by Will Durant
In April he set out on a tour that took three years and covered parts of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, the Rhineland, Holland, and England. He remained in England eighteen months (November, 1729, to August, 1731). There he formed a friendship with Chesterfield and other notables, was elected to the Royal Society of London and initiated into Freemasonry, was received by George II and Queen Caroline, attended Parliament, and fell in love with what he thought was the British constitution. Like Voltaire he went back to France strong in the admiration for liberty, yet sobered by contact with the problems of government. He retired to La Brède, transformed his park into an English garden, and, except for occasional trips to Paris, gave himself up to the researches and writings that occupied the rest of his life.
2. Why Rome Fell
In 1734 he issued, unsigned but acknowledged, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. He had submitted the manuscript to a Jesuit scholar, and had consented to eliminate passages that might give umbrage to the Church. The book did not and could not repeat the success of the Lettres persanes; it contained no indecencies, it dealt with a remote and complex subject, it was relatively conservative in politics and theology. Radicals did not relish the emphasis on moral decay as a cause of national decline, and they were not ready to appreciate the terse wisdom of such sentences as: “Those who have ceased to fear power can still respect authority.”70 Today the little treatise is looked upon as a pioneer attempt at a philosophy of history, and as a classic of French prose, recalling Bossuet but adding brilliance to gravity.
The subject invited the historian-philosopher, for it involved the whole gamut of a great civilization from birth to death, and exposed in broad scope and illuminating detail one of the basic processes of history—the dissolution that seems fated to follow any full evolution in individuals, religions, and states. Already there was a suspicion that France, after the collapse of le grand siècle, had entered upon a long period of decay in empire, morals, literature, and art; the profane trinity of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau had not yet appeared to challenge the intellectual supremacy of the seventeenth century. But the rising courage of the new age showed in the fact that Montesquieu, in explaining the course of history, considered only earthly causes, and quietly set aside, except for incidental obeisance, the Providence which, in Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), had guided all events to divinely determined results. Montesquieu proposed to seek laws in history as Newton had sought them in space:
It is not Fortune who governs the world, as we see from the history of the Romans.… There are general causes, moral or physical, which operate in every monarchy, raise it, maintain it, or overthrow it. All that occurs is subject to these causes; and if a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle. In a word, the principal movement [l’allure principale] draws with it all the particular occurrences.71
Consequently Montesquieu reduced the role of the individual in history. The individual, however great his genius, is but an instrument of the “general movement”; his importance is Duc not to his surpassing ability so much as to his falling in with what Hegel was to call the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the time. “If Caesar and Pompey had thought like Cato [had striven to preserve the powers of the Roman Senate], others would have come to the same ideas [to subordinate the Senate] as those of Caesar and Pompey, and the Republic, destined to perish [from internal causes] would have been led to ruin by some other hand.”72
But this “destiny” was no mystical guidance or metaphysical force; it was a complex of factors producing the “principal movement”; and the main function of the philosophical historian, in Montesquieu’s view, is to ferret out each such factor, analyze it, and show its operation and relations. So the decline of Rome (he thought) was Duc first of all to a change from a republic—in which there had been a division and balance of powers—to an empire better fitted to govern dependencies, but so centering all rule in one city and one man as to destroy the liberty and vigor of the citizens and the provinces. To this prime cause were added other factors in the course of time: the spread of supine servility among the masses; the desire of the poor to be supported by the state; the weakening of character by wealth, luxury, and license; the influx of aliens unformed by Roman traditions and ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder; the corruption of central and provincial administrators; the depreciation of currency; the excess of taxation; the abandonment of farms; the sapping of martial virility by new religions and a long peace; the failure of military discipline; the ascendancy of the army over the civilian government; the preference of the army for making or unmaking emperors in Rome rather than for defending the frontiers from barbarian invasion … Perhaps in reaction against the supernatural emphasis in Bossuet, Montesquieu made little account of those changes in religion which Gibbon was to stress as a main cause of the imperial collapse.
But always Montesquieu came back to what he considered the prime factor in Rome’s decadence—the passage from republic to monarchy. By their republican maxims the Romans conquered a hundred peoples; but by the time they had accomplished this the republic could not subsist; and the maxims of the new government, contrary to those of the republic, caused the decline.73 However, when we go back to Chapter vi, and examine the maximes, or methods, by which the Roman Republic conquered “all the peoples,” we find a strange assortment: deceit, broken treaties, force, severe punishments, division of the enemy for piecemeal conquest (divide et impera), forcible reshuffling of populations, subverting resistant governments by subsidizing internal revolts, and other procedures familiar to statesmen. “The Romans used their allies to destroy an enemy, and then soon destroyed the destroyers.”74 Apparently forgetting this description of republican maxims, or swallowing Machiavelli at one gulp, Montesquieu, in Chapter XVIII, held up the Republic as an ideal of greatness, and deplored the Empire as a gay landslide to dissolution. Yet he recognized the corruption of politics in the Republic, and the political splendor of the Empire under “the wisdom of Nerva, the glory of Trajan, the valor of Hadrian, and the virtue of the two Antonines”;75 here Montesquieu gave a lead to Gibbon and Renan in naming that period the noblest and happiest in the history of government. In those philosopher-kings too Montesquieu found the ethics of the Stoics, which he clearly preferred to the Christian. His admiration for the Romans of the Republic passed down to the French enthusiasts of the Revolution, and shared in changing French government, martial methods, and art.
