to a good family and moved habitually in the best society.
His milieu and his point of view were different from those of typical bourgeois, such as Marais and Barbier. He was a country gentleman, and was fond of strolling about his vineyards, and talking to his tenants and labourers. 'I like talking to peasants,' he said; 'they are not learned enough to reason perversely.' But his attitude towards them was that of a great Whig nobleman or squire. Of their feelings and points of view he could know nothing. The third estate, which was nothing and was to be everything, was to him, for most purposes, an unknown world[1]. But, though he was not wholly free from the faults of his class and his time, he was a great gentleman, with a genuine public spirit, a genuine love of liberty, a genuine hatred of oppression, cruelty, intolerance, and injustice. Among the three great political thinkers of the day, Montesquieu stands for liberty, as Voltaire stands for efficiency, and Rousseau for equality[1]. If Lord Acton's projected History of Liberty had ever seen the light, Montesquieu would doubtless have been among its greatest heroes.
In the next place Montesquieu belonged to a hereditary caste—the caste which supplied the staff of
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 'On turning from Montesquieu to Rousseau we may fancy that we have been present at some Parisian salon, where an elegant philosopher has been presenting to fashionable hearers conclusions daintily arranged in sparkling epigrams and suited for embodiment in a thousand brilliant essays. Suddenly, there has entered a man stained with the filth of the streets, his utterance choked with passion,a savage menace lurking in every phrase, and announcing himself as the herald of a furious multitude, ready to tear to pieces all the beautiful theories and formulas which stand between them and their wants.'—Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, p. 191.
