SOURCE: Betts, Christopher. “Constructing Utilitarianism: Montesquieu on Suttee in the Letters Persanes,” French Studies 51, 1 (January, 1997): 19-29.

[In this essay, Betts casts a critical eye on Letter 125 of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, in which Montesquieu condemns the Hindu custom of sati, to demonstrate that the principles underlying his argument anticipate the Utilitarianism of a later era. Betts also raises the possibility that the coded message of the letter is not anti-Hindu but anti-Christian.]

The one hundred and twenty-fifth letter of the Lettres persanes, the text of which will be found at the end of this article, consists of a story preceded by a discursive introductory section, both light in tone. The subject of the narrative section is suttee, or sati, the Hindu custom according to which a woman newly widowed burns herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. The letter can be read in various ways. If we take it on its own terms, it is a prose fable. The purpose of the story is simply to illustrate a lesson, argued with some irony in the introductory discussion, namely that definitions of heavenly bliss are often such as to deter rather than attract the believer. Most commentators, I think, would wish to reject this view of the letter's purpose as being superficial or ingenuous, and would look for something deeper. For one thing, the issue that the story raises in narrative terms—whether the widow will perform the ritual of suttee—is sufficiently compelling, when it arises, to monopolize the reader's attention, so that the letter's initial argument about heavenly bliss is lost to sight. Although the idea resurfaces and plays its part in the plot, it comes to seem subsidiary, the fate of the widow being the dominant question. As in some of La Fontaine's fables, lesson and story do not quite match, and the letter's opening argument, considered in retrospect, comes to seem an oblique and perhaps slightly mischievous preface to the narrative. However, this would mean that the link between the two sections, discursive and narrative, is different from that announced by Rica, and—on the assumption that it is a real link, and not artificial—calls for definition.

One approach that suggests itself would be to concentrate on the narrative section and treat “Lettre CXXV” as a record of Western reactions to an Eastern custom, ‘cette cruelle coutume’ as Montesquieu calls it in the letter. He makes no attempt to understand its rationale in the manner applied to the analysis of custom in the Esprit des lois.¹ On the contrary, the story in the Lettres persanes is plainly devised as a satirical attack on the custom itself and its supporters, the priests who figure in the story. “Lettre CXXV” is part of a history of such reactions, of which it is one of the important earlier texts.² François Bernier, in his Voyages (1668), describes a scene in which he personally dissuaded a widow from sacrificing herself. Later in the eighteenth century, Voltaire was to follow Montesquieu's lead in treating the subject in fiction; the chapter in Zadig entitled Le Bûcher has close resemblances both with Bernier and “Lettre CXXV.” All three writers display abhorrence for the custom, but the negative responses it provoked have their positive side, which is perhaps no less important; reflections on suttee (as with despotism), while no doubt helping to create a certain image of the East which is still with us, also allowed writers of the period to develop those ideals of humanitarian compassion which are an essential part of the Enlightenment.

Another interpretation, which probably represents the commonest approach to passages concerning oriental religions in Enlightenment literature, would be to read the letters as a camouflaged attack on the Christian religion. For Hindu read Catholic; for suttee read any self-denying ritual; for Paradise (Rica consistently employs this word) read the Christian Heaven; and the letter becomes an exercise in sceptical implication, suggesting not just that Heaven is undefinable, but that the whole idea is nonsense. A reason for the camouflage is easily found: it is that the existence of the system of censorship prevented authors from expressing their real views about religion directly, and forced them to resort to subterfuge.

On this view, it is the first part of “Lettre CXXV,” rather than the narrative, which is primordial; but, as I have mentioned, the weight of the letter seems to lie with the narrative part. There is another objection also. The method of interpretation just sketched out provides a certain intellectual satisfaction, that of discovering a coded subtext, but its use requires some care. There was, of course, a move away from religion during the Enlightenment, and one of its standard devices is the destructive presentation of Christianity in the guise of some Eastern religion. It is often far from obvious, however, what is intended when such a guise is adopted. We can usually be sure that Voltaire's ironies are meant aggressively, but Montesquieu is less hostile, or more conservative.

