Cultural Amnesia (77 page)

MONTESQUIEU

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755) is one of
our ambassadors in history. Like Thucydides, Tacitus and Montaigne, he represents us in the depths of time, as if his mind were a space station built by the modern world and positioned in an
observational orbit above the surface of the past. His well-known commemorative medal, on the other hand, makes him look like a projection into the future from the Senate of ancient Rome. The
real man was a creature of his age, and very good at being so. Noble birth helped, but his brilliance was not of the kind that precluded sociability. He was a hit in the grand salons and no
stranger to frivolity.
The Persian Letters
(1721), his first famous book, started as something of a joke. A measure of his success is that today we
regard its central trick as commonplace: foreigners observe our society and find it strange. The French society that Montesquieu’s two imaginary visiting Persians described was in fact
heading downhill towards revolution, but it was delighted to be so wittily told that it was in a mess. Montesquieu was a Persian visitor himself when he spent two years in England, moving at
the highest level, fêted everywhere: a period of observation that was to yield crucial results for his
later work. First, however, came his
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline
(1734), a thriller which is probably the best port of entry for the new reader. His
undoubted masterpiece is heavier going:
The Spirit of Laws
(1748). One of the formative books of the modern world, it is still, in a hundred different
ways, relevant today. Perhaps, at the moment, it is most conspicuously relevant in the critique it implicitly delivers of its ostensible subject, multiculturalism. Montesquieu had practically
invented the concept that all cultures evolved in different ways from separate imperatives; and in
The Spirit of Laws
he continued that theme, but by
then he had seen the danger. In allowing the suggestion that all cultures might be equally valuable, room had been left for supposing that they might be equally virtuous. To guard against
this, he advanced the further proposition—buttressing his argument with reference to the British constitution he had studied at first hand—that beneath cultural variety there
were, or should be, values that did not change. In modern terms, he was concerned that a legitimate delight in the multiplicity of cultures should not develop into an ideology,
multiculturalism: an ideology that would entail the abandonment of any fixed concept of justice. Seemingly in the face of his own cultural relativism, Montesquieu declared that justice was
eternal. There is a fine introductory essay to Montesquieu by Isaiah Berlin (collected in his
Against the Cur rent
), but Berlin strangely failed to see
that Montesquieu’s point had deep consequences for liberalism, which Berlin thought a matter of contending values. Montesquieu thought the same, but he thought there was a fixed point.
Proposing, at least by implication, a liberalism dependent on a hard core of principles, and not just on tolerance, Montesquieu thus made a decisive pre-emptive intervention into the debate
that we are having now.

It is not impossible that the things which dishonoured him most
served him best. If he had shown a great soul from
the start, the whole world would have distrusted him; and if he had been hardy, he would not have given Antony time for
all the extravagance that led to ruin.

—MONTESQUIEU, PLÉIADE
EDITION, VOL. 2, P. 137

A
FTER FINALLY LEARNING
enough French to put myself in a condition where he might teach me more, I found Montesquieu too big to begin at the beginning. The above citation was the passage that addicted me to him. Dipping
at random into one of his Pléiade volumes, I chanced on this characterization of Augustus, and knew very soon that I would be occupied with Montesquieu for a long time into the future, so
I put the books away in full confidence that when I came back to them later I would be reading nothing else for days on end. That was how it worked out, except that the days turned to weeks. (I
own two complete sets of the Pléiade Montesquieu now, one to be occasionally carried with me on my travels, the other to be kept always safe at home against a rainy day, such as might
happen at the end of the world, an event that would have left him sad but not stunned.) Decades before, when I was first a student in Sydney, North’s Plutarch had had the same effect. The
big, ugly Modern Library edition was hard to love from the outside, but hard to leave once you were in. I could see straight away what Plutarch had done for the posters on Shakespeare’s
marquee. Even today, I can’t believe that the lists of dramatis personae for
Julius Caesar
and
Antony and
Cleopatra
—my favourite plays on a Shakespearean roster in which almost all are favourites—would strike us as quite so rich if Shakespeare had not already found Plutarch to be a
crowded bench of well-established characters all looking for what Hollywood used to call Additional Dialogue. Beyond that obvious connection, would all the other Shakespeare plays be the same as
they are without Plutarch: that is, without the idea and the example of character being destiny? Montaigne, said Stefan Zweig (in his
Europäisches
Erbe
—The European Heritage), read history not in order to become learned, but to see how other men had handled events, and so set himself beside them. By assessing the behaviour of
prominent characters in history we find a measure for ourselves. But one of our first assessments of ourselves is that we would be unlikely to attain such a magnificent
objectivity on our own: we need our guides to the human soul, and among them Montesquieu is hard to beat, because he can withhold his moral judgement to the cracking point without
letting go of it. Obviously he does not much admire Augustus as a man; but he can see Augustus’s greatness as an emperor; and finally he can see the connection between Augustus’s
greatness and his not being much of a man. This is quite a feat of detachment. Most of us would table our decision long before that.

