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C H A P T E R V Montesquieu and the Huguenots: A Conservative's View of Minority Rights As the most conservative of the major thinkers of the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu might seem at first glance an unlikely champion of civil rights for non-conformists. Indeed, in his widely read L'Esprit des lots, the scholarly magistrate added to the embarrassment of the Huguenots by reviving the old hypothesis that Protestantism and republicanism went hand in hand. Politics apart, Montesquieu tended to find Protestants morally prudish and culturally Philistine. Yet, whatever reservations he may have had concerning their world-view, neither his character nor his circumstances would allow Montesquieu to remain indifferent to the sufferings of his Protestant fellow countrymen. Montesquieu had a more direct personal acquaintance with the French Protestant community than most philosophes. As the husband of a Huguenot, he was able to form close friendships with leading members of the Calvinist "internal emigration." As traveller and scholar, he met a number of Europe's most gifted Protestant thinkers and writers, men such as the Genevan theologian Vernet and the itinerant publicist La Beaumelle. His most celebrated works, the Lettres persanes and L'Esprit des lois, were edited and published by Calvinist refugees. Finally, his cosmopolitan and tolerant inclinations were broadened as a result of contact with members of a second disadvantaged minority, the descendants of the Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from the Spain during the Inquisition and had settled in the Bordeaux area.1 His early training in the law brought Montesquieu to understand and deplore the ways in which French justice had been modified to transform magistrates into monitors of conscience. The political philosophy which the mature Montesquieu evolved made him the champion of corporate rights against the ever-encroaching pretensions of the monarchy. As a defender of the these nobiliaire, he saw both the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the repression of the Jansenists as part of a despotical design by which the crown had set about eliminating all spiritual as well as secular restraints on absolute power. During the Regency period, the passionate antipathy which he felt towards the despotism of Louis XIV led Montesquieu to encourage a policy of religious pluralism for France. In his later years, he became more cautious about the wisdom of promoting spiritual diversity and more respectful of the role performed by the Catholic church in reinforcing the monarchist inclinations of the French. Montesquieu was to remain, however, a passionate critic of intolerance until his death and a helpful 61 62 The Huguenotsand French Opinion: 1685-1787 mentor to Protestants whose lives and property remained in jeopardy in the France of Louis XV. The intimate links which were to bind Montesquieu to the French Calvinist community were forged during the last weeks of the Sun King's reign when he married the Huguenot Jeanne de Lartigue. The father of the bride, a former colonel in the French army, had been made a member of the Order of Saint Louis, the highest honour available to soldiers of the crown, despite his open profession of the Reformed faith. The same indulgence prevailed at the altar rail; no attempt was made to compel the bride to abjure her Calvinism before her marriage to Montesquieu in Bordeaux on April 30, 1715. The baronne de Montesquieu would, in fact, remain a believing Calvinist until her death in 1768, apparently without suffering any overt discrimination as a consequence.2 Montesquieu received a handsome dowry from his wife's family. Calculation rather than passion appears to have been the basic foundationof the marriage. By all accounts, Jeanne de Lartigue was a rather plain woman whose puritanical education ill suited her to become the partner of a man with a well-developed taste for the sensuous. Quite possibly, the sexual reticence of his young bride helped provoke in Montesquieu that special interest in the erotic which would find fuller release in Paris.3 Whatever its private disappointments, his marriage brought Montesquieu into contact with the small circle of titled Huguenot families which had opted to stay in France following the Revocation. It was through his wife that the president met Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, the chief Calvinist contributor to the Encyclopedic and its co-editor (with Diderot) after 1758. Some of the political ideas of Montesquieu would reach readers of the Encyclopedic in articles written by his admiring Calvinist friend. Personal affection in Jaucourt was as strong as intellectual devotion; together with...

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