Moreover, as with any satire, assuming that satirical intent is present, it remains a delicate matter to determine on what basis the satire rests. With “Lettre CXXV,” for instance, as I have said, the repugnance for self-immolation on religious grounds is obvious, but if the ‘real’ attack is on Christianity, we ought to be able to determine the concealed target, a Christian counterpart for the Hindu custom. But there is no obvious counterpart for suttee in Christian practice. Indeed, the narrative section of the letter could be written from a Christian standpoint. From other passages in the Lettres persanes we can be moderately confident that Montesquieu's religious attitude, if it was Christian at all, was at the very limits of orthodoxy, but it is by no means certain that his aim in “Lettre CXXV” was to deliver a covert attack on the religion of his own country.

Even so, to interpret “Lettre CXXV” as the bearer of an anti-Christian message has the merit of affirming the coherence of a piece of writing that might otherwise appear to be a not altogether admirable combination of the appalling and the frivolous; humour on a subject like suttee can give the impression of callousness. The humour may well be partly a defence mechanism, a method of handling a reality too harsh to contemplate directly. However that may be, the problem of coherence remains, and is not fully overcome by the approaches I have briefly explored. Without prejudging the question whether coherence is the be-all and end-all of critical analysis, the reading which follows seeks to show that “Lettre CXXV” is indeed coherent, or unified, although what makes it so is something rather different from the lesson-fable connection asserted by Rica.

In brief, my argument will be that the letter is controlled throughout by well-defined binary oppositions. These form the assumptions lying at the root of what we now call utilitarianism. In “Lettre CXXV” they act so as to replace a conceptual framework that is intrinsically religious by one that is not. The replacement framework could also be called materialistic. As to the way in which the substitution is accomplished, it is that the reader is obliged, in order to make sense of the text, to accept some binary oppositions and to reject others. Historically, the letter is interesting in this perspective because it suggests (if I am right) that utilitarian principles functioned persuasively at a time, early in the eighteenth century, well before the date at which utilitarianism is usually supposed to have come into existence. In addition to the main binary oppositions, paired opposites are also created which structure the text at the level of character and plot. The story's governor and priest are in opposition not only as characters but also in abstract terms, while the reversal in the plot, a change of mind on the widow's part, is also a move from one conceptual framework to another.

This shift first occurs at the beginning, in a sentence which, despite its air of simplicity, achieves a great deal. With some sympathy, but irony too, Rica places himself in the position of religious authorities (‘on’) who are faced with the tricky problem of defining heavenly bliss as effectively as the terrors of Hell. This is of course a paraphrase; words denoting Heaven and Hell directly do not appear, yet we are bound to think of them. The text is: ‘On est bien embarrassé dans toutes les religions, quand il s'agit de donner une idée des plaisirs qui sont destinés a ceux qui ont bien vécu’. Here, donner une idée is not followed by some phrase such as de l'état des bienheureux dans le Ciel, which would (more legitimately) leave open the question of what awaits the virtuous, but by a clause which imposes on us the assumption that what they will be rewarded with is pleasure. This is followed up by the affirmation that it is easy to scare the wicked ‘par une longue suite de peines, dont on les menace’—clearly, the agonies of Hell. But when, following the standard Heaven/Hell parallel, we align the idea of these peines with that of the allegedly hard-to-define heavenly pleasures, it is almost impossible not to regard the pleasure in question as physical. We have been made to take the first step in the process of substituting a non-religious for a religious set of assumptions.

