HISTORICAL ESSAYS

MONTESQUIEU

[BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1845]

MONTESQUIEU may be fairly called the founder of the philosophy of history. In many of its most important branches he has carried it to a degree of perfection which has never since been surpassed. He first looked on human affairs with the eye of general observation; he first sought to discover the lasting causes which influence the fate of mankind; he first traced the general laws which, in every age, determine the rise or decline of nations. Some of his conclusions were hasty, many of his analogies fanciful; but he first turned the human mind to the general causes of events. It is by repeatedly deviating into error that it can alone be discovered where truth really lies: there is an alchemy in the moral, not less than the material world, in which a vast amount of genius must be lost before the discovery is made that it has taken the wrong direction. But in Montesquieu, despite such occasional and unavoidable aberrations, there is an invaluable treasure of profound views and original thought-of luminous observation and deep reflection of philosophic observation and just generalisation. His fame has been long established-it has become European; his sayings are quoted and repeated from one end of the world to the other; but to the greater part of English readers, his greatness is known rather from the distant echo of Continental fame, than from any practical acquaintance with the writings on which it is founded.

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Though Montesquieu, however, is the father of the philosophy of history, it is due to Tacitus and Machiavel to say, that he is not the originator of political thought. In the first of these writers is to be found the most profound observations on the working of the human mind, whether in individuals or bodies of men, that ever were formed by human sagacity in the latter, a series of remarks on Roman history, and the corresponding events in the republics of modern Italy, which, in point of deep political wisdom and penetration, have never been surpassed. Lord Bacon, too, had in his Essays put forth many political maxims with that profound sagacity and unerring wisdom by which his thoughts were so pre-eminently distinguished. But still these men, great as they were, and much as they added to the materials of the philosophy of history, can hardly be said to have mastered that philosophy itself. It was not their object to do so: it did not belong to the age in which they lived to make any such attempt. They gave incomparable observations upon detached points in human annals, or the working of inherent selfishness under particular circumstances; but they did not take a general view of the tendency of national fortunes, as determined by original character or political institutions. They did not consider whence the world had come, or whither it was going. They formed no connected system in regard to the march of human events. They saw clearly the effects of particular measures, or systems of government, at the time; but they did not reflect on the chain of causes, which first raised up, and afterwards undermined it. Aristotle, the most powerful intellect of the ancient world, was of the same calibre as a political observer. He considered only the effects of the various forms of government which he saw established around him. In that survey he was admirable, but he never went beyond it. Bossuet's universal history is little more than a history of the Jews;-he refers everything to the direct and immediate agency of Providence, irrespective of the freedom of the human will. Montesquieu first fixed his eyes upon the rise, progress, and decay of nations, as worked out by the actions of free agents. The Grandeur et Décadence des Romains is as original as the Principia, and laid the foundation of a science as sublime, and perhaps still

more important to man, than the laws of the planetary bodies.

Charles, second Baron de la Brede and Montesquieu, was born at the chateau of La Brede, near Bordeaux, on the 18th January 1689. The estate of La Brede had been long in his family, which was a very ancient one: it had been erected into a barony in favour of Jacob de Lecondat, his great-great-grandfather, by Henry IV. The office of President of the Parliament (or Local Court of Justice) of Bordeaux had been acquired by his family in consequence of the marriage of his father with the daughter of the first president of that tribunal. From his earliest years, young Montesquieu evinced remarkable readiness and vivacity of mind, a circumstance which determined his father to train him to the "magistracy," as it was termed in Francea profession midway, as it were, between the career of arms peculiar to the noble, and the labours of the bar confined to persons of plebeian origin, and from which many of the greatest men, and nearly all the distinguished statesmen of France, took their rise. Montesquieu entered with the characteristic ardour of his disposition into the studies suited to that destination; and at the age of twenty he had already collected the materials of the Esprit des Loix, and evinced the characteristic turn of his mind for generalisation, by an immense digest which he had made of the civil law. But these dry, though important studies did not exclusively occupy his mind; he carried on, at the same time, a great variety of other pursuits. Like all men of an active and intellectual turn of mind, his recreation was found not in repose, but in change of occupation. Books of voyages and travels were collected, and read with avidity; he devoured rather than read the classical remains of Greece and Rome. "That antiquity," said he, " enchants me; and I am always ready to say with Pliny, you are going to Athens: show respect to the gods.'

