Our age praises the spirit of the Enlightenment like the gods of Olympus. It has lost its meaning. Montesquieu embodies the quintessence of the early Enlightenmentfrom Fontenelle to Voltaire. He praised freedom in all things and, in l’Esprit des loisthe best formula for guarding against despots of all kinds, whether dictator or irascible little office manager: “Any man who has power is inclined to abuse it”. He prefigures Lord Acton: “All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. If there had been a few more readers of Montesquieu, the two totalitarianisms that bloodied the 20th century would have had fewer fanatics.

Montesquieu, born in 1689, quickly achieved literary success with the Persian Letters (1721), but he wasn’t content with a feather in his cap that led him to the Académie française. This former magistrate wanted to leave his mark on the immense ethical reflection that, from Aristotle to Locke and Hume (in his time), had sought to preserve the spirit of freedom in the West. The task seemed all the more daunting in France, since this spirit had been lost, as he writes in the final chapters of L’Esprit des lois, since the Hundred Years’ War.

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It’s not easy to interest 21st-century readers in a monument to the human spirit at its most demanding. The Spirit of Laws seems to be aimed at jurists (who don’t read it very much), and it also seems to have little relevance today. Recent times are all about strong men. Not for the champions of moderation like Montesquieu, who had this scathing word for all those Caesarist apprentices who believe themselves indispensable: “A despotic government (…) is, so to speak, obvious (…) as only passions are needed to establish it, everyone is good for it” (V,14). Montesquieu may be a liberal, but he is not a libertarian individualist, and his name impresses more than it seduces. Even his portraits do him no favors.

He is often portrayed as an old Roman or a mandarin, swollen with ermine and honors. Which is the antithesis of what he really was. You need to reread his Thoughts. The man was bubbly, shy, brilliant and funny. “ Gravity is the shield of fools “he used to say. Many will agree. Nor would it do him any great service today to make him the father of the “social sciences”, as is often said, and as Benjamin Hoffmann still writes in the otherwise interesting preface to this reprint of L’Esprit des lois. Even if Raymond Aron made him the founder of sociology, others of political science or whatever, Montesquieu is part of a humanist tradition, and that’s what makes him so charming. “C’est de l’esprit sur les lois”, as Madame du Deffand so aptly described his masterpiece. Montesquieu was first and foremost a literary man, but he was not content with his own navel and took an interest in society.

Too liberal for authoritarian leftists, too socialist for neoliberals

This new edition, with a discreet and personal foreword by Dany Laferrière (who occupies the headquarters of Montesquieu quai Conti) and a very useful critical apparatus, having preserved the Défense de l’Esprit des lois drawn up by Roger Caillois (who wrote a fine preface to the Pléiade edition).

Montesquieu’s modernity has often been misunderstood. Witchcraft trials have multiplied since 1748. Too unchristian for the Jansenists Ecclesiastical News too liberal for the authoritarian leftists, too socialist for the neoliberals, because he did not sanctify property as a natural right (unlike Locke, Montesquieu did not believe in natural rights; all rights are, as with the Ancients, the product of society, and for this reason he was by no means at the origin of the bourgeois Declaration of 1789), and was even accused of being a feudal reactionary under the Terror. This nonsense was taken up by Althusser, who wrote one of the worst texts on Montesquieu. This interpretation is no longer current. But we still don’t understand him. It’s true that his elliptical style demands a lot from the reader. Even recently, a certain Odile Tobner, obsessed with “four centuries of negrophobia” in France, totally missed his famous ironic chapter against slavery (XV, 5).

It’s true that Montesquieu measured the limits of the spirit of revolt, and in 1789 he would certainly have been closer to a Burke (at the very least to the “monarchians”, so as not to frighten sensitive souls) than to a Robespierre. Basically, he’s a defender of a certain monarchical tradition, but one that can be disconcerting, as he criticizes the Capetian heritage, from Philip the Fair to Louis XIV, which Action Française later claimed as its own. Montesquieu belongs to an altogether different, and long-forgotten, current. Along with Fénelon and Saint-Simon, he denounced the absolutist path and opposed it to the tradition of the origins – the freedom of the Franks – and this vein inspired Tocqueville. But he does not subscribe to what has been called “aristocratic liberalism”, for Montesquieu is basically a follower of Machiavelli (the real Machiavelli, not his soothing reading) and of the legacy of the “mixed monarchy”, a blend of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy that has been exalted in the West since Polybius and Thomas Aquinas. This modernized tradition is at the root of his famous theory of the separation of powers, to which all our liberal regimes still aspire. But Montesquieu goes further. With its refusal of a clean slate, its taste for “the general spirit of each nation”, its attention to history and climate, while always remaining at the service of human freedom, the Esprit des lois is precisely what it is today, for it is, as Laboulaye clearly saw in the 19th century, a formidable viaticum against all the excesses of abstraction and dogmatism, both of the Second Enlightenment (D’Holbach, Condorcet, etc.) and of contemporary Cancel Culture. An agnostic, Montesquieu is a perfect guide against sectarianism, both religious and revolutionary, and against the illusions of all lyricism. He is a Kundera in toga.