it was a different rationalism that was winning out, the one brought by Spinoza and soon after him Bayle , the rationalism that re-examines the foundations of any religion. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries only prolonged a groundswell that should not be limited to what Paul Hazard, in the 1930s, described as the “crisis of European consciousness,” assigning it to the period from 1680 to 1715.34 False [Location 1382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1382) That was in any case the first consequence of his university studies: between 1705 and 1708, under his father’s tutelage, his reaction to the reading of Roman law – which is the meaning of the word “code” – spawned, in La Brède or in Bordeaux, the first work of the Enlightenment.5 [Location 1645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1645) The sciences are all interconnected; the most abstract of them border on those that are the least abstract, and the whole body of the sciences is allied with literature. For the sciences greatly benefit from being treated in an ingenious and delicate manner; that is how one can counter their aridity, avoid being tiresome, and put them within reach of every mind.49 [Location 1898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1898) The Académie des Inscriptions, one of the royal academies created by Louis XIV, was founded in 1663 with the purpose, as defined in 1701, as the advancement and propagation of knowledge of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. So they already defined their time as some new era? False [Location 1682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1682) the latter belonged to an order which was traditionally opposed to the Jesuits and showed all its sympathy to the persecuted movement, which he manifests in his correspondence, while showing himself favorable to toleration (a new idea). [Location 1690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1690) erudition was considered the modest servant of history, or rather of the historical narrative, which occupied the summit of the literary hierarchy. Soon Montesquieu was to show that this division, to which the philosophes would nonetheless subscribe, made no sense. [Location 1699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1699) a person of the greatest interest: Arcadio Wang, or rather Arcade Hoangh as it was written at the time, the first Chinaman ever to live in France. Born around 1679 into a Christianized family, he was entrusted at the age of seven to a French missionary, Artus de Lionne , bishop of Rosalie; he had then gone with him to France, and after a detour through Rome settled in Paris in 1706. [Location 1704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1704) It was by working with him that Fréret discovered that Chinese characters, which number in the thousands, can be reduced to 214 “keys.” [Location 1754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1754) But let us turn the mirror around: what made all of Europe believe that China was the most prosperous of empires, and that Christianity was gaining ground there? This is the start of a movement that would never fail in Montesquieu: defiance of the order of Jesuits, which he thought too powerful, too well organized, and too clever; and mistrust with respect to that idealized China, that Chinese mirage which was also a Jesuit mirage: The Spirit of Law would be marked by it. By encountering the sole eyewitness to be found in France, Labrède gave himself the means of doubting it. And that was a big step forward. What does this mean? False [Location 1996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1996) In what did his profession consist? During audiences he was to listen to the lawyers’ arguments and participate in the vote that followed, but he could also be asked to study the exhibits of the suit and furnish a written report, or to study petitions to decide whether they were receivable and whether all the facts were perfectly clear. [Location 2002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=2002) In The Spirit of Law, as in My Thoughts , the court reporter was to evolve into a severe critic of torture, deemed necessary in French law for obtaining a confession.4 [Location 2029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=2029) A marriage contract was signed on 12 February 1715 with Marguerite Denis , the younger daughter of Daniel Denis , a merchant in Les Chartrons, which was to bring him a dowry of 75,000 livres. Coup de théâtre: he broke the contract exactly a fortnight later to sign another on 22 March with Jeanne de Lartigue , whom he married on 30 April in the church of St. Michel. The bride brought with her 100,000 livres in dowry, beside the fact she was an only daughter; it also happened that the Lartigue properties in Martillac (in addition to the considerable land they possessed in Clairac in the Agenais) were adjacent to those of La Brède. ... The Baron de La Brède was willing to conform to the family tradition, but to have his choices dictated by his uncles was another matter. In three weeks he found a match in keeping with his father’s declared preferences and financially much more advantageous, and he negotiated it himself. The dramatic turn was not capricious but a strong move. [Location 2074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=2074) It all begins with her limp, which, according to Vian (Vian again!), is known thanks to Montesquieu himself: “I know a woman who walks well enough, but who limps the minute you look at her,” we read in Persian Letters . But how would a président à mortier, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, dare to talk that way about his wife, he who never says a word about her in his letters except in literary games which must certainly not be taken literally? Never mind: the annotators of Persian Letters go and find Madame de Montesquieu, arguing from a “tradition” for which we have been unable to uncover the slightest basis, and which they constitute in the process of repeating it; biographers, looking at such a picturesque “tradition,” one so well attested by editors, cannot do less than repeat it in turn, thus authorizing later editors of Persian Letters to argue based on them.20 And that is how books get written. Instead, let us acknowledge that we know nothing about her appearance, and that it hardly matters; as for