1689
Charles Louis Secondat, Baron
de La Brède et de Montesquieu, born today, at Château de La Brède, a rather aristocratic commune in the Gironde department of Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France.
"Les Lettres Persanes" was on the curriculum as part of the B.A.
French Literature course at my Polytechnic (oui, polytechnique, dans l'ancien
monde, il y a très longtemps, presque l'époque de Montesquieu), but without
really being told anything about the man. I took him for a satirist in the
manner of Voltaire and Molière, and only later, studying the Jewish Haskalah,
did I realise how significant a contribution he had made, with Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Spinoza et al, to the European Enlightenment, but also, indirectly,
to that beacon of democratic idealism the American Constitution.
Having now re-read "The Spirit of Laws" in the wake of nearly forty years of post-student experience, it is not hard to see why Voltaire fell out with him: for all his liberality, he was by birth, by conviction, and by intellectual stance aristocratic, and while I share his view that a hereditary monarchy fenced round with safeguards is much better than a political Presidency, I am not convinced that he and I really mean the same thing by this. He wanted the monarchy for its own sake, because it supported, indeed required the aristocracy; I want it because it prevents the Presidency: better a Queen Elizabeth who does nothing political but apogees the tourist economy by prodiving pageantry, than a self-important demagogue with megalomaniacal tendencies who can't stop interfering with his absurd and usually undemocratic ideological idealisms.
What Monsieur le Baron has to say about Spinoza requires more space than I have here; except to observe that he is wrong, that you can espouse Spinoza's views and also be a Deist, that in fact it was the common position of most left-wing religious intellectuals in the 20th century, and a good few of the atheists as well, and still is in the 21st: Spinoza wished to overturn religion in favour of human law and humanist morality, which is an existentialist position, not necessarily an atheistic one, and Spinoza to the last insisted that he was not an atheist.
This portrait of Montesquieu is quite magnificent. If you were shown it in a quiz and asked to guess, you would probably go for Marcus
Aurelius or Pericles or some austere Greco-Roman general. Aristocratic to his very bone structure - and not simply in the class sense of that word.
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
That last paragraph in particular, one of the sources of my notion of "Passive Complicity" and "Victimhood Collaboration", the worst sins performed, and daily, by most of the human race.
For much more on who he was and especially what he thought, click here.
Amber pages:
1535, Francisco
Pizarro González founded Lima in Peru
1778, James Cook "discovered" the Hawaiian Islands ("found for Europeans"; the native population had long before worked out that they were there, and where "there" was), and named them the Sandwich Islands (not to be confused with the South Sandwich Islands)
1788, first convicts at Botany Bay
1867, birthday of Félix Rubén
García Sarmiento (Rubén Dario), the poetical equivalent of Cervantes in the
history of Spanish literature, though he was Nicaraguan, so a slightly
different dialect of Spanish. The father of Modernismo, and the reason why Sergio Ramirez et al later on have made Nicaragua a rival to Colombia as the
great land of literature among the Americas north and south. You can read some of his poetry here.
1919: opening of the Versailles conference
1943: end of the siege of Leningrad
1966: Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India
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