Next, we are made to work out the meaning of an innuendo which, with humour and scurrility, reinforces the physical reference. In developing his statement about the virtuous, ‘on ne sçait que leur promettre’, Rica explains that part of the problem is that pleasures are short-lived; not completely symmetrical, it seems, with Hell's ‘longue suite de peines’. But why not? We have to spend a moment working out the implication. When we have done so—oh, he must be referring to the brevity of sexual ecstasy, no wonder he can't mention it directly³—we have also been made to continue with the materialist assumption that it is only physical pleasure that awaits in Paradise. Joy in the contemplation of the godhead, which in a Christian perspective could also be promised to the elect, has been entirely excluded from consideration. If against the habit of reading we were to stop a moment, in order to examine Rica's logic, we might reflect that in fact a ‘longue suite’ of pleasures is no more difficult to conceive than ‘une longue suite de peines’; but everything in the text discourages such drearily pedantic reflections.

The result, in sum, is that the pleasure-pain principle—to give it its familiar modern label—is maintained without question throughout the first paragraph. Meanwhile, doubt is cast on the exactness of the parallelism between Heaven and Hell, and hence on the concept of heavenly bliss. The second paragraph goes a step further in what would now be regarded as Rica's deconstruction of the belief in Heaven, showing not only that Paradise cannot be described, but that adverse effects are produced by attempts to do so: unattractive Paradises will not motivate les gens de bon sens towards virtue. The subsequent examples will indicate that belief in the pleasure-pain principle is the distinguishing feature of these sensible people.

Readers are set a new task here. In order to follow the second paragraph's reasoning, we must apply the opposition between pleasure and pain, as before, but in another way, through the logic of paradox. The irony of heureuses in ‘les uns font jouer sans cesse de la flûte ces ombres heureuses’ can only be appreciated if we see that they are supposed to be happy but are in reality suffering. The same formula, by which concepts intended to define happiness define unhappiness instead, recurs in the next example, which increases the paradox by using the strong term supplice. The third example is unusual;⁴ but it evokes a situation contrary to what is to occur in the subsequent narrative, and the correlation with the later passage is presumably the reason for its inclusion.

By this point, the pleasure-pain antithesis having been definitively imposed by the need to employ it in the process of understanding the irony and paradox, Montesquieu is ready to begin the narrative section. He has also implanted the idea of renouncing Paradise when it is defined unattractively, which is in fact to be the central event of the story. However, he avoids saying so, choosing to define the point of the story as a more limited lesson about the incapacity of Hindu priests as regards describing Paradise. The narrative section thus becomes the equivalent of a fourth example, after the three that we have already had.

The narrative subject, suttee, was presumably one that Montesquieu expected his readers to recognize, since he is able to refer to it as ‘cette cruelle coutume’, without further elaboration. Even so, the end of the story's first sentence must be intended to shock. ‘Une femme qui venoit de perdre son mari, vint en cérémonie chez le gouverneur de la ville lui demander la permission de se brûler’: the effect on the reader depends partly on the literalness, unusual in the full sense, of the final verb,⁵ but also on a temporary inconsistency. What is proposed by the widow is directly contradictory to the assumptions about pleasure and pain that have been established hitherto. Rica has been discussing the gens de bon sens, who are virtuous, but motivated by the desire to have pleasure and avoid pain. Against this background, the widow's request is not only painful to the imagination, but absurd. By the norms to which the text has habituated us, it is impossible for anyone to want to inflict pain on himself, or herself, especially the extreme pain of being burnt alive.

The opening of the narrative section, therefore, puts the reader in a conceptual impasse, since the words of the first sentence, although not contradictory among themselves, do not make sense within the only conceptual scheme that we have been allowed to apply. The rest of the first sentence does something to restore meaning, since with the statement that the governor refused permission we return to the norms of the pleasure principle. He is on the side of the gens de bon sens, and we must be on his side, unless we are prepared to be as irrational as the widow.

The immediate sequel makes more acute both the contradiction within her behaviour and the opposition between her and the governor. Presumably Montesquieu could have provided some transcendental justification for the widow's desire to commit suicide; she could have suffered overwhelming grief at the loss of her husband, or been moved by profound religious conviction. Nothing, however, is said about feelings or her faith, and for good reason, since emotional and religious criteria would compete with those on which “Lettre CXXV” relies. The widow's position becomes more and more bizarre: what she presents as reasons for her request, the examples set by other members of her family, adds nothing except further perverseness. Her family history consists, it would seem, in a succession of pointless sacrifices. At the same time, her manner of expressing herself suggests that she regards the horrific fate which awaits her as no more alarming than a trip to market. For her, it is the governor's prohibition that is senseless, and she accuses him of shouting ‘comme un enragé’, although we may guess that it is she who has been raising her voice.

