Persian Letters [antikvár]

introduction The Persian Letters {Lettres persanes) is perhaps the first great popular work of the European Enlightenment. Conceived around 1717, it was published anonymously in 1721 and enjoyed immediate notoriety. The playwright Marivaux was critical of its 'false brilliance' about serious subjects, while the historian and journalist Denis-François Camusat applauded its brilliance but called the contents 'dangerous'. A cleric, stung by its critical attitude to religion, told Montesquieu that his book 'would sell like hot cakes'. The prediction was correct, and Montesquieu later noted that booksellers, eager to cash in, implored members of the public to 'write them some Persian Letters'. The original two slim volumes clearly caught the mood of the moment. Montesquieu now stands as one of the great political thinkers of the modern world. His views on the nature of states and their constitutions had a tangible impact on the world around him. In Russia, Catherine the Great drew on his writing in her legislative reforms of the 1760s, and in America the Founding Fathers looked to his great Spirit of the Lam (De l'esprit des lois, 1748) in framing their constitution for the new republic. When in the early twenty-first century pundits everywhere worry about the compatibility of Islam and the West, we see Montesquieu's name invoked in discussions about the banning of the headscarf in France, in editorials about the war in Iraq, and in polemics about the separation of powers in the United States.1 Yet when encountered first in the 1720s, Montesquieu does not look like an obvious figure to anticipate the tireless scepticism of future philosophes. For one thing, they were from less privileged backgrounds, Voltaire the son of a bourgeois lawyer, Diderot the son of a provincial cutler. As an aristocratic landowner and magistrate, Montesquieu might rather have been expected to follow received wisdom about church and state, god and man. He began, however, 1 See e.g. Michael Johnson, 'Revisiting the French Guru of American Democracy', International Herald Tribune, 10 Mar. 2007.