The book had some faults of a scholarship made hasty by the press of time and the call of a larger task. Montesquieu was sometimes uncritical in his use of classical texts; so, for example, he took as history Livy’s chapters on Rome’s beginnings, whereas Valla, Glareanus, Vico, and Pouilly had already rejected that account as legend. He underestimated the economic factors behind the politics of the Gracchi and Caesar. But against these shortcomings a larger view ranges the eloquence, vigor, and concentration of the style, the depth and originality of the thought, the bold attempt to see in one perspective the rise and fall of a complete civilization, and to elevate history from a record of details to the analysis of institutions and the logic of events. Here was a challenge to historians, which Voltaire and Gibbon would seek to meet; and here was that longing for a philosophy of history which Montesquieu himself, after a generation of labor, would try to satisfy with The Spirit of Laws.
3. The Spirit of Laws
Fourteen years passed between the Considérations and L’Esprit des lois. Montesquieu had begun his chef-d’oeuvre about 1729, aged forty; the essay on Rome was a by-product and interruption. In 1747, aged fifty-six, he grew tired of the toil, and was tempted to abandon it: “Often have I begun this work, and often have I laid it aside. I have a thousand times cast to the winds the leaves that I had written.”76 He appealed to the Muses to sustain him: “I am running a long co
urse, I am weighed down with sadness and weariness. Pour into my soul the persuasive charm that once I knew, but which now flies from me. You are never so divine as when you lead us through pleasure to wisdom and truth.”77 They must have responded, for he carried on. When at last the task was done, he confessed his hesitations and his pride:
I have followed my object without forming a plan; I have known neither rule nor exceptions; I have found the truth only to lose it again. But when I once discovered my principles, everything I sought for came to me; and in the course of twenty years I have seen my work begun, growing up, advancing toward completion, and finished.… If this work meets with success I shall owe it chiefly to the grandeur and majesty of the subject. However, I do not think that I have been totally deficient in genius.… When I have seen what so many great men in both France and Germany have written [on this subject] before me, I have been lost in admiration, but I have not lost my courage; I have said with Correggio, “And I too am a painter.”78
He showed the manuscript to Helvétius, Hénault, and Fontenelle. Fontenelle thought the treatise lacked le bon genre of French style;79 Helvétius begged the author not to ruin his reputation as a liberal by publishing a book so lenient to many conservative beliefs.80 Montesquieu judged these cautions irrelevant, and proceeded to print. Fearing the French censorship, he sent the manuscript to Geneva; it was published there in 1748 in two volumes, unsigned. When the French clergy had ferreted out its heresies they condemned it, and a government order forbade its distribution in France. In 1750 Malesherbes—future savior of the Encyclopédie—became censor, removed the prohibition, and the book rapidly made its way. Twenty-two editions were printed in two years, and soon the work was translated into all the languages of Christian Europe.
Titles in Montesquieu’s time were honestly, often laboriously, explanatory. So he called his book On the Spirit of Laws, or On the Relations Which Must Exist between the Laws and the Constitution of Each Government, the Manners, Climate, Religion, Commerce, etc. It was an essay on the relations between physical forces and social forms, and on the interrelations among the components of civilization. It tried to lay the foundations for what we should now call “scientific” sociology: to make possible—after the manner of research in the natural sciences—verifiable conclusions illuminating present society and conditionally predicting the future. It was, of course, too much for one man to accomplish in the brevity of life and the existing state of ethnology, jurisprudence, and historiography.
More specifically, Montesquieu’s thesis was that “the spirit of laws”—i.e., their origin, character, and tendency—is determined first by the climate and soil of the habitat, and then by the physiology, economy, government, religion, morals, and manners of the people. He began with a broad definition: “Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things”; obviously he wished to bring the “natural laws” of the physical world, and the assumed regularities in history, under one general concept. Following Grotius, Pufendorf, and other predecessors, he distinguished several kinds of laws: (1) natural law, which he defined as “human reason so far as it governs all the peoples of the earth”81—i.e., the “natural rights” of all men as beings endowed with reason; (2) the law of nations in their relations with one another; (3) political law, governing the relations between the individual and the state; and (4) civil law—the relations of individuals with one another.