having mistresses, there is little that is surprising about that at a time when marriages were indissoluble and when the spheres of family duties and of pleasures were clearly distinct. [Location 2106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=2106) As for his person, he paid little attention to his appearance, with “his blue costume, red jacket, black breeches, gray stockings and cuffs of hemp fabric”24; as we shall see, his mind was elsewhere, and his luxury too: in the constant presence of a secretary at his side, in his life in Paris, in books and travels, in his generosity toward the Bordeaux Academy : all things that take him away from the family circle, and for which he would spend without counting. The pleasures of Montesquieu were elsewhere, a fact that seems established from the earliest times of his marriage. [Location 2113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=2113) Since the death of Louis XIV on 1 September 1715, the Regent , who, the better to seize the principle levers of power, hastened to restore the prerogatives of the Parlement, was bringing a breath of fresh air. Was everything permitted? No, but everything was possible; for now, France was feeling young. [Location 2137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=2137) The brilliant young baron was soon picked out and recruited in April 1716. After an inaugural oration imbued with rhetoric, the principal merit of which might be its brevity,29 things got seriously under way in July–August with a highly revealing Dissertation on Roman Politics in Religion . Montesquieu’s point of departure is a demonic writer, Machiavelli , according to whom Rome’s early kings had used religion in the service of their own purposes. His thesis was more radical still: “It was neither fear nor piety that established religion among the Romans, but rather the necessity of having one in all societies”: a social function therefore, and not an aspiration to transcendency. Yet Montesquieu did not justify atheism, which he abhorred his whole life long; attuned rather to the forces and counter-forces that order societies, he did not examine religion in itself, but as an instrument of policy: “this people, which is so easily moved to anger, needs to be checked by an invisible power.”30 That was to be his constant preoccupation, along with toleration, in which he saw another of the Romans’ weapons. [Location 2175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=2175) I have often bracketed a religion which I revere, and since it is impossible to be a philosopher and a theologian at the same time, because that which is according to the order of nature has no relationship with that which is according to the order of grace, I have often put myself in the place of a pagan whose works I was reading, determined to return at once to my duty and to leave these feelings at the door of my study when I go out. 37 That is what he calls “the freedom of philosophy,” the freedom that free inquiry gives when it is based on Descartes , Malebranche , and Bayle ; and it by no means spares so “revered” a religion. Ought we for that reason to posit a “double” Montesquieu whose public work is respectful of conventions while a “freer” part of him remains hidden? That would be misjudging the way he proceeds: the free space in this “study” opens to him the field of experimental thought, to which he can return and contradict himself, launch hypotheses, turn an idea over to see all its facets. Freedom consists not in being allowed to attack religion, but in being allowed to examine it, for “it is impossible to be a philosopher and a theologian at the same time”: in The Spirit of Law and in his Defense of The Spirit of Law , in his replies to the Sorbonne, and to his last days, on this he would never vary. ### [Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=457) #### Montesquieu had a boring life Yet it is a life devoid of mystery – except for those determined to know the names and number of his mistresses – and in particular devoid of the shocks that made the life of Rousseau the subject matter of much of his work. Voltaire made his inseparable from his writings, turning his time in England into the Philosophical Letters making his refuge in Ferney into the very symbol of oppressed liberty and triumphant philosophy. To the name of Diderot is attached the thought of the happy slavery in which he spent twenty-five years directing the Encyclopédie. Nothing in Montesquieu’s life seems ever to have leached into his writings, even if some have taken great pains to see the experience of the young man from Bordeaux in the discovery of Paris by Rica and Usbek. ### [Location 1382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1382) #### First work of the Enlightenment That was in any case the first consequence of his university studies: between 1705 and 1708, under his father’s tutelage, his reaction to the reading of Roman law – which is the meaning of the word “code” – spawned, in La Brède or in Bordeaux, the first work of the Enlightenment. Note: She is referring to Persian Letters. But she must mean »first work of the Enlightenment *for Labrede*«, right? ### [Location 1401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BMVZ1G1S&location=1401) #### Interest in slavery It is later that [[Montesquieu (1689–1755)|Montesquieu]] was to become [[interest|interested]] in [[slavery|slavery]], to the point of devoting Book XV of [[The Spirit of the Laws (1748)|The Spirit of Law]] to it. ## Check location In what did his profession consist? During audiences he was to listen to the lawyers’ arguments and participate in the vote that followed, but he could also be asked to study the exhibits of the suit and furnish a written report, or to study petitions to decide whether they were receivable and whether all the facts were perfectly clear. [[2024-01-02]]. Note: So Montesquieu was basically a judge, decision-making one of his most important skills. // Nicht relevant für meine Projekte aktuell. #### Chaotic creation These last two books (XXX and XXXI) were not completed until August 1748, whereas the printing had begun nearly a year earlier. added: [[2024-01-20]] note: [[The Spirit of the Laws (1748)]] ist also, trotz 20-jähriger Entstehungszeit, zum Ende hin noch so chaotisch entstanden. So this is a great example for chaotic creations. Where can I use this? Not on freedom, not on ideas...