|
EYE ON EUROPE |
 |
|
MONTESQUIEU, MR.BUSH |
 THE EVER POPULAR MONTESQUIEU |
Revisiting a French guru
of the Founding Fathers
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
BORDEAUX
You can hardly
turn around in the Bordeaux area without encountering a plaque,
a statue or other reminder of Montesquieu, one of the main thinkers
whose books helped inspire the American Constitution.
The Bordeaux area glorifies him, and rightly so. Montesquieu deserves a fresh look today, especially for Americans in light of the expanded powers of the Bush presidency. Montesquieu--a defender of checks and balances--must be spinning in his grave.
The old Frenchman is omnipresent over here. The Lycée Montesquieu is around the corner from my home and I often have business on the rue Esprit des Lois, a street named for his masterwork, “The Spirit of Laws”. I can’t think of another street anywhere in the world named for a classic book.
Montesquieu is alive and well, 252 years after his passing. A French modernist composer, Jean-Paul Noguès, recently wrote a cantata based on “The Spirit of Laws”, surely a unique source text for a work of music. And a new book, “Montesquieu: The Women and the Wine,” brings warmth and humanity to this venerated figure from the French Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Just 15 minutes from my house, his Chateau de La Brède survives as an imposing monument and the site for gatherings of Montesquieu admirers. His last direct descendant, Countess Jacqueline de Chabannes, lived in the chateau until shortly before her death in 2004 at age 92.
It is now maintained by a foundation she established for posterity. A pity. I had been intending for some time to meet this lady in her chateau and interview her while practicing my upperclass manners. Her friends describe her as a lovable eccentric living alone in the chateau for most of her life but always in direct touch with the people of the village of La Brède--a rarity for the French aristocracy. She drove her own car, did her shopping alone, and knew everyone in town. In return, she was always addressed respectfully as “Madame la Comtesse.”
Charles de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, known universally as simply “Montesquieu,” is relevant today in the U.S. debate over the abuse of presidential power in the United States. Critics say President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney want powers that were reined in after excesses in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s under the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations..
As I flipped through one of his books recently while at a sidewalk café in the sunshine of springtime Bordeaux, I felt an eerie resonance. Montesquieu lived under a monarchy but spent his final years searching for better ways to combine order and freedom. And he found it. A key tenet he advocated was the separation of powers--the checks and balances of the separate judicial, legislative and executive branches--which the early Americans adopted outright for their Constitution.
“The Spirit of Laws,” a translation of which was published in Philadelphia and corrected by Thomas Jefferson, was “the best-read book in the Colonies after the Bible,” Prof. Emerita Joyce Appleby, a specialist in American History at the University of California at Los Angeles, told me by phone. She has called the current concentration of powers in the U.S. presidency nothing less than a constitutional crisis.
In an op-ed article she co-wrote with former Sen. Gary Hart, she recalled that in the post-Nixon years “Congress passed laws making clear that presidents were not to engage in unconstitutional behavior in the interest of ‘national security’”. Past and current abuses concern the Fourth Amendment protections against searches and seizures without judicial warrants establishing “probable cause,” attempts to assassinate foreign leaders and surveillance of American citizens.
“Now the Iraq war is being used to justify similar abuses,” the article charged.
Separation of powers was destined to be a key concept in the American Constitution, and James Madison argued for including it. Knowledge of this prompted me to look again at “The Federalist Papers,” which had been gathering dust in my library for 50 years.
“The oracle who is always consulted on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu,” Madison wrote in No. 47. And he quotes Montesquieu as saying that “there can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body or magistrates.” Accumulation of powers “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” he concluded.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, would love Montesquieu. All the ammunition she needs is there.
Thomas Jefferson and others cooled to the great Frenchman in later years, at odds with such ideas as warning that democracy would be manageable only in small republics. Jefferson as President had bigger ideas for the United States, and indeed doubled its size with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Yet Montesquieu’s influence on Jefferson is beyond historical dispute. Jefferson was so imbued with French ideas and culture that Patrick Henry once mocked him as a man who even “abjured his native victuals” in favor of French cooking. One can only sympathize with Jefferson, whose native victuals were fairly basic--grits, corn bread, porridge, a side of bacon.
Mme. Monique Brut, author of “Montesquieu: The Women and the Wine,” tells me she and other writers work to “keep Montesquieu alive through his writings and our activities.” She studied more than 600 letters by and to him to sketch her lively portrait of him--an intellectual who had a taste for the sensual but always within limits. I asked her to elaborate. “I mean he slept with various women but only one at a time.”
She believes Montesquieu’s lifelong study of governments and societies in Germany, Austria, Holland, Italy and England qualify him as the first sociologist and the first true European. He was so committed to first-hand research that he embarked on a three-year study tour of Europe, leaving his pregnant wife behind in the chateau. He was particularly drawn to the English constitutional monarchy, noting that the House of Commons gave voice to the people in an orderly fashion.
Monesquieu’s library of 3,800 volumes, then one of Europe’s largest private libraries, is preserved in the rare books department of Bordeaux’s Municipal Library. When I visited the collection recently and leafed through the works it was electrifying to find scraps of paper inserted here and there with comments written in his own hand. “He rarely made notes on the margins of the books themselves,” curator Hélène de Bellaigue told me. “He was a confirmed bibliophile.”
Montsquieu’s wide-ranging mind brought him mixed fortunes in his lifetime. While avidly read in America, his masterwork was subjected to the notorious Vatican Index of works banned by the Catholic Church. And in France he was criticized by progressive colleagues for being too pro-British and pro-monarchy. The French, writes one historian, felt he was “too fond of talking about the nature of liberty and too pointed in implying that France had very little of it.”
©2007 by Michael Johnson. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted March 19, 2007.
You can comment
on this column online. Please address your message to either
"The Editors" or Michael Johnson. To send an email,
click here and don't forget to mention Michael's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|