limited neither by law nor by secondary powers. Despotism was further associated
with other features of the Sun King’s reign: the centralization of power, religious
intolerance, the pursuit of military glory, and financial corruption and mismanage-
ment. To this Montesquieu was to add the description of despotism as rule by fear.
Montesquieu offered three criteria by which political regimes could be defined:
who held sovereign power, by what method sovereign power was exercised, and by
what principle the regime was set in motion. He accordingly stipulated that there
were three types of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic; and then
defined the principle determining the working of each in the following way: ‘the
nature of republican government is that the people as a body, or certain families,
have the sovereign power; the nature of monarchical government is that the prince
has the sovereign power, but that he exercises it according to established laws; the
nature of despotic government is that one alone governs according to his wills and
caprices’.30 The despot, in short, had no rules by which he was bound and he was
strong because he gloried in scorning life, being free to take life away as he chose.
Honour, therefore, was unknown in despotic states, leaving the despot only with
28 Martin S. Staum, ‘French Lecturers in Political Economy, 1815–1848: Varieties of Liberalism’,
History of Political Economy, 30 (1998), 95–120.
29 See Sharon Krause, ‘Despotism in the Spirit of the Laws’, in David D Carrithers, Michael
A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe (eds.), Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of the Laws
(Lanham, Md., 2001), 231–72.
30 The Spirit of the Laws (1989), 21.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
153
rule by fear. It was thus in the nature of despotic government that it required
‘extreme obedience’ and that the people were to be made ‘timid’ and ‘ignorant’.
Politics likewise became devoid of substance. There was little public business,
Montesquieu wrote, and government was reduced to ‘the preservation of the
prince, or rather the preservation of the palace in which he is enclosed’. Men
acted only with the comforts of life in view and expected to be rewarded for
everything they did. As Montesquieu observed, ‘the worst Roman Emperors were
those who gave the most’.31 However, the goal of despotic government, for all its
reliance upon caprice and fear, was nothing more than order and tranquillity, the
reducing of all citizens to a servitude where all showed ‘passive obedience’ and
where each ‘blindly submits to the absolute will of the sovereign’. Everyone was
equal, but this was because everyone counted for nothing and lived isolated from
one another. What is more, the despot’s subjects lived in a state of destitution and
they did so because the laws of commerce scarcely applied. Embezzlement, Mon-
tesquieu recounted, was the normal condition under despotic rule.
Montesquieu summarized this deplorable state of human existence in one
short observation. ‘When the savages of Louisiana want fruit’, he wrote, ‘they cut
down the tree and gather the fruit. There you have despotic government.’32 What
he meant by this was that despotic government was government determined
by instinctive and irrational appetites and actions. It destroyed the very thing
sustaining its life. It was government that lacked the all-important ingredient of
moderation and where power was not counter-balanced. In institutional terms it
was a situation where the instruments of government were not divided up between
the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Among the Turks, Montesquieu
wrote, ‘where the three powers are united in the person of the sultan, an atrocious
despotism reigns’.33
From this Montesquieu concluded that ‘political liberty is found only in
moderate governments’.34 This in turn begged the question of what was meant
by political liberty. For Montesquieu it was defined in terms of the absence of
fear and, its corollary, an individual’s sense of personal security guaranteed by law.
‘[I]n a society where there are laws’, Montesquieu wrote, ‘liberty can consist
only in having the power to do what one should want to do and in no way being
constrained to do what one should not want to do.’ ‘Liberty’, he continued,
‘is the right to do everything that the laws permit.’35 The worst situation was
one where the enjoyment of liberty depended upon the caprice of the legislator
or upon the arbitrary power of the despot. Unpromisingly, Montesquieu
believed that there was something natural about despotism––hence his view
that it arose more often in warm climates––and that there was no guarantee that
liberty and moderation would ultimately prevail.
As Montesquieu famously contended, there was only one nation ‘whose
political constitution has political liberty for its direct purpose’ and that nation
was England.36 Much has been written about Montesquieu’s discussion of the
31 Ibid. 68.
32 Ibid. 59.
33 Ibid. 157.
34 Ibid. 155.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid. 156.
154
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
English constitution, and in particular on the subject of whether he was providing
a description of how the English constitution actually worked or an ideal type of
the ‘constitution of liberty’ with England as its source.37 Montesquieu himself
appeared to suggest that it did not matter whether the English actually enjoyed
the liberty he was describing: it was sufficient ‘to say that it is established by their
laws’. Whatever the truth of the matter, Montesquieu outlined what he took to
be the tripartite division of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of
government and saw England as a system of mixed government in which power
was shared between monarch, Lords, and Commons. Furthermore he recognized
that such a system of division and balance was indispensable for the preservation
of liberty. Thus, the essence of good government was a situation where power
counter-balanced itself and could not be abused.
