MONTESQUIEU, THE THEORY OF SEPARATION OF POWERS

The Spirit of Laws

Today, The Grandma is at home reading The Spirit of Law a masterpiece written by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. This work talks about the separation of powers the basic rule of a democracy. People sometimes think they live in a democratic country but it is only a perception since the moment that this separation of powers is not respected.

Sadly, we are living extreme violations of democracy, rule of law and separation of powers in the European Union. They are the cases of Hungary, Poland and Spain. If the European Union doesn't stop these abuses of power, it will be closer to the beginning of its end because it will lose the trust and respect of its inhabitants.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (18 January 1689-10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, and political philosopher.

He is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon. His anonymously-published The Spirit of Law in 1748, which was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, influenced the Founding Fathers in drafting the United States Constitution.

More information: Fordham University

Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 kilometres south of Bordeaux. His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble ancestry. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles was seven, was an heiress who brought the title of Barony of La Brède to the Secondat family.

After the death of his mother he was sent to the Catholic College of Juilly, a prominent school for the children of French nobility, where he remained from 1700 to 1711. His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu.

He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. The next year, he married the Protestant Jeanne de Lartigue, who eventually bore him three children. The Baron died in 1716, leaving him his fortune as well as his title, and the office of président à mortier in the Bordeaux Parliament.

Baron de Montesquieu

Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to study and writing. He achieved literary success with the publication of his 1721 Persian Letters, a satire representing society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary Persian visitors to Paris and Europe, cleverly criticizing the absurdities of contemporary French society. 

Montesquieu embarked on a grand tour of Europe, especially Italy and England, during which he kept a journal. His reflections on geography, laws and customs during his travels became the primary sources for his major works on political philosophy upon his return to France. He next published Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), considered by some scholars, among his three best known books, as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work.

L'Esprit des lois was originally published anonymously in 1748 and translated in 1750 by Thomas Nugent as The Spirit of Laws. It quickly rose to influence political thought profoundly in Europe and America. In France, the book met with an unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the regime. The Catholic Church banned The Spirit -along with many of Montesquieu's other works- in 1751 and included it on the Index of Prohibited Books. It received the highest praise from the rest of Europe, especially Britain.

More information: Archive

Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors, which include Herodotus and Tacitus, of anthropology, as being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the political forms in human societies. Indeed, the French political anthropologist Georges Balandier considered Montesquieu to be the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social anthropology.

According to social anthropologist D. F. Pocock, Montesquieu's The Spirit of Law was the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions.

Montesquieu's most influential work divided French society into three classes or trias politica, a term he coined: the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons.

Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing: the sovereign and the administrative.

The administrative powers were the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. These should be separate from and dependent upon each other so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two, either singly or in combination.

This was a radical idea because it completely eliminated the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the people at large represented by the Estates-General, thereby erasing the last vestige of a feudalistic structure.

More information: Archive

In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative;

the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations;

and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law. 

Montesquieu