[In this essay, Hundert and Nelles support the argument advanced by Judith Shklar that Montesquieu describes liberty as requiring a theatrical public sphere, adding that the Persian Letters reflect Montesquieu's earlier explorations of this idea. The authors focus on the structure and genre of the novel to demonstrate how Montesquieu uses the unusual form of the epistolary novel to advance his political philosophy.]

“The crowns and scepters of stage emperors,” remarked Sancho, “were never known to be of pure gold; they are always of tinsel or tinplate.”

“That is the truth,” said Don Quixote, “for it is only right that the accessories of a drama should be fictitious and not real, like the play itself. Speaking of that, Sancho, I would have you look kindly upon the art of the theater and, as a consequence, upon those who write the pieces and perform in them, for they render a great service to the state by holding up a mirror for us at each step we take, wherein we may observe, vividly depicted, all the varied aspects of human life; and I may add that there is nothing that shows us more clearly, by similitude, what we are and what we ought to be than do plays and players.”

—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, II, iii, 12

When Stalin asked, “How many divisions has the Pope?” his scorn for unarmed, merely ceremonial, and hence bogus claims to power was couched in an ancient idiom drawn from the stage. The idea of a distinction between what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” and the “efficient” parts of government, a theme developed by the Stoics, had in the West become by Machiavelli's lifetime a standard figure of political rhetoric. The topos of the theatrum mundi served as a persistent reminder of the dramaturgical components of human action and of the inherently theatrical characteristics of civic participation, in which public roles are demanded of ostensibly private persons. Politics formed a natural field for the deployment of the figure of the human being as an actor. From the time of antiquity, the public sphere was understood to share with the theater an emphasis on the performing body as the embodiment of a role, a figure presenting itself to a viewing public in a persona of appropriately stylized poses, gestures, and attitudes.¹ As Hobbes put it:

Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disquiseth the face, as a Mark or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunals, as Theatres. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is. …²

Politics as a public spectacle of ritual mystification was a favored image of post-Renaissance, pre-Revolutionary moralists. Following Montaigne, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, Jansenists and puritans, libertines and encyclopédistes sought to untangle the doctrinally coercive and politically integrating strategies of Baroque monarchies and their attendant court societies, where power was self-consciously nourished by cultural practices, the ceremonials and symbols, festivals and masques of absolute monarchy. This public manipulation of political signs established a conceptual environment in which the state, that “master noun”³ of contemporary political discourse, took on its modern senses of regime and dominion. Splendor and display, the accoutrements of stateliness, had become, most notably at Versailles, essential instruments of monarchical ambition in polities sustained by their capacity to fascinate the obedient and arrest rebellion by the production of awe.⁴

The understanding of human beings as actors in and beholders of political drama, and the conceptualization of the public as a body manipulated by spectacle, were heightened features of social awareness during the eighteenth century. This perception was especially acute among republicans such as Rousseau, who understood the theatricality of political life as legitimating in the imaginations of free people the habits of obedience to arbitrary power.⁵ In the limited and unreformed British parliamentary monarchy, elections themselves were theatrical events. They were the public spectacles depicted by Hogarth in which both crowd and patrician adopted highly articulated roles, much as they did in riots, strikes, and criminal proceedings.⁶ Radicals such as Paine saw that the landed oligarchy's success in thwarting reform depended on its ability to “show and parade to fascinate the vulgar.”⁷ Its members staged their appearances as responsible and virtuous citizens in ways that took on, as E. P. Thompson puts it, “the studied consciousness of public theatre.”⁸ The “antitheatrical prejudice” that long informed reflection on the fine arts⁹ came to have its distinct analogues in the civic domain; in each, theatricality tended to be held suspect because of its power to subvert independence of judgment and action, and to undermine civic virtue. The inherent tendency of the theatrical relation, it was assumed, transforms impartial spectators into singularly self-interested performers who falsely represent themselves for others.¹⁰ It converts the person into a player and the citizen into a hypocrite, the hypokrates of classical usage who is induced to wear a public mask by a regime whose rituals regulate one's personal compliance.

Suspicion of the theatrical relation continues to guide political discourse, as Judith Shklar shows in her rich and allusive discussion of the role of character in public life.¹¹ She rightly connects a continuing demand for emotional openness with a tradition of argument, refined by Rousseau, within which Lionel Trilling honed his notion of authenticity as the exemplary capacity of the citizen's conscience enabling him or her to refuse merely to perform for others, and instead partake in that transparent communication required of free and equal persons.¹² Shklar's attempt to expose what she regards as the incoherence of this view entails a reevaluation of politics as theatrical, and of the praise of hypocrisy as “one of the few vices that bolsters liberal democracy.”¹³ Her argument depends for much of its force on a reading of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws [EL] (1748) as the model text in which liberty is understood as that condition in which the inner person, his or her motives and deepest impulses, is shielded from public scrutiny by a person's freedom to act, and by the necessity of a person's acting, on the public stage. We shall argue that a theatrically ambiguous social universe of performers is at the heart of this conception, and that it was first dissected by Montesquieu in The Persian Letters [LP] (1721). This argument requires a discrimination between the formal demands and rhetorical procedures of a work of fiction, in which a variety of voices address the reader, and the forms of argument standardly required by more conventional vehicles of political discourse, such as the monologic treatise. In particular, we will attempt to show how an understanding of the figural and semiotic devices in Montesquieu's epistolary novel clarifies his analytic purposes and points to their systematic realization in The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu employs these devices to engage and direct the political attention of his audience. They are instruments of a discursive strategy that places Persians and their letters in a perspective from which readers may grasp, with little apparent effort, that an untheatrical politics, free of ambiguity, violates natural law and is a condition of despotism, and that a theatricalized politics is a necessary prerequisite of liberty as Montesquieu understands it.¹⁴