More difficult to assess was what Montesquieu thought of the French monarchy.
Where Montesquieu cited a regime as an example of arbitrary despotism his
standard instance was that of the Ottoman Empire. Monarchy itself, along with
republics, was one of the two types of political regime which he identified as having
potentially beneficial consequences. Monarchies, he wrote, do not have ‘liberty for
their direct purpose . . . they aim only for the glory of the citizens, the state, and the
prince. But this glory results in a spirit of liberty that can, in these states, produce
equally great things and can perhaps contribute as much to happiness as to liberty
itself.’38 Nor did he believe anything other than that executive power should be in
the hands of a monarch. However, monarchies could degenerate into despotism.
They did so not only when the three branches of government fell into the same
hands but also when subordinate and intermediate institutions were weakened
or, in the
worst case, eradicated. As a member of the ‘nobility of the robe’ and of
the provincial parlement of Bordeaux, Montesquieu’s personal sympathies were
clear enough. Indeed, as a means of restraining royal power, he was not averse to
defending the practice of the buying of public offices.
One possible antidote to the slide towards despotism was religion, but this,
Montesquieu recognized, could be used to induce passivity. Another was com-
merce. By commerce, Montesquieu here had in mind not merely the exchange of
goods but also the creation of new patterns of social intercourse. ‘It is an almost
general rule’, Montesquieu wrote, ‘that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is
commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores’.39 Our
moral practices and habits, in other words, become less ‘ferocious’ as a result of our
contacts with other people and through our greater familiarity with their ways. In
particular, ‘the natural effect’ of commerce is to lead to peace: ‘two nations that
trade with each other become reciprocally dependent; if one has an interest in
buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are founded on mutual
37 See e.g. R. Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1961), 284–301; M. F. T. H.
Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics (1750–1800) (Philadelphia, 1989), 107–51; M. J. C. Vile,
Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, 1967), 76–97; Melvin Richter, The Political
Theory of Montesquieu (Cambridge, 1977), 84–97; and Paul Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty
(2009).
38 Spirit of the Laws, 166.
39 Ibid. 338.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
155
needs’.40 Additionally, there existed a relationship between forms of government
and commerce. As a general rule, Montesquieu wrote, ‘in a nation that is in
servitude, one works more to preserve than to acquire; in a free nation, one
works more to acquire than to preserve’.41 It was here that England again figured
positively in Montesquieu’s account. Other countries had put political interests
before commercial interests. In England, it was always the reverse. The English
were ‘the people in the world who have best known how to take advantage of each
of these three great things at the same time: religion, commerce, and liberty’.42
This did not mean that France should rush unreservedly towards an imitation of
English murs and institutions. One of the most striking conclusions of De l’Esprit
des lois was an awareness of the limitations attached to the activity of politics. Laws,
Montesquieu believed, along with climate, religion, morals, manners, and examples
drawn from the past, were the factors which ‘governed men’ and together they
formed ‘a general spirit’. The wise legislator was one who followed ‘the spirit of the
nation’. To that extent, government should be a reflection of society rather than
a vehicle for securing the transformation of society. Faced therefore with the
centuries-long deviation of royal power towards despotism, Montesquieu was left
with little alternative but to conjure up the possibility of a return to a pre-feudal and
‘gothic’ past where the monarch made no decisions without first consulting the
representatives of the people.
De l‘Esprit des lois was not a book from which one could easily draw hard and fast
conclusions. Nevertheless, despite the preoccupation with locating all societies
within their diverse natural and historical conditions, there was no ambiguity in
Montesquieu’s condemnation of despotism in whatever form it took. Happy then,
in Montesquieu’s eyes, were all those fortunate enough to experience what was
delightfully termed ‘la douceur du gouvernement’. The best of situations seemed
indubitably to be that where ‘moderate’ government was combined with the
enjoyment of a ‘moderate’ liberty. This led to the conclusion that liberty was
most readily preserved through the contrived balance of both governmental in-
stitutions and competing social interests.