Montesquieu can delay his judgement on Tiberius: a forbearance that not even Tacitus could show. Montesquieu, it should be
said, thought the world of Tacitus, “
qui abrégeoit tout parce qu’il voyoit tout
.” (“He abridged everything because he saw
everything.” Perfect.) Tacitus was charmed by Tiberius, but only as a maiden with a soft neck is charmed by the approach of a trained vampire. Like Tacitus, Montesquieu could appreciate
Tiberius as an artist of bastardry. “There is no crueller tyranny,” said Montesquieu, “than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.” A
connoisseur of murderous casuistry, Montesquieu was impressed by the efficiency Tiberius brought to the business of perverting the judicial system. From a distance of sixteen hundred years,
Montesquieu rewarded the imperial perpetrator with the quality of his prose: “
les couleurs de la jus tice
” is a magnificent phrase, one of those
perfect formulations that should be left in its original language as a tribute to the culture from which it emerged. Tacitus had seen that Tiberius not only wanted the Senate to be servile, but
despised it for flattering him. Yet Tacitus, as much fascinated as repelled, had his sense of irony exhausted by a satanically gifted individual. Montesquieu, less emotionally involved, saw a
point about Tiberius that extended to all mankind. “Like most men, he wanted contradictory things; his general politics were nowhere in accord with his particular passions. He would have
liked a Senate free and capable of making its government respected, but he also wanted a Senate to satisfy, at all times, his fears, his jealousies and his hatreds: finally the statesman gave way
contentedly to the man.” We are left free to deduce a universal principle. Unless constrained to do otherwise, the statesman will always give way to the man. Lord Acton’s later
observation about the corrupting nature of power is
already there, and already expounded in apprehensible human terms. Part of the impact comes from our recognition of what
has happened so often within ourselves: the feeling of relief and release as we slip from a rigid civic obligation into a spastic self-assertion.

Montesquieu was well aware, however, that the dolorous road of arbitrary imperial power led far past the
point set by the demoralization of the sane, and that beyond the corruptible personality there was such a thing as the outright psychopath, demented from the womb, or anyway from the cradle.
Montesquieu had no doubt that Caligula was crazy. But Montesquieu is able to enrich his condemnation—to make it an analysis, and not just a bleat of anguish—by examining how
Caligula’s blatant insanity did not preclude subtlety of intellect, and might even have encouraged it. He drew Caligula as a sophist of cruelty. Descended from both Antony and Augustus,
Caligula said he would punish the consuls if they celebrated the day of rejoicing established in memory of the battle of Actium, and that he would punish them if they didn’t. (For the
puzzled or the innocent, here’s how it worked: Antony lost the battle of Actium to Octavian, the future Augustus. Therefore, those who celebrated the battle dishonoured Antony, while those
who didn’t dishonoured Augustus. The way was thus left open to punish everyone.)

By entertaining the possibility that cruelty could be allied with a kind of artistic ingenuity, Montesquieu pioneered a
field of study that we by no means exhaust by reading the Marquis de Sade: if only it were so. Many of de Sade’s effects were merely cumulative, and anyway they were almost all fictional.
They were ideas he masturbated to in gaol, and the quill was the only conduit between his imagination and reality. He didn’t have an office with a telephone. In the twentieth century, alas,
one of the ways that the same brand of madness proved itself in power was by the ingenuity which added, to physical tortures unseen since medieval times, a range of psychological tortures which
had been thought to have died with the nuttier Roman emperors. If Saddam Hussein needed to acquire by education what he did not have from instinct, he could have learned from Stalin the
techniques of mentally destroying parents by attacking their children. (“My handsome son Uday,” we can imagine him saying, “is looking forward to meeting
your daughter.”) But not even Stalin’s ingenuity was without precedent in ancient times, and Hitler’s fondness for
Sippenhaft—
the German term for punishing the innocent family along with the guilty criminal—was a direct hand-on from Tiberius. (Stalin’s penchant for
obliterating the entire family of an Enemy of the People was not really
Sippenhaft,
because he was cleaning up a whole bourgeois element anyway: i.e., they
couldn’t
not
be guilty, so there was no arbitrariness to the punishment.) On a less exalted level in the infernal Nazi world, Victor Klemperer, in his
diaries—
I Shall Bear Witness
and
To the Bitter End
—records the exquisite dilemma of the Dresden Jews in
the years when they supposedly still had a life, before the Final Solution officially got under way.

Victor Klemperer is sometimes given a niggling press because he seems lost in everyday detail. But when everyday detail
was so horrible, to record it was an act of heroism, and nobody who has read his diaries should lose an opportunity of pointing out to anyone who hasn’t that they constitute one of the
great documents of the twentieth century. At the heart of the document is the perception that the Jews were placed under designedly intolerable psychological pressure from the first day of the
new regime. When they were still granted the luxury of travel by tram to their increasingly distant places of decreasingly remunerative work, they were permitted to ride only on a platform which
could not be reached except though a compartment they were forbidden to enter. Their dilemma was between either walking to and from work, which was steadily less possible, or boarding the tram
and facing almost certain punishment. The “almost” made things worse: if there had been no alternative to staying at home and starving yourself and your family to death, it might have
been easier to face. But there was an alternative. The alternative, however, was to face the dilemma. A more delicately calibrated mechanism for inducing neurosis in human beings could scarcely
have been devised. But devised it was: though it would be a relief to hear that the idea had simply evolved without a creator, there can be no doubt that some perversely talented Nazi factotum
sat down to a desk and thought it out. Like Tacitus only more so, Montesquieu deserves our thanks for preparing us to face our own time. Tacitus thought that there were arguments for the use of
torture. Montesquieu
agreed, but said that there was something in our nature that cried out against it. Tacitus predicted what we have to face, but Montesquieu predicted us
facing it, and thus ranks even higher among those men of the past who tell us that the future was always there—or anyway that enough of it had already happened to reassure us that the rest
was not really unprecedented, just anachronistic. There is thus a kind of solace in reading them, saddening though it is; and with Montesquieu the solace becomes an inspiration, as if our doubts
had met their voice.