46 Chapter III
of one’s rank in society, a desire for recognition and public esteem, an enjoyment of
external marks of high position, a sense of obligation imposed by one’s standing or
the known deeds of one’s ancestors, a greater readiness to accept danger than to
incur disgrace, a refusal to be humiliated even by a king. Because noblemen had
such a sense of honor they could not succumb to the fear by which despots ruled.
They would resist their own debasement, and so protect the liberties of all. There is
doubtless more truth in this diagnosis than is palatable to popular equalitarians.
Palatable or not, there is no disputing that for Montesquieu the preservation of
political liberty presupposed a hierarchic form of society and an aristocratic code
of personal honor.
The Spirit of Laws set forth, in an amplified and cogent form, what members of
the constituted bodies of Europe had long been saying in more fragmentary ways;
it was therefore immediately popular, and influential in the formulation of consti-
tutional thought. It has often been said that Montesquieu misunderstood En-
gland; it has been alleged that the growth of cabinet government in England, and
the increasing power of the House of Commons, had already put Montesquieu’s
emphasis on a balance between King, Lords, and Commons out of date. It seems
likely, however, that Montesquieu interpreted eighteenth- century England more
correctly than some later writers who sought to make England prematurely demo-
cratic. There is ground for believing that the Prime Minister was more dependent
on the King than on either house of Parliament. To Holdsworth, the authority on
English legal and constitutional history, it seemed that Montesquieu, and along
with him Delolme, Vattel, Blackstone, and Burke, were quite right in holding the
separation and balance of powers, between King, Lords, and Commons, to be the
distinctive feature of the British eighteenth- century constitution, as, he says, it re-
mained down to 1832.^6
Montesquieu’s book went through half a dozen French editions in three years. It
was immediately translated into English, in which it reached its tenth edition by
- It was the best- known modern French book in America. It appeared in
Dutch in 1771, in Italian in 1777, in German in 1789, in Russian in 1801, doubt-
less encouraged in Russia by the young patrician reformers about Alexander I. A
traveler saw it in Hungary as early as 1751, translated into Latin, the official politi-
cal language of the Magyars.
The extent of an influence is best seen when we find it in unexpected places, in
the minds of men who are thinking of other subjects. Edward Gibbon offers an
example. Gibbon of course knew France very well. In Paris in 1763, he found that
intellectuals and men of high social standing mixed more easily in that country
than in England; he was a little irked to be received in France as a writer only, in-
stead of in the quality of “a man of rank for which I have such indisputable
claims.”^7 Years later, as historian of the Roman Empire, he related how in A.D.
212 all subjects of the empire became Roman citizens. He found here one of the
causes of subsequent despotism and degradation. He was moved to make a general
6 W. S. Holdsworth, “The Conventions of the 18th Century Constitution,” in Iowa Law Review,
XVIII, 2 ( Jan. 1932), 161–80. See also below, Chapter VI.
7 Quoted by Elinor G. Barber, The Bourgeoisie in 18th Century France (Princeton, 1955), 133.