Montesquieu: The Rules of War and Lessons For Today

by Paul A. Rahe

In an earlier post, I bemoaned the fact that very few well-educated Americans know who Montesquieu was – and I drew attention to the fact that the author of The Spirit of Laws was more often cited by the American Founding Fathers than any other figure, that his magnum opus was quickly translated into virtually every European language, and that he exercised an influence in England and on the European continent during and for a time after the second half of the eighteenth century no less profound than that which he exercised in our own country.

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Needless to say, there were reasons for Montesquieu’s pre-eminence. That his thinking deserves attention today may be less obvious, but it is no less true. To begin with, Montesquieu was the first to grasp the conditions within which modern war is waged, and his insights bear on the history of our country and on its situation today.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu was born on the 18th of January 1689, at a time in which the Glorious Revolution was underway in England, and he came of age in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1713. He watched from afar with dismay as England’s duke of Marlborough repeatedly annihilated the legions of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France: first at the battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704, when Montesquieu was fifteen; then – in the brief span of years stretching from 1706, when Montesquieu was seventeen, to 1709, when he was twenty – at Ramillies, Oudenarde, Lille, and Malplaquet.

Later, in the commonplace book that he labeled Mes pensées, Montesquieu would look back on these events and remark,

That day at Blenheim, we lost the confidence that we had acquired by thirty years of victories. . . . Whole battalions gave themselves up as prisoners of war; we regretted their being alive, as we would have regretted their deaths.

It seemed as if God, who wished to set limits to empires, had given to the French this capacity to acquire, along with this capacity to lose, this fire that nothing resists, along with this despondency that makes one ready to submit to anything.

In fact, the situation was even more dramatic. Prior to Blenheim, the French had not lost a major battle in 150 years. Looking back on the battle of Blenheim, Winston Churchill would write,

Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions in the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.

We may find this awkward, but Churchill was undoubtedly right. The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago this past November, and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, which followed not long thereafter, worked a similar sea-change in our own world.

For members of Montesquieu’s generation, for young Frenchmen who had watched in horror as their country’s armies suffered defeat after defeat, the War of the Spanish Succession marked a turning point. In the age of Louis XIV, no one in France bothered to learn English – apart from some of those who lived in the port cities on France’s Atlantic coast and were involved in the trade with England. In the aftermath of the Sun King’s humiliation on the field of the sword, all of that changed. Not only did the young Voltaire, born a few years after Montesquieu, journey to England; he learned the language well enough to be able to begin composing works in it; and he was by no means alone. Montesquieu arrived in London not long after Voltaire left, and both soon thereafter published books inspired by what they had learned.

For Voltaire, the subject addressed in his Philosophical Letters was a passing fancy. For Montesquieu, however, this subject was a life-long- obsession – even though, or perhaps because, he found, he dared not address this subject in the volume that he began composing in the early 1730s after his return from England (a volume in which his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline was meant to be a prelude to Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and to a work on England, its Constitution, and way life).

Montesquieu was the first to recognize that, at the end of the seventeenth century, a profound and arguably permanent transformation had taken place in European politics. He saw that commerce had replaced war as the force dominant in international relations; that a well-ordered Carthage could now defeat Rome on the field of the sword; and that, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Great Britain – with its separation of powers, its policy of religious toleration, its devotion to industry and trade, and its empire over the sea – had come to occupy a pre-eminence that no existing continental power could hope to challenge. That European monarchy – with its hereditary aristocracy, its ethos of honor, its suspicion of trade, and its appetite for conquest, empire, and glory – could not be sustained in an age in which money had become the sinews of war: this he also knew.

In Montesquieu’s opinion, two successive revolutions, neither likely to be reversed, provided this transformation in politics with its underpinning. The first of these took place in the sphere of religion. Montesquieu was persuaded that Machiavelli was correct in supposing that, when Christianity supplanted paganism, it made classical republicanism obsolete.

When the virtue of the ancients was “in full force,” Montesquieu writes in The Spirit of Laws, “they did things that we no longer see & which astonish our little souls.” If his contemporaries are unable to rise to the same level, it is, he suggests, because the “education” given the ancients “never suffered contradiction” while “we receive three educations different” from and even “contrary” to one another: “that of our fathers, that of our schoolmasters, that of the world. What we are told in the last overthrows the ideas imparted by the first two.” In short, there is now “a contrast between the engagements” which arise “from religion” and “those” which arise “from the world” that “the ancients knew nothing of.” This is why the moderns possess such “little souls.”

That was one aspect of the revolution that had taken place. There was another that Machiavelli had also noticed. In the Florentine’s Art of War, when the dialogue’s protagonist, Fabrizio Colonna, laments the decline of martial virtue in Europe, he traces its disappearance to ancient Rome’s elimination of the republics that had once flourished there. Europe’s failure to recover after the fall of the Roman empire he explains partly with regard to the difficulty involved in restoring something that has been spoiled. Then he mentions a second, no less salient cause: “the fact that the mode of living today, as a consequence of the Christian religion, does not impose the necessity for self-defense that existed in ancient times.” In antiquity, he explains,

men conquered in war were either massacred or were consigned to perpetual enslavement where they led their lives in misery. Then, the towns conquered were either destroyed or the inhabitants were driven out, their goods seized, and, after being sent out, they were dispersed throughout the world. And so those overcome in war suffered every last misery. Frightened at this prospect, men kept military training alive and honored those who were excellent in it. But today this fear is for the most part lost. Of the conquered, few are massacred; none are held for long in prison since they are easily freed. Cities, even if they have rebelled a thousand times, are not eliminated; men are left with their goods so that most of the time what is feared is a ransom. In consequence, men do not want to subject themselves to military orders.

