40 Fun Facts About Montesquieu

Montesquieu is the principal source of which theory of government, now written into many constitutions?

Separation of powers, he argued, protects liberty because no one body can make the laws, enforce them and settle disputes all at once. The framers of the US Constitution built the idea in.

Montesquieu's noble parents are said to have chosen which unlikely figure as their son's godfather?

A beggar stood godfather, the story goes, so that the future baron would remember all his life that the poor were his brothers.

To support his climate theory, Montesquieu froze which animal's tongue and studied it under a microscope?

A sheep supplied the tongue: he watched its tiny bumps shrink when frozen and rise again as it thawed, and concluded that people in cold countries feel things less keenly.

America's founders cited Montesquieu more than any other source except which book, one survey found?

The Bible alone outranked him: political scientist Donald Lutz counted citations in late-1700s American writing and found Montesquieu the most quoted authority on government.

From 1981 to 1994, Montesquieu's face appeared on which everyday French item, later given to Gustave Eiffel?

A banknote for 200 francs bore his portrait until a new series handed that denomination to the engineer of the famous tower in 1996.

Which ruler admitted pillaging Montesquieu's work for the Nakaz, an instruction for a new law code?

Catherine the Great lifted hundreds of articles from Montesquieu and Beccaria, then altered the parts that clashed with her vision of Russia as an absolute monarchy.

At the Horn Tavern in Westminster in 1730, Montesquieu was initiated into which fraternity?

The Freemasons admitted him at a lodge that met in the tavern. Back in France, his membership later drew unwelcome attention from Cardinal Fleury.

Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was added in 1751 to which institution's list of banned books?

The Catholic Church placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books, even though he had published a full Defence of the work the year before.

Montesquieu held high office in the Parlement of Bordeaux, which was chiefly what kind of body?

A court of law is what every French parlement was: a bench of appeal judges, not lawmakers. He presided over the criminal chamber in Bordeaux, hearing cases and supervising prisons.

Montesquieu is a title taken from a barony: which family name was the philosopher actually born with?

De Secondat was his surname; he was born Charles-Louis, and the name the world knows him by arrived with a barony he inherited as a young man.

In Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, which principle keeps a despotic government running?

Fear drives a despotism, he wrote, just as love of virtue drives a republic and love of honour a monarchy; a regime that loses its principle cannot last long.

Which founder, the 'Father of the Constitution', called Montesquieu the oracle always consulted and cited?

James Madison paid the compliment in Federalist No. 47, an essay he published under the pseudonym Publius in a New York newspaper in 1788.

Montesquieu's ironic list of arguments for slavery says which commodity would cost too much without it?

Sugar is the commodity he names, in a deadpan list of pro-slavery arguments set down without comment. Elsewhere in the same book he calls slavery wrong because all humans are born equal.

Montesquieu's birthplace, the moated Château de la Brède, sits amid which kind of farmland?

A vineyard surrounds the Gothic castle, begun in 1306, where he wrote most of his works. Visitors can still see his library and bedroom, kept as they were in the 18th century.

Montesquieu's Persian Letters opens in the final years of which long-reigning French king, who died in 1715?

Louis XIV rules for the first three years of the travellers' stay in Paris; the rest of the novel unfolds under the regency that governed for his five-year-old heir.

In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the travellers Uzbek and Rica set out for Paris from which city?

Isfahan is where Uzbek leaves five wives in a seraglio guarded by eunuchs, and the household's slow collapse in his absence becomes the dark thread of the novel.

Montesquieu's 1734 study of Rome's greatness and decline helped inspire which historian's far longer work?

Edward Gibbon drew on it for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which runs to six volumes where Montesquieu needed only 23 chapters.

Montesquieu's history of the Romans ends in 1453, when Constantinople fell to which invading power?

The Ottomans' capture of the city closes a book that begins with the founding of Rome in 753 BC, though he had first meant to write only a few pages on the subject.

Which body of forty members known as 'the immortals' elected Montesquieu in 1728, despite some opposition?

The Académie française elected him in January, and by April he had left on a tour of Europe that kept him away from France for three years.

Montesquieu's wife, Jeanne de Lartigue, practised which outlawed faith when the couple married in 1715?

Protestant worship had been banned in France since the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, yet Jeanne de Lartigue kept her faith and brought her husband a large dowry.

