4 - “Prolem cum matre creatam”: the background to Montesquieu

Summary

In his 1808 commentary on De l'esprit des lois, later translated into English under the supervision of Thomas Jefferson, the political economist Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy attacks what he considers a central, but bizarre aspect of Montesquieu's thought. He insists that the “democratic republics” whose parameters the President sketches in the early books of his great treatise must be rejected as irretrievably nostalgic and perverse:

[Montesquieu] chooses the most austere rules, and those most likely to uproot in individuals all human feeling. In order to achieve his end, he permits without restriction that one should take the most violent measures, like those of equally dividing all lands, of never allowing one man to join together two estates, of forcing a father to leave his inheritance to one of his sons, and to have the others adopted by citizens without children, of not giving more than a middling dowry to girls, and when they are heiresses, to force them to marry their nearest relation, or even to require that the rich take in marriage, without dowry, the daughter of a poor citizen, and give a rich dowry to their own daughter to marry a poor citizen, etc., etc. He adds to this the deepest respect for everything that is ancient …

Elsewhere, Destutt de Tracy simply concludes that Montesquieu endorses “certain measures clearly contrary to distributive justice and to the sentiments natural to man,” and attributes this endorsement to a bewildering admiration for “many of the institutions of the ancients … an admiration of which I cannot partake, and which I am surprised to see in a man who has studied so widely”.