Michael Johnson: On Montesquieu's renewed relevance
[Michael Johnson is a former correspondent for The Associated Press.]
You can hardly turn around in the Bordeaux area without bumping into a plaque, a statue or some other reminder of Montesquieu, a great thinker whose books inspired the American Constitution. The Lycée Montesquieu is around the corner from my home and I often have business on the rue Esprit des Lois, a street named for his masterwork, "The Spirit of Laws."
Montesquieu is alive and well, 252 years after his passing. A French modernist composer, Jean-Paul Noguès, recently wrote a cantata based on "The Spirit of Laws," a unique source text for a work of music. And a new book, "Montesquieu: The Women and the Wine," brings warmth and humanity to this venerated figure from the French Enlightenment.
His Château de La Brède survives as an imposing monument and the site for gatherings of Montesquieu admirers. His last direct descendant, Countess Jacqueline de Chabannes, lived in the chateau until shortly before her death in 2004 at age 92. It is now maintained by a foundation she established for posterity.
Montesquieu seems especially relevant today in the U.S. debate over concentration of presidential power. He lived under a monarchy, but spent his final years searching for better ways to combine order and freedom.
As I flipped through one of his books recently while at a sidewalk café in the warm sunshine of Bordeaux, I felt an eerie resonance. Montesquieu is worth a fresh look. A key tenet he advocated was the separation of powers, which the early Americans adopted outright for their new Constitution.
"The Spirit of Laws," a translation of which was published in Philadelphia and corrected by Thomas Jefferson, was "the best-read book in the Colonies after the Bible," said Joyce Appleby, a specialist in American History at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Separation of powers was a key concept in the U.S. Constitution. "The oracle who is always consulted on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu," James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. He quotes Montesquieu as saying that "there can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body or magistrates." Accumulation of powers "may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny," he concluded.
To be sure, in later years Jefferson and others cooled to the great Frenchman, at odds with such ideas as warning that democracy would be manageable only in small republics. Jefferson as president had bigger ideas for the United States, and indeed doubled its size with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Yet Montesquieu's influence on Jefferson is beyond dispute. Jefferson was so imbued with French culture that Patrick Henry once mocked him as a man who even "abjured his native victuals" in favor of French cooking.
Monique Brut, author of "Montesquieu: The Women and the Wine," tells me she and other writers work to "keep Montesquieu alive through his writings and our activities." She parsed 619 letters by and to him to sketch a lively portrait of him — an intellectual who had a taste for the sensual but always within limits....
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
You can hardly turn around in the Bordeaux area without bumping into a plaque, a statue or some other reminder of Montesquieu, a great thinker whose books inspired the American Constitution. The Lycée Montesquieu is around the corner from my home and I often have business on the rue Esprit des Lois, a street named for his masterwork, "The Spirit of Laws."
Montesquieu is alive and well, 252 years after his passing. A French modernist composer, Jean-Paul Noguès, recently wrote a cantata based on "The Spirit of Laws," a unique source text for a work of music. And a new book, "Montesquieu: The Women and the Wine," brings warmth and humanity to this venerated figure from the French Enlightenment.
His Château de La Brède survives as an imposing monument and the site for gatherings of Montesquieu admirers. His last direct descendant, Countess Jacqueline de Chabannes, lived in the chateau until shortly before her death in 2004 at age 92. It is now maintained by a foundation she established for posterity.
Montesquieu seems especially relevant today in the U.S. debate over concentration of presidential power. He lived under a monarchy, but spent his final years searching for better ways to combine order and freedom.
As I flipped through one of his books recently while at a sidewalk café in the warm sunshine of Bordeaux, I felt an eerie resonance. Montesquieu is worth a fresh look. A key tenet he advocated was the separation of powers, which the early Americans adopted outright for their new Constitution.
"The Spirit of Laws," a translation of which was published in Philadelphia and corrected by Thomas Jefferson, was "the best-read book in the Colonies after the Bible," said Joyce Appleby, a specialist in American History at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Separation of powers was a key concept in the U.S. Constitution. "The oracle who is always consulted on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu," James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. He quotes Montesquieu as saying that "there can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body or magistrates." Accumulation of powers "may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny," he concluded.
To be sure, in later years Jefferson and others cooled to the great Frenchman, at odds with such ideas as warning that democracy would be manageable only in small republics. Jefferson as president had bigger ideas for the United States, and indeed doubled its size with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Yet Montesquieu's influence on Jefferson is beyond dispute. Jefferson was so imbued with French culture that Patrick Henry once mocked him as a man who even "abjured his native victuals" in favor of French cooking.
Monique Brut, author of "Montesquieu: The Women and the Wine," tells me she and other writers work to "keep Montesquieu alive through his writings and our activities." She parsed 619 letters by and to him to sketch a lively portrait of him — an intellectual who had a taste for the sensual but always within limits....