Montesquieu's split of power into three branches shaped the US Constitution
A Bordeaux judge who first found fame with a satire narrated by two Persian visitors went on to write the book that taught constitution-makers to divide power. Montesquieu argued that when one person or body makes, enforces and judges laws, liberty disappears. America's founders listened; the Catholic Church banned the book.
Charles Louis de Secondat was born on 18 January 1689 at the Château de la Brède, about 25 kilometres south of Bordeaux. His mother, an heiress who brought the barony into the family, died when he was seven. He was schooled by Catholic teachers at Juilly, became a counsellor in the Bordeaux Parlement in 1714, married the Protestant Jeanne de Lartigue, and in 1716 inherited his uncle's fortune, title and senior judicial office. He grew up amid upheaval: Britain's new constitutional monarchy and the death of Louis XIV, succeeded by a five-year-old king.
The Persian Letters of 1721 mocked French absurdities through foreign eyes, was an instant hit and was pirated at once. He sold his judicial post in 1726, entered the Académie Française in 1728, and set off on a long European tour. In England from 1729 to 1731 he studied how the constitution protected liberty and was initiated as a Freemason. Back at La Brède he worked through a library of some 3,000 volumes.
His history of Rome's rise and fall in 1734 argued that general causes, not chance or individual heroes, drive events; had Caesar and Pompey not seized the Republic, he suggested, others would have. The Spirit of Law, published anonymously in 1748, classified governments by their animating principle: virtue in republics, honour in monarchies, fear in despotisms. That comparative approach led later scholars to count him among the founders of anthropology and social science.
Its best-known argument separates legislative, executive and judicial power so none can outweigh the others; if judges also made laws, he warned, power over citizens' lives would become arbitrary. Thomas Nugent's 1750 English translation found eager readers in Britain and the American colonies, and Catherine the Great borrowed heavily from it, discarding what clashed with autocracy. The Sorbonne denounced it and in 1751 the Church put it on the Index. Fearing blindness from a cataract, Montesquieu died of fever in Paris on 10 February 1755.
Source: Montesquieu