In the early stages of human society, Montesquieu thought, the basic determinant of laws is the physical character of the terrain. Is it jungle, desert, or arable? Is it inland or coastal? Is it mountainous or plain? What is the quality of the soil, and the nature of the food it yields? In a word, climate is the first, and at first the most powerful, factor in determining a people’s economy, its laws, and its “national character.” (Bodin in the sixteenth century anticipated, and Buckle in the nineteenth followed, Montesquieu in this initial emphasis.) For example, consider the climatic, and consequent human, differences between north and south:
People are more vigorous in cold climates.… This superiority of strength must produce various effects: for instance, a greater boldness, i.e., more courage; a greater sense of superiority, i.e., less desire of revenge; a greater sense of security, i.e., more frankness, less suspicion, policy, and cunning.… I have been at the opera in England and in Italy, where I have seen the same pieces and the same performers; and yet the same music produced such different effects on the two nations; one is so cold and phlegmatic, and the other so lively and enraptured.… If we travel toward the north we meet with people who have few vices, many virtues.… If we draw near the south we fancy ourselves entirely removed from the verge of morality; here the strongest passions are productive of all manner of crimes, each man endeavoring, let the means be what they will, to indulge his inordinate desires … .
In warm countries the aqueous part of the blood loses itself greatly by perspiration; it must therefore be supplied by a like liquid. Water is there of admirable uses; strong liquors would congeal the globules of the blood which remains after the transuding of the aqueous humor. In cold countries the aqueous part of the blood is very little evacuated by perspiration. They must therefore make use of spirituous liquors, without which the blood would congeal.… The law of Mohammed, which prohibits the drinking of wine, is therefore fitted to the climate of Arabia.… The law which forbade the Carthaginians to drink wine was a law of the climate. Such a law would be improper for cold countries, where the climate seems to force them to a kind of national intemperance.… Drunkenness predominates.… in proportion to the coldness and humidity of the climate.82
Or consider the relations between climate and marriage:
Women, in hot countries, are marriageable at eight, nine, or ten years of age.… They are old at twenty; their reason, therefore, never accompanies their beauty. When beauty demands the empire, the want of reason forbids the claim; when reason is obtained, beauty is no more. These women ought then to be in a state of dependency, for reason cannot procure in old age that empire which even youth and beauty could not give. It is therefore extremely natural that in these places a man, when no law opposes it, should leave one wife to take another, and that polygamy should be introduced.
In temperate climates, where the charms of women are best preserved, where they arrive later at maturity, and have children at a more advanced stage of life, the old age of their husbands in some degree follows theirs; and as they have more reason and knowledge at the time of marriage [than their semitropical analogues] … it must naturally introduce a kind of equality between the sexes, and in consequence of this, the law of having only one wife.… That is the reason why Mohammedanism [with polygamy] was so easily established in Asia, and with such difficulty extended in Europe; why Christianity is maintained in Europe, and has been destroyed in Asia; and, in fine, why the Mohammedans have made such progress in China, and the Christians so little.83
At this point Montesquieu realizes that he has replaced Bossuet’s Providence with climate, and hastens to add, for God’s sake, a saving caution: “Human reasons, however, are subordinate to that Supreme Cause who does whatever He pleases, and renders everything subordinate to His will.” Some Jesuits thought that they saw Montesquieu’s tongue in his cheek.
He soon resumed his reckless generalizations. In the “East” (Turkey, Persia, India, China, Japan) the climate compels the seclusion of women, for “the hot airs inflame the passions,” and would endanger polygamy as well as monogamy if the sexes were as free to mingle as “in our northern countries, where the manners of women are naturally good, where all the passions are calm, where love rules over the heart with so regular and gentle an empire that the least degree of prudence is sufficient to conduct it.”84 “It is a happiness to live in those climates which permit such freedom of converse, where the sex which has most charms seems to embellish society, and where wives, reserving themselves for the pleasure of one, contribute to the amusem
ent of all.”85
Customs are more directly the result of climate than laws are, for laws must sometimes seek to counter the effects of climate. As civilization advances, climatic factors are and must be more and more controlled by moral or legal restraints, its in the Oriental seclusion of women. And the wisest legislators aim to balance “physical causes.” Customs are a function of place and time; none is in itself right or wrong or best. By and large, custom is the best law, since it is a natural adaptation of character to situation. We must move slowly in trying to change a custom. Usually a custom refuses to be changed by a law.86
Since habitat determines custom, which determines national character, the form of government will vary with the complex of all three. In general it will depend upon the extent of the area ruled: a republic comports with a small territory, whose leading citizens can assemble in one place for deliberation or action; if the area expands it will require more laws and wars, and will submit to monarchical rule. Monarchy passes into despotism when it governs too much terrain; for only despotic power can keep under subjection the local rulers of distant provinces.87 A monarchy must rest on “honor”; i.e., its population must be ranged in ranks, and its citizens must be zealous for distinction and preference. A republic must rest on a wide dissemination of “virtue,” which Montesquieu defines in his own way as “the love of one’s country—i.e., the love of equality.”88
A republic may be either an aristocracy or a democracy, according as it is ruled by only a part of the citizenry or by all. Montesquieu admires Venice as an aristocratic republic, and the ancient city-states as democracies; he knows but ignores the fact that in these the enfranchised citizens were only a minority. He praises the rule established by William Penn in America, and, still more enthusiastically, the theocratic communism organized by the Jesuits in Paraguay.89 To be real, however, an honest democracy must provide economic as well as political equality; it should regulate inheritances and dowries, and progressively tax wealth.90 The best republics are those in which the people, recognizing their incapacity to wisely determine policy, accept the policies adopted by the representatives whom they have chosen.