But would this precarious equilibrium be overturned by the activity of com-
merce, the dynamic effects of which Montesquieu had identified so accurately?43
Much has been made of Montesquieu’s ‘esprit conservateur’. Within his writings
the maintenance of stability attained almost as much importance as the dispersal of
political power. For this reason he opposed the emergence of a ‘noblesse comm-
merçante’ and believed that governments should regulate who could take part in
commercial activities. Ultimately, however, such restrictions upon commercial
activity proved untenable and with the collapse of the feudal order there occurred
not only a reconfiguration of what Montesquieu would have regarded as the general
spirit of society but also one potentially undermining the mainsprings of liberty.
Once this had been perceived to have occurred, those who came increasingly to
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid. 341.
42 Ibid. 343.
43 Roger Boesche, ‘Fearing Monarchs and Merchants: Montesquieu’s Two Theories of Despotism’,
Western Political Quarterly, 43 (1990), 741–61.
156
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
regard themselves as liberals had the task of forging a new doctrine which would
graft the fundamental insights of Montesquieu concerning the nature of liberty
and its preservation onto a society dominated by new social classes, new political
institutions, as well as by the pursuit of affluence. This was to prove to be no easy
task.
During the Revolution Montesquieu was read consistently (and correctly) as a
fierce critic of all forms of despotism. It was also the case that the tripartite division
of governmental functions outlined by Montesquieu acted as a consistent point of
reference in the constitutional debates that took place after 1789. Nearly everyone
agreed that despotism could only be avoided if these three functions were not
placed in the hands of either a single individual or institution and it was this that
explained the preoccupation with ensuring that the legislative and executive func-
tions in particular should remain separate. Not surprisingly, it was the monarchiens
who were to prove to be the most enthusiastic and faithful advocates of Montes-
quieu’s constitutional recommendations. As the Revolution progressed, and as
attention turned away from the goal of constructing a balanced constitution
towards that of using the State as a moral agent, Montesquieu continued to fade
from view. Most importantly, the idea figuring at the very heart of Montesquieu’s
thought––‘the need for power to check power through the arrangements of
things’––was consistently ignored. Alongside demands for unity of political action,
the moderation associated with a system of balances and manufactured equilibrium
had little charm or attraction.
It was precisely this sentiment that underscored Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of
power on the 18 Brumaire.44 What, more broadly, might be said of the character
and significance of this new regime? At the heart of what became Bonapartist
ideology was the aspiration to bring t
he Revolution to a close while preserving what
were taken to be its achievements.45 This was secured by a series of concessions
towards those who had been most adversely affected by the Revolution. If this
largely concerned measures to assuage the Catholic Church and the aristocracy (for
example, allowing Christians to worship on Sundays and ending the commemora-
tion of the execution of Louis XVI) it also meant that slavery, having been abolished
in 1794, was re-established in French colonies in 1802. By the same token, there
was to be no going back upon the abolition of the privileges associated with the
ancien régime. Recognizing civil equality, the Revolution was to be stabilized upon a
conservative basis. What followed were a series of wide-ranging administrative,
financial, judicial, and educational reforms, many of which still operate in con-
temporary France. To take but two examples: the legal code was systematically
overhauled between 1804 and1810, whilst the educational system was reformed
with a view to providing a new elite equipped to serve the State. So too the préfet,
symbol of the State’s presence and authority beyond the capital, was brought into
44 See Patrice Gueniffey, Le Dix-Huit Brumaire (2008).
45 The term ‘Bonapartism’ was first used in 1816: see Melvin Richter, ‘Towards a Concept of
Political Illegitimacy: Bonapartist Dictatorship and Democratic Legitimacy’, Political Theory, 10
(1982), 185–214.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
157
existence. This was accompanied by a further reinforcement of administrative
centralization.46
It was this feature of the Empire that was to become one of the abiding
obsessions of its later liberal critics. Spreading its tentacles outwards from the
Ministry of the Interior in Paris, the State’s administrative apparatus came to be
seen as an all-powerful mechanism of control, intruding into every aspect of local
life. The reality, according to many of those charged with exercising these func-
tions, was less interventionist and far more attuned to the needs of local commu-
nities, but the prefectoral system was seen to be an integral part of what was an
authoritarian and centralized regime.
This was not to be the only feature of Napoleon’s rule that was to meet with
criticism. No sooner had power been seized than attempts to stifle opposition were
Revolution and the Republic Page 33