There is deadlock, therefore, between widow and governor at the narrative level, and conceptually also. At this level, the confusion resembles that in the second paragraph of the letter, about self-contradictory ideas of Paradise. In Rica's previous argument about the afterlife, the place which is by definition blissful had been interpreted by some in totally inappropriate terms; in the narrative, the widow's motive, which would normally be expected to be pleasure, seems to be the opposite.

The only possible way of resolving these contradictions, while preserving the pleasure principle, would be to quantify pain and pleasure: self-immolation, an intense but brief pain, guarantees a happiness that will last forever. This is another idea deliberately played down by “Lettre CXXV,” but to the extent that we are aware of it none the less we shall expect the next incident in the story: the young priest⁶ assures the widow that her sacrifice is worthwhile. From the dialogue between the two, we can reconstruct her previous story by the narratological method: her husband was jealous, bad-tempered and impotent, but two priests (old and presumably crafty: the young one is ingenuous), knowing that the marriage was sexless, persuaded her that she should perform the rite of suttee for the sake of future bliss, without describing the kind of bliss that lay in store (‘n'avoient garde de me tout dire’). Before the story's present time, therefore, no reference has been made to reunion with her husband, but the young priest ineptly explains to the widow what the other two had concealed. At this she immediately alters her proposed course of conduct: ‘je ne me brûle pas’. What she has decided is, at last, to follow the pleasure-pain calculus. (Her additional conversion to Islam is no doubt made in the belief, normal for Europeans at the time, that according to Muslims bliss in the afterlife is physical.)

The principal event in the plot, then, a simple reversal in Aristotelian terms, is in the main character a transformation from opponent to follower of the pleasure principle. The narrative accomplishes, in its own manner, the same substitution of values as the initial argument, during which this principle comes to displace the provisional assumption of belief in a conventional Heaven. The narrative also contains a number of minor reversals, in the sense of further transformations of elements in the text, which at the end manifest some feature opposite to a feature present at the beginning. The effect of these modifications seems to be to reinforce the main reversal. To start with, we have a Hindu woman requesting permission (which will not be given) from a secular authority, the governor, for a proposed course of action caused by the death of her husband. At the end, the same woman, now proclaiming herself a Muslim, is the one giving permission (which has not been requested) to a religious authority, a priest and the first man's enemy. What she permits (in the words ‘vous pouvez, si vous voulez’) is the message that ‘je me porte fort bien’; she is in a state opposite to the extreme pain she had sought for herself initially.

The parallels may schematically be represented as follows, taking the order of words in the first sentence as a basis:

a woman	same woman
had just lost her husband	priest can go to her husband
ceremoniously	familiar style
governor	priest
asks permission (refused)	gives permission (unasked)
self-immolation	well-being.

Combined with the main reversal, these detailed relationships create closure in its formal aspect, making a remarkably exact and complex pattern of like and unlike between the first and last sentences. It seems to be a rule of narrative that initial-final reversals of this type are required for completeness, or to signal that a literary ending has been reached. It is of course the last of the oppositions, in the list above, that is the most important; the subordinate parallels order the material so as to make the transformation more clear-cut.

As for the situation of the reader at the end of the narrative section of the letter, it may perhaps be summarized (I rely on introspection here) as relief, because the widow's intention of burning herself alive has been discarded, combined with satisfaction, because the priest has been discomfited. Assuming that similar responses are shared more or less generally, they illustrate another feature of narrative persuasion, as opposed to that operated by argument: to the extent that we sympathize with the widow's change of mind, we are induced to accept the pleasure-pain principle.