Montesquieu inherited his title, a fortune and a seat in the Bordeaux Parlement from which relative?

His uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu, had taken him in as a ward when his father died three years earlier.

Bored with the Bordeaux Parlement, Montesquieu gave up his inherited office by doing what with it?

He sold it, which was perfectly legal: such posts were property under the old regime, freely bought, sold and inherited subject to payments to the king.

Montesquieu's Persian Letters mocks the 'System' of which Scottish financier, which collapsed in 1720?

John Law was a gambler who had fled a death sentence for killing a man in a duel; he rose to run France's finances and became the richest man in Europe before his bubble burst.

In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Rica calls which figure a magician who convinces a king that three are one?

The Pope, in Rica's baffled report, can also persuade people that the bread they eat is not bread. Much of the book's early humour comes from the visitors misreading what they see.

In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, which favourite wife of Uzbek ends the novel with a defiant final letter?

Roxane, the one wife whose virtue Uzbek trusted, takes a lover and then her own life, telling her husband in that last letter that her mind had always stayed free.

Montesquieu's Persian Letters claimed to be printed in Cologne but really came from a press in which city?

Amsterdam was the real source: 'Pierre Marteau of Cologne' was a front for the press of Jacques Desbordes, by then run by his widow, Susanne de Caux.

Which upheaval, ending the year Montesquieu was born, made England the monarchy he later admired?

The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 shaped the system he went to see for himself, living in England from late 1729 until the spring of 1731.

Which French writer applied Montesquieu's methods to the United States in Democracy in America?

Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent to study American prisons, spent nine months travelling the country, and came home with a portrait of its whole society instead.

Which 20th-century economist told French readers that Montesquieu was their true equivalent of Adam Smith?

John Maynard Keynes made the claim in the French edition of his General Theory, praising Montesquieu's clear-headedness and good sense above those of the physiocrats.

Which ailment troubled Montesquieu from the 1730s onward and shadowed his later years at La Brède?

Failing eyesight dogged him for two decades and a cataract left him dreading blindness, yet in those same years he completed The Spirit of the Laws.

A tower named for Montesquieu, once the joint-tallest building in its country, stands in which European state?

Luxembourg gained the Montesquieu tower in 2008 as an addition to the headquarters of the Court of Justice of the European Union, where it houses many of the translators.

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that which activity naturally leads nations toward peace?

Commerce makes manners gentle wherever it goes, he wrote. The theory was later nicknamed doux commerce, though he never used the phrase himself.

Opponents of the US Constitution cited Montesquieu to argue that a republic could survive only if it stayed what?

Small republics alone can resist tyranny, the Anti-Federalists read him as saying. Hamilton answered in Federalist No. 9 with Montesquieu's own praise of confederations of states.

Montesquieu died in 1755 leaving an unfinished essay for Diderot's Encyclopédie on which subject?

Taste was the topic, and the fragment still appeared in the seventh volume two years after his death, alongside the article Voltaire had written on the same subject.

Montesquieu's theory of liberty built on which English philosopher's Second Treatise of Government?

John Locke reached French readers in a cut-down translation made by an exile in the Netherlands, which dropped the whole of the First Treatise.

Which founder of modern sociology wrote his Latin doctoral dissertation on Montesquieu in the 1890s?

Émile Durkheim argued that Montesquieu's grasp of how social phenomena depend on one another was the realisation that brought social science into being.

In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Uzbek sends his friend Mirza a famous fable about which legendary people?

The Troglodytes fill letters 11 to 14 of the novel; ancient Greek and Roman writers had used the name, which literally means cave goers, for peoples they placed in several regions.

Montesquieu's rank of président à mortier in Bordeaux took its name from the mortier, which was what?

A velvet cap, black with two gold braid ribbons, marked the presidents of the senior chamber as superior to those of the lower ones.

Montesquieu was buried in which Paris church, the city's second largest, noted for its mismatched towers?

Saint-Sulpice received him the day after he died of a fever in February 1755, and he was laid to rest in its chapel of Sainte-Geneviève.

Montesquieu's Persian Letters was imitated in a 1747 novel of letters from a captive woman of which country?

Peru is the homeland of Zilia, the Inca princess of Françoise de Graffigny's novel, who like Uzbek and Rica turns an outsider's eye on French society.