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Château de la Brède, Montesquieu's birthplace. Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 kilometres (16 mi) south of Bordeaux. [4] His father, Jacques de Secondat (1654–1713), was a soldier with a long noble ancestry, including descent from Richard de la Pole, Yorkist claimant to the English crown.
Montesquieu's treatise, already widely disseminated, had an enormous influence on the work of many others, most notably: Catherine the Great, who produced Nakaz (Instruction); the Founding Fathers of the United States Constitution; and Alexis de Tocqueville, who applied Montesquieu's methods to a study of American society, in Democracy in America.
Frontispiece and title page of 1748 edition. Initially, Montesquieu only intended on writing a few pages on the topic. [1] However, the size of his topic overwhelmed him, so he chose to expand the scope of his writing from the beginnings of the Roman Republic to the decay of the late Roman Empire. [1]
Montesquieu was one of the foremost supporters of separating the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. His writings considerably influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States, such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who participated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 which drafted the Constitution.
The Americans closely followed English and Scottish political ideas, as well as some French thinkers such as Montesquieu. [115] As deists, they were influenced by ideas of John Toland and Matthew Tindal. There was a great emphasis upon liberty, republicanism, and religious tolerance. There was no respect for monarchy or inherited political power.
Proponents of the doux commerce theory argued that the spread of trade and commerce will decrease violence, including open warfare. [6] [7] Montesquieu wrote, for example, that "wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle" [8] and "The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace". [1]
By far the most important French sources to the American Enlightenment were Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations. Both informed early American ideas of government and were major influences on the U.S. Constitution. Voltaire's histories were widely read but seldom cited.
Céline Spector, Montesquieu, "Lettres persanes", de l’anthropologie à la politique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Louis Desgraves, Chronologie critique de la vie et des œuvres de Montesquieu, Paris: Champion, 1998, pp. 36–94. Philip Stewart, "Toujours Usbek," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11 (1999), pp. 141–150.