The coherence of “Lettre CXXV” is increased further by formal relationships similar to the initial/final reversals, but less usual. They link the content of the story section with part of Rica's argument earlier in the letter. These are the parallels to which I have already referred in passing, and which relate the widow's remarks about her dead husband with the most obscure example in Rica's list of deterrent paradises. He claims, about the blessed, that there are some authorities, unidentified, ‘qui les font rêver là-haut aux maîtresses d'ici-bas, [et qui] n'ont pas cru que cent millions d'années fussent un terme assez long, pour leur ôter le goût de ces inquiétudes amoureuses’. The woman in the story contrasts positionally, as it were, with the men in Rica's example; she is reflecting ‘icibas’ on a future with her husband ‘là-haut’. Her reflections (spoken, not silent) are unloving, the contrary of ‘inquiétudes amoureuses’, and are not everlasting like the men's, since it takes her only a moment to abandon them. Schematically tabulated:

(Rica's example:)	(story:)
the blessed là-haut	the woman ici-bas
reflect on maîtresses	reflects on husband
with love	with hostility
unendingly	briefly.

Broadly speaking the oppositions amount to a contrast between romantic love and marital enmity. Their precision makes it reasonable to suppose, in my view, that Rica's third example is present because it corresponds by antithesis to the later passage of narrative. It seems likely, in consequence, that the first section of the letter was written after the narrative section, Rica's example being necessary for reasons of balance and symmetry.

The argumentative and narrative sections of the letter are connected by another theme, that of incapacity, both physical and intellectual. (I call it a theme, a simple element which is repeated, rather than one term in a binary opposition, because the complementary opposite of incapacity is not mentioned.) At first, only intellectual impotence is in question, as Rica writes of the inability of any religion to define beatitude effectively, but then comes a hint, in the sentence about short-lived pleasure, that the sexual aspect might also be relevant. When Rica introduces the story, the word he chooses to qualify the Hindu priests, because like the others they cannot define Paradise, is stériles. The epithet is no doubt a gibe at celibacy; elsewhere in the Lettres persanes Catholic priests are described as eunuchs.⁷ The theme is recalled momentarily in the story when the widow's pleas are said to be ‘impuissantes’, and becomes essential in the dénouement, since her knowledge of her husband's sexual incapacity (emphasized by the joke about a possible renovation) disproves the priest's belief that reunion with him in Heaven will give her pleasure. Or to spell out the connection between the two sorts of impotence, the husband's physical incapacity confirms, in narrative mode, the argument about the intellectual inability of religious authorities to define heavenly pleasures.

The letter's semantic structure, then, is coherent. The binary opposition instilled from the outset, pleasure and pain, persists throughout the narrative. The field in which the opposition applies is that of motivation, Heaven and Hell being seen as motivators of conduct. In both sections, ideas of Heaven or Paradise are shown to be ineffective, so that pleasure and pain in this world emerge as the only valid motives for conduct. This is why “Lettre CXXV” is destructive of a certain kind of religious belief. On the positive side, the principle involved is the basis of what was later to become the doctrine of utilitarianism. In 1721 it is not a doctrine, but—to try to define what I have been discussing—an unstated and perhaps unconscious assumption in a satirical piece directed against a foreign religious custom.

The manner in which movements of thought come into being is obscure; there is no commonly accepted theory, especially when an -ism does not bear the name of its founder. It is no doubt possible that different movements originate in different ways. Modest though it is, “Lettre CXXV” may shed some light on the beginnings of utilitarianism. The utilitarian mood was diffuse but powerful in the eighteenth century and triumphed in the nineteenth. According to the common, narrow definition—the doctrine of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’—it was first stated by Jeremy Bentham in England in 1780. John Stuart Mill, in 1861, gave a definition of the doctrine that is still authoritative in dictionaries of ideas and is relevant here: ‘The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to produce happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is meant pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure’.⁸

