Biography

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède and de Montesquieu was born on January 18, 1689 in Bordeaux, France. His father, Jacques de Secondat, was revered by many in Bordeaux for his service in Hungary fighting Turks. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, was a rich noblewoman who brought a valuable wine-producing property, La Bréde, into the family. She passed away when Montesquieu was only 7 years old, leaving him to become the Baron of La Bréde, as her oldest child.
When Montesquieu was 11 years old, he was sent to the Collége de Juilly near Paris where he studied ancient and modern history. Unfortunately, there are no records of his work from this time. He began writing political commentary at the University of Bordeaux where he studied to become a legal advocate. He held a licentiate in law after three years at the university and became a legal advocate. After graduating, he lived in Paris briefly to study law in the courts and but moved back to Bordeaux upon his father’s death to claim his inheritance. In 1714, Montesquieu became a counselor to the Bordeaux Parliament.
In 1715, he married Jeanne de Lartigue, a wealthy Protestant with whom Montesquieu shared three children. Little is known of her life other than she was the trusted steward of Montesquieu’s property in his absence. It was during this time that great national transformations, namely the death of Louis XIV, France’s longest-reigning monarch of all time, prompted Montesquieu to begin developing his own political philosophy.
In 1721, he published his first major literary work titled “Persian Letters”—a satirical account of Parisian society from the perspective of Persian travelers. Initially, these letters were published anonymously, as his letters critiqued the foundations of different social classes, catholicism, and Louis XIV’s reign, which were all highly contentious subjects. He also feared punishment from the government, as the King was only recently deceased. However, his letters gained more positive literary traction than he expected, and he continued to write.
Montesquieu’s most famous and influential work, Spirit of the Laws, came more than 20 years after Parisian Letters. Spirit of the Laws contained Montesquie’s most cited and recognized political theory of separation of powers, which many nations would later model their governments after, including the United States. He spent nearly 21 years developing his separation of powers ideology, which included trips to Italy and England in which he studied their governments’ and national laws. He spent the rest of his life after this traveling between La Bréde and Paris, where he was involved in many literary and political circles until his death in 1755.