The Life and Work of Montesquieu, The French Lawyer

When one is asked to name a famous person who changed America, they will usually state the obvious: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln; some would even go back to the very founding of the country and say Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. These are the people who were inspired to create America based on the principles of a just government that treated its citizens fairly, but they did not create these ideas all by themselves. They themselves were influenced by a number of different people. Perhaps one of the most popular of these people was named Montesquieu.

Montesquieu was born on January 18, 1689 in a castle called the Château de la Bréde in France. His birth name was Charles-Louis de Secondat. He would be many things throughout his life, an advocate, a philosopher of politics, and an author. His parents were both from a noble family. His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier and his mother, Marie Françoise de Pensel, was a heiress. She died when he was only seven years old and Montesquieu was sent to the Catholic College of Juilly by his father after her death. The school was specifically made for French nobility and he stayed there for 5 years from 1700 to 1705. He then moved to Bordeaux in 1705 to study and practice law at the city’s university. By the time he finished his education, he was twenty-two years old. When his father died two years later in 1713, he was left under the care of his uncle, Baron de Montesquieu and became his ward and eventually the counselor to the Parliament of Bordeaux. His early childhood was filled with many significant events that would later affect his works. Some examples of these were when England joined with Scotland to join and became The Kingdom Of Great Britain, when Louis XV ascended to the throne, and the French Revolution. These events sparked his lifelong interest in politics and societal laws.

He married Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, in 1715 and they had one daughter and two sons together. During this time he was also elected into the Academy of Bordeaux. When his uncle died in 1716, he left Montesquieu with a large amount of money, the title of Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, and an important place in the French government, the Président à Mortier of the Bordeaux Parliament. He would eventually abandon his pursuit of a career in law and move to Paris to become a writer and a studier instead. He studied geology, biology, physics, and Roman politics. He published many popular books critiquing French society at the time and earned much praise from Britain and the rest of Europe. He often used the word "despotism" in his works and was known for playing a big role in introducing the word to politics.

He successfully published his first book, The Persian Letters in 1721. Although it was published anonymously, people soon found out the real author and Montesquieu became a very popular figure. The book was a satirical fiction about two Persian merchants who travel around Europe and mocked and criticized its flawed society and government. Arguably his most famous work was De I'esprit des loix which was published in 1748. The book challenged the power of the monarchy and the church and presented ideas such as a constitutional government, the separation of powers and the ending of slave trade. The book also divided French society into three classes, the Aristocracy, the Monarchy, and the Commons and introduced the ideas of the three branches of government, the judicial, the legislative, and the executive. Furthermore, he believed that the three branches of government should depend on each other so that there would never be one that would have more power than the other two. In the book, Montesquieu expressed his worry for the French social classes, specifically the middle class or the nobles. This was because he was afraid that the class was being slowly disintegrated and needed to be sustained to prevent the monarch from becoming too powerful. He also introduced his belief of the three forms of government, the monarchies, which was a government ruled by a royal bloodline passed down from generations, the republics, which was a government ruled by an elected leader, and the dictatorship, which was a government ruled by the rule of only one person. The popularity of De I'esprit des loix spread across Europe and made people people think about their own political system. It was often quoted by other famous figures including Catherine The Great and James Madison. Although the book was very popular with the people, it was condemned by the Catholic Church and put onto its list of banned books only three years after its publishing. They did this because the book’s idea of government powers, the administrative and sovereign powers, did not match with their own structure of government, called the Estates of the realm. The book is now named as one of the most important French writings. Montesquieu’s other accomplishments include his other writings, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, which discussed the politics of the Romans and how their government played a part in their downfall, Genuine History, which was a novel about a man and his many lives as different animals, and more than ten other books and letters. He was also credited as one of the key contributors to the widespread recognition of political, social, and cultural anthropology. He became a very influential figure in politics at the time and his work even contributed founding fathers' idea of democracy among other people. His belief that governments should be way that no person would be afraid of another reminded them to create a government that balanced its power among multiple people instead of just one. Other famous figures he influenced included Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke.

In his later years, Montesquieu wanted to continue his study of the sciences and this resulted in him selling his position as the president of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1721 and this allowed him to study and write more. In pursuit of more knowledge, he traveled Europe and visited places like Germany, England, Austria, Hungary, and Italy to learn more about the politics of each country, but he eventually settled back in Paris. He slowly lost his sight as he grew older and was blind by the time he died in France on February 10, 1755 of a fever. He left behind the idea of how modern democracy and government should be like as well as the belief that balancing of all social classes would lead to a better society.