“Lettre CXXV” follows exactly the pattern thus set out many decades later, and the more rigorously in that the emphasis is firmly on the motivating of actions by the pleasure-pain principle. The concern in the first paragraph is with motivation towards virtue, and religious concepts are seen as instrumental, possessing—or rather not possessing—the utility of a means to an end. The modern concept of effectiveness is already present in the remarks on the relative impact of Hell and Heaven. However, a point which seems essential, the conceptualization is implicit, not explicit as in Mill's definition, and therefore the less likely to meet resistance. Montesquieu's writing, as I have been trying to show, obliges his readers to employ the concepts of what we now call utilitarianism. If they do not, the text will be undecipherable, and they accordingly construct for themselves, so to speak, an intellectual framework which was to supersede the religious concepts then regarded as normal. If this reconstruction of the process is correct, the groundwork for the appearance of utilitarianism as a doctrine, in the second half of the eighteenth century, had been laid down at a considerably earlier date in writings such as “Lettre CXXV” of the Lettres persanes. Unformulated ideas of the utilitarian can be traced in many other places in Montesquieu's work, and in others of similar date; Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques would be a case in point.⁹

A final comment on the attitude to women, since it is they alone who perform the sacrifice of suttee. Was Montesquieu engaged in pleading their cause? “Lettre CXLI” (like the Lettres persanes as a whole) also concludes with an illustration of feminine vengeance on male tyrants. However, it seems difficult to claim “Lettre CXXV” for any kind of feminism because, although the widow triumphs over the priest, she transfers her allegiance to another male figure of authority, the governor. The suggestion, though tenuous, is that women must live within a society dominated by men, or, from the masculine point of view, that male dominance should be exercised humanely. But then it would have been extraordinary for Rica to suggest anything more radical. It does appear, putting the matter of social authority on one side, that in his view women have as much right as men to reap the benefits of the pleasure-pain calculus.

Notes

1. Suttee is mentioned in the Esprit des lois, XIV, 3, but not examined in depth. For a modern work which seeks to render the custom comprehensible to Western readers, see: Sati, The Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India, edited by John Stratton Hawley (New York-Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994). It should perhaps be mentioned that, as Hawley points out, sati in Indic languages ‘is a person, not a practice’ (p. 12); here, as seems normal in English, I use the transliterated word to refer to the ritual. Perhaps surprisingly, in view of the intrinsic interest of the subject, “Lettre CXXV” does not seem to have attracted critical attention.

2. Much material for such a history is to be found in Georges Ascoli's notes to his edition of Zadig (Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2 vols (Paris, Didier, 1929), II, 86-90). But La Fontaine is also important in the background of “Lettre CXXV” (as of the chapter in Zadig), since La Matrone d'Éphèse carries a very similar lesson for widows about the value of life. For information about reactions in the later eighteenth century and after, see: Dorothy M. Figueira, ‘Die Flambierte Frau: Sati in European Culture’, in Sati, ed. Hawley, pp. 27-52.

3. It is interesting that the mere presence of innuendo suggests, of itself, that what is implied must be to some extent improper.

4. Nothing comes to mind as the origin of Rica's description of Heaven here: perhaps he is referring to a poetic work.

5. Se brûler vive would presumably be usual, the verb as commonly used suggesting no more than a minor accident (‘Je me suis brûlé’).

6. He is called a bonze, but must in fact be a Brahmin; a bonze is a Buddhist priest.

7. In “Lettre CXVII” Usbek writes of ‘le grand nombre d'eunuques’ among the Christians, and explains: ‘Je parle des prêtres et des dervis de l'un et de l'autre sexe’. See also the opening of “Lettre LXXXII”.

8. Utilitarianism, Chapter II, ‘What Utilitarianism Is’.

9. Many of the satirical passages in the Lettres persanes attack social types for uselessness or ineffectiveness, and the letters on depopulation (Lettres CXII to CXXII) often argue from a utilitarian position; see my Montesquieu: ‘Lettres persanes’, Critical Guides to French Texts, 105 (London, Grant & Cutler, 1994), Chapter 5. In the Lettres philosophiques, the vocabulary of the useful is particularly prominent in “Lettre XXIV”, ‘Sur les académies’.