It was under this feeling of devout gratitude to the master minds of the ancient world, that he made his first essay in letters, which came out in a small work in the form of letters, the object of which was to show that the idolatry of most Pagans did of itself not merit eternal damnation. Probably there are few good Christians, from

Fenelon and Tillotson downwards, who will be of an opposite opinion. Even in that juvenile production are to be found traces of the sound judgment, correct taste, and general thought which characterised his later works. But he was soon thrown into the proper labours of his profession. On the 24th February 1714, he was admitted into the Parliament of Bordeaux as a councillor; and his paternal uncle, who held the president's chair, having died two years after, young Montesquieu was, on the 13th July 1716, appointed to that important office, though only twenty-seven years of age. Probably his being thrown, thus early in life, into the discharge of onerous and important duties, had an important effect in producing that firmness and maturity of judgment by which his mind was ever after distinguished. Some years afterwards, he gave a convincing proof of his fitness for the situation, in the vigour with which he remonstrated against the imposition of a fresh tax on wine, which had the effect of procuring its removal at the time, though the necessities of Government led to its being reimposed some years after. But his ardent mind was not confined to professional pursuits. He concurred in the formation of an academy of sciences at Bordeaux, and read some papers in it on natural history; and his attention being in this way turned to physical science, he wrote and published in the journals, a project for a Physical History of the Earth, Ancient and Modern.

But in no human being was more completely exemplified the famous line

"The proper study of mankind is man." Montesquieu's genius was essentially moral and political; it was on man himself, not the material world with which he was surrounded, that his thoughts were fixed. This strong bias soon appeared in his writings. He next read at the academy at Bordeaux, a "Life of the Duke of Berwick," and an " Essay on the Policy of the Romans in Religion," which was the basis of the immortal work which he afterwards composed, on the rise and fall of that extraordinary people. These desultory essays gave no indication of the genius displayed in the first considerable composition which he gave to the world, which was the famous Lettres Persannes. They appeared in 1721, when he was thirty-two

years of age. Their success was immediate and prodigious; a certain indication, in matters of thought, that they were not destined to durable fame. They fell in with the ideas and passions of the time; they were not before it; thence their early popularity, and ultimate decline in reputation. The work was published anonymously; for the keen, but delicate, satire of French manners and vices which it contained might have endangered the author, and, as it was, he had no small difficulty, when it was known he was the writer, in escaping from its effects. It consists in a series of letters from an imaginary character, Usbeck, a Persian traveller, detailing the vices, manners, and customs of the French metropolis. The ingenuity, sarcasm, and truth which that once celebrated production contains, must not make us shut our eyes to its glaring defects. The vices of the age, as they mainly contributed to its early popularity, so have been the chief cause of its subsequent decline. It contains many passages improperly warm and voluptuous, and some which, under the mask of attacks on the Jesuits, had the appearance, at least, of being levelled at religion itself. No work, at that period, could attract attention in France, which was not disfigured by these blemishes. Even the great mind of Montesquieu, in its first essay before the public, did not escape the contagion of the age.

But, ere long, the genius of this profound thinker was devoted to more congenial and worthy objects. In 1726, he sold his office of president of the parliament of Bordeaux, partly in order to escape from the toils of legal pursuit and judicial business, which, in that mercantile and rising community, were attended with great labour, partly in order to be enabled to travel, and study the institutions and character of different nations. This was a pursuit of which he was passionately fond, and which, without doubt, had a powerful effect in giving him that vast command of detached facts in political science, and that liberal view of institutions, habits, and manners, differing in some degree from his own, by which his philosophical writings are so eminently distinguished. Here, as in the biography of almost all other really great men, it is found that some circumstances, apparently trivial or accidental, have given a permanent bent to their mind; have stored it with the appropriate knowledge,