This alteration in the rules of war had an additional consequence, of particular interest to Montesquieu, which Colonna is no less inclined to regret: “That present wars impoverish the lords who are victorious as much as those who lose – for, if the one loses his state, the other loses his money and his possessions.” In antiquity, he explains, war was for the victors a source of enrichment: they could sell into slavery those they captured and seize and sell their lands. In modern times, thanks to Christianity, the costs all too often exceed the gains.

To the changes in outlook effected by Christianity Montesquieu was no less sensitive than Machiavelli. The developments within the law of nations – which Machiavelli’s interlocutor traces to Christianity, laments, and evidently hopes to reverse – Montesquieu in his Reflections on Universal Monarchy takes as an historic achievement, and it is on this basis also that he judges universal monarchy of the sort that Louis XIV had attempted to establish a moral impossibility. “In earlier times,” the Frenchman explains, “one would destroy the towns that one had captured, one would sell the lands and, far more important, the inhabitants as well.”

The sacking of a town would pay the wages of an Army, & a successful Campaign would enrich a Conqueror. At present, we regard such barbarities with a horror no more than just. We ruin ourselves [financially] in capturing places which capitulate, which we preserve intact, & which most of the time we return.

The Romans carried off to Rome in their Triumphs all the wealth of the Nations they conquered. Today victories confer none but sterile Laurels.

When a Monarch sends an Army into enemy country, he sends at the same time a part of his treasure so that the army can subsist; he enriches the country he has begun to conquer, & quite often he puts it in a condition to drive him out.

Herein lies what Montesquieu regarded as a delightful paradox, for in modern times imperial expansion tends to eliminate the conditions prerequisite for the imperial venture’s success. “Here,” he will later write in his Spirit of Laws, “it is necessary to render homage to our modern times, to the species of reasoning dominant at present, to today’s religion, to our philosophy, & our mores” as well.

The second of the two seemingly irreversible revolutions noted by Montesquieu took place in the sphere of commerce.  In Montesquieu’s view, Europe differs from the rest of the world in one crucial particular. “At present,” he writes in his Reflections on Universal Monarchy, it “is responsible for all the Commerce in the Universe & for the Carrying Trade in its entirety.” He is persuaded as well that in his own day, at least in Europe, Machiavelli’s famous dictum has been proven wrong and that money really has become the sinews of war: that, “to the extent to which a State takes a greater or lesser part in Commerce or in the Carrying Trade, its power necessarily grows or diminishes.” In consequence, he contends, since war gets in the way of trade, “a State which appears to be victorious abroad ruins itself [financially] at home, while states which remain neutral augment their strength.” It can even happen that “those conquered regain their strength.” In fact, “decline generally sets in at the time of the greatest successes, for these can neither be achieved nor sustained except by violent means.”

These two revolutions – the rise of Christianity and progress in commerce – allow us to comprehend how it is that, in modern times, a well-ordered Carthage, such as England, “whose principal strength consists in her credit and commerce,” could “render fictive wealth real,” equip “her Hannibal” with “as many men as she could buy,” and “send them into combat,” while Louis XIV’s ill-ordered French Rome, “in a spirit of vertigo,” patiently awaited “the blows” solely “in order to receive them” and fielded “great armies” only “to see” her “fortresses taken” and her “garrisons deprived of courage, and to languish in a defensive war for which” she had “no capacity at all.”

England’s status as an island, its commercial orientation, the fact that it was interested in policing the sea and keeping it open for trade and not in making conquests on the continent of Europe, as well as the fact that in England an elected Parliament exercised supremacy and that its citizens trusted their government and were willing to lend it money – all of these considerations, taken together, gave to the great antagonist of Louis XIV’s would-be universal monarchy a strength that no martial monarchy could overcome. This was the first great fact that Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws brought to the attention of England’s colonists in North America, and figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton did not miss the significance of an observation that Montesquieu made in passing regarding their fellow Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers – to the effect that another commercial people was taking “shape in the forests” of the New World under England’s protection, a great people endowed by it with a “form of government, which brings with it prosperity.”

Montesquieu’s hypothesis concerning the transformation of war has been sorely tested on four occasions since his day – first, in the Napoleonic Wars; then, in World War I and II; and, finally in the Cold War. On each occasion, a commercial, maritime power not unlike ancient Carthage – or a coalition of such powers – squared off against a martial, continental power modeled on ancient Rome; and, on each occasion, the commercial power or powers managed initially to stave off defeat and later to achieve a decisive victory.

That this may not always be the result Montesquieu also demonstrates. Commercial powers tend to take their eyes off the ball. They are impatient. They tend to lose in negotiation what they have gained in struggle. They tend also to be cheap. They mistake a truce for a peace, and they disarm at the end of a war to a point that invites a renewal of war. William of Orange fought Louis XIV to a standstill in the War of the League of Augsburg, which ended in 1697. Four years later, thanks to the fact that the English parliament rejected William’s pleas that a military force adequate to deter Louis be kept up, the English found themselves involved in the War of the Spanish Succession. There is much to be learned from Montesquieu.

His reasoning, as I have argued in detail in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and more briefly in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, deserves today the close attention that it was accorded in and for a time after the second half of the eighteenth century.


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Posted Jan 3rd 2010 at 6:29 am in Culture, Defense, Economics, Education, Featured Story, History, Politics | 140 Comments