Catherine Volpilhac-Auger’s biography of Montesquieu (originally published in 2017 in French) offers a remarkable account of the life and times of Charles Louis de Secondat Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu as a foundational thinker in the history of ideas. She argues that Montesquieu is, first, a man who through his various works enabled his contemporaries to “think differently” about the world (pp. 2–3). Drawing on her extensive work with (relatively) recently opened archives on Montesquieu’s correspondence and major and minor works, Volpilhac-Auger disabuses the reader of long-standing errant interpretations of his life and ideas that appear insufficiently attentive to the documented evidence. Still, her biography is not a radical departure; rather, readers will “know a little better what [Montesquieu] could not do, or say, or write, especially if we avoid the temptation, which is the easy solution, of projecting today’s manners of living and thinking onto someone who lived more than two centuries ago” (p. 7). At once, Volpilhac-Auger’s biography is both a revision and a recovery. It paints a picture of Montesquieu as he would have seen himself and advances foundations for new and exciting Montesquieu scholarship.
Volpilhac-Auger’s biography features nine chapters organized around Montesquieu’s major life events and works. Her opening chapter foregrounds the formative influences of Montesquieu’s education and of his immediate family—his father, mother, siblings, uncle, and an anonymous beggar godfather, Juilly—on his future development. She balances and humanizes Labrède’s (Montesquieu’s childhood name) developing familial relations and (co)curricular environments and passions, such as poetry, philosophy, and theater, while displaying little patience for previous biographers’ “invented,” “foundationless,” “awkward,” and “ignorant” attempts to reconstruct Montesquieu’s early life (pp. 9, 15, 17, 18, 24).
In the second chapter, Volpilhac-Auger emphasizes Labrède’s turn to an apprenticeship in law, with an eye toward resisting anachronistic imputations (pp. 36, 38, 41). She helpfully details the origins of the Lettres persanes (as a byproduct of his boredom with the law) and Labrède’s “moment” with Arcadio Wang, while recounting the turbulent political context and burgeoning intellectual pursuits informing (or subverting) the young polymath’s legal training in Paris. Yet, her account suffers slightly from its frequent recourse to begging questions about Labrède’s motives, options, and encounters (pp. 38, 40, 48, 51).
Chapter 3 offers valuable reflections on the Baron de la Brède’s life and work after his father’s death and before his rise to fame as the author of the celebrated Lettres persanes. Volpilhac-Auger commandingly displays intimate details of the baron’s marriage and the early influences of Machiavelli, Cicero, Descartes, Bayle, and others on the president à mortier’s religious writing. Montesquieu’s privileging of intellectual interests—that is, science, math, botany, climate, and literature—over formal legal responsibilities continues both here and in the subsequent chapter, with a detailed analysis of the genesis and publication process of the Lettres persanes.
The fourth chapter features a Montesquieu flush with his recent success yet still searching for stimulating intellectual endeavors and passions beyond the “well-marked path” laid out by his family, early benefactors, and even by France. Volpilhac-Auger’s dismissive tone toward earlier biographical blunders and assumptions in chapters 3 and 4 (pp. 58, 75–76, 83), although understandable, seem somewhat uncharitable. Moreover, the continual anticipation of The Spirit of Law up to this point (pp. 15, 27, 38, 53, 55, 57, 64, 69, 77, 85, 92, 95, 96, 112), even though appreciated, risks opening the author to the criticism she will levy later against other biographers: namely, that biographies of Montesquieu often risk implying that all roads lead to 1748 (pp. 184–86).
Chapter 5 turns abroad, noting Montesquieu’s fraught (but successful) path to the Académie Française on his way to “discover new worlds.” As Montesquieu deepens his analysis of agriculture, commerce, slavery, war, and diplomacy abroad, he also develops respect for the aesthetics of Italian visual and performative art (which informed his Essay on Taste [1757]), the religious pluralism of Germany and the Netherlands, and the complexity of political institutions in Austria and England. Much of this is known, but Volpilhac-Auger compellingly traces connections across Montesquieu’s varied interests that will undoubtedly generate future avenues for research.
The sixth chapter tracks the weight of Montesquieu’s travels on his future work. Volpilhac-Auger catalogs Montesquieu’s extensive library and classification system (sometimes to a fault) and facilitates a much-needed look into the Lumiere’s reading and writing process, especially as it pertains to China. Moreover, she helpfully weighs the benefits and limits of using Montesquieu’s anecdotal writings—namely, Spicilège and My Thoughts—while providing correctives to the reception history and current interpretations of Considerations on the Romans (1734). The brief glosses on Universal Monarchy and the lesser known Histoire véritable are also worth consideration.
The seventh chapter foregrounds Esprit de lois but not at the expense of more intimate biographical details, such as Montesquieu’s amorous relations, health challenges, and tensions with salon acquaintances, chateau neighbors, his children, and even the king. Much of the material on the composition, influences, and substance of Esprit de lois is well known. Volpilhac-Auger acknowledges this explicitly and through somewhat charitable citations of other Montesquieu biographers and scholars; however, her account shines in noting that, as a project, Esprit de lois “came on progressively, with the advance of the extracts, notes, and works through which Montesquieu’s ‘principles’ were taking shape; the work was constructed by feeding on earlier works which it reoriented, recomposed, and rewrote. A progressive emergence then, rather than an act of birth” (p. 185). Here, the reader is (re)oriented to one of Volpilhac-Auger’s main contributions: an archivally informed revision of Montesquieu’s most well-known work and its place in his œuvre. Its development and significance were hardly inevitable; rather, contingency features equally in its content and production, due both to his intellectual shifts and factors beyond his control, such as the printing process. Conceptual and methodological continuities across his works and preoccupations remain, but scholars would do well to cease filtering all of Montesquieu through Esprit de lois—a powerful conclusion indeed.
Chapter 8 signals an impending curtain call, with its focus on Montesquieu’s final six years of life. Volpilhac-Auger devotes ample text to the stress of printing challenges and critical responses to the text but loses nothing of the narrative’s personal flavor, emphasizing other stressors in Montesquieu’s life, including a construction lawsuit in Bordeaux, the deaths of Madame de Tencin and his brother, and the general fatigue of being misunderstood (sans être entendu). The conflicting accounts surrounding Montesquieu’s death (“Did he repent of his writings or no?”) form the bulk of chapter 9 and make for a nuanced, if not ambiguous, conclusion to a complex life.
Overall, Volpilhac-Auger’s biography of Montesquieu reflects a seasoned scholar’s work of more than 20 years that cannot be judged by a moment’s reading. It should be approved or condemned as a whole, as Montesquieu would have it. To this reviewer, Volpilhac-Auger’s biography will be as essential for this generation of Montesquieu scholars and generalists as Robert Shackleton’s Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (1961) and Louis Desgraves’s Montesquieu (1986) works were for previous generations. To this end, the chronology and selected bibliography serve as essential points de départ for any scholar looking to find (or revisit) the highest-quality French and English materials on Montesquieu.
