Charles Louis de Secondat baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu

Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, baron de la Brède et de , 1689-1755, French jurist and political philosopher. He was councillor (1714) of the parlement of Bordeaux and its president (1716-28) after the death of an uncle, whom he succeeded in both title and office. He gained a seat in the French Academy in 1728. His Persian Letters (1721) brought him immediate fame. In these letters, supposedly written by Persian travelers in Europe and by their friends, he satirized and criticized French insititutions. In 1734 he produced a scientific historical study of the rise and fall of Rome, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. His greatest work, The Spirit of Laws (1748), is a comparative study of three types of government—republic, monarchy, and despotism—and shows John Locke's influence on Montesquieu. Its main theories are that climate and circumstances determine the form of governments and that the powers of government should be separated and balanced in order to guarantee the freedom of the individual. Written with brilliance of style, it had great historical importance and influenced the formation of the American Constitution.

Bibliography: See biography by R. Shackleton (1961); studies by J. R. Loy (1968), M. Hulliung (1977), and T. L. Pangle (1989).

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de (1689–1755) French political philosopher. A former advocate, he became known with the publication of his Lettres Persanes (1721), a satire of French society from the perspective of two Persian travellers visiting Paris. Montesquieu's reputation rests chiefly on L'Esprit des lois (1748), a comparative study of political systems in which he championed the separation of judicial, legislative, and executive powers as being most conducive to individual liberty, holding up the English state as a model. His theories were highly influential in Europe in the late 18th century, as they were in the drafting of the American Constitution.