From the noblesse de robe, Charles de Secondat, Baron of Brède and Montesquieu, was born in the Château de Brède, near Bordeaux. A lawyer, adviser and then President of the Bordeaux Parliament, elected to the Academy of Sciences (1716), he wrote several memoirs but it was not until 1721 that he published the Persian Letters anonymously in Amsterdam: a satirical, epistolary tale of the discovery of the West by two Persians. This work opened the doors of literary salons to him.

Leaving his anonymity behind him, he sold his practice in Bordeaux (1726), was admitted into the Académie française (1728) and began a three-year voyage around Europe. On his return, he published his Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734).

It was another fourteen years until the anonymous publication in Geneva in 1748 of The Spirit of Laws, which inspired the authors of the 1792 Constitution. The first to bring to light the inter-dependency of all aspects of the life of the societies at the origin of the "generations of laws", this major work created among other things a typology of governments - Republican, Monarchist, Despotic - and attempted to defend the freedoms guaranteed by the institutions, in particular the separation of powers, in such a way that "it must be ensured by the nature of things, that power shall check power". The object of violent attacks, blacklisted by the Pope, Montesquieu then wrote his In Defence of The Spirit of Laws (1750), before writing the article on Taste for the Encyclopaedia (1753).