PERSIANS IN PARIS

The Persian Letters encodes the concepts of liberty and selfhood within an ostensibly ethnographic frame, itself a code that its principal characters seek to decipher. Usbek and Rica, travelers to Europe from Persia, “did not think it right that our knowledge should be limited to its boundaries nor that we should see by the light of the Orient alone” (LP, 1). But this ocular metaphor is, from the start of their journey, hobbled by a cognitive dilemma. As foreigners for whom the life of an alien civilization is an exotic experience, the Persians must discriminate between the customary, seemingly “natural” practices of ordinary daily life and those apparently ornamental elements of ritual and ceremony Europeans self-consciously learn. In order to read the alien culture before them adequately, they must first construct the rudiments of a grammar of social behavior in which intentionally signifying practices are distinguished from the nonsignifying elements of habit. Until this is accomplished, merely “seeing” the social text is an invitation for them to misread it.¹⁵ Rica, for example, reports that whoever falls into the hands of the Inquisitors “is lucky only if he has always said his prayers with little wooden beads in his hand, has worn two pieces of cloth attached to two ribbons, and has sometimes visited a province called Galicia” (LP, 29). Here the use of the rosary, the wearing of the scapulary, and the rite of pilgrimage are mistakenly treated as practical features of everyday behavior. Since Rica fails to perceive that these are learned and practiced rituals, self-consciously signifying acts, he cannot grasp their meaning. Because he has as yet no point of entry into the self-understanding of the actors he observes, Rica mistakenly places these actions outside of the context of practices in which they are performed and rendered comprehensible.

Rica's and Usbek's misreadings, however, serve to reveal a more essential truth about European practices than the actors' self-understanding permits them to grasp. For the Oriental culture that putatively informs the Persians' “vision” in fact plays no important role in their attempt to decipher the habits of Europe, nor does the real Orient of the eighteenth century anywhere appear in the letters the friends exchange. Instead, the Orient in The Persian Letters functions as a spectacle “where the rules of politics are everywhere the same” (LP, 80), one that permits Occidentals to inspect the negative, limiting conditions of the Western tradition.¹⁶ Likewise, “Persian” (in Paris) names for Montesquieu a privileged imaginative space from which Europeans may decontextualize and thus, he believes, rationally comprehend their own behavioral protocols.¹⁷ Radical misreading may thus ironically invite comprehension, as when Usbek attends the theater. The theater in its Parisian shape is a form clearly unfamiliar to Usbek, for in the “Orient,” as we shall see, all roles are permanently assigned; there, all identities are frozen. Having been told that actors will perform on something called a stage, Usbek fails to discover its location, and consequently fails to distinguish offstage from onstage behavior, or between actors and audience:

Everyone gathers together after dinner to perform in a sort of show, called, so I have heard, a play. The main action occurs on a platform, called the stage. On each side of it there are little compartments called boxes, and here men and women act out scenes together as if in a dumb show rather like those we have in Persia.

(LP, 28)

The behavior of the Parisian theater audience so resembles the staged behavior of Persians at home that Usbek confuses the two. He extends the domain of signifying action from the actual stage into the theater proper, and then enlarges the region of the theater itself: “Everyone retires to rooms where they act in a private comedy, which begins with bows and continues by embraces.” His aestheticizing of the elements of daily life permits Usbek formally to encode everyday practices as theatrical, and by so doing he becomes the conceptually privileged audience at a social drama. In this theatrically constituted arena all (onstage) behavior signifies and Usbek's local misreading of it ironically enables his potentially stronger, global reading of any action as literally significant.

The Inquisition and theater episodes of the The Persian Letters serve as early points of reference against which the reader measures Usbek's and Rica's continuing ethnographic purchase on the French culture they seek to understand. From this point of view, these two letters mark off an unreflective zone of cross-cultural confusion, one that increasingly diminishes as their dialogue with French society progresses. It is important to notice, however, that Montesquieu never abandons the theatrical metaphor as an instrument of social intelligibility.¹⁸ It becomes for the travelers an organizing principle of cultural perception through which they are able to decode French manners with heightened skill. The (European) reader of the letters is in this way forced to revise his own first reading of them. Usbek's apparent overextension of the theatrical metaphor is itself shown to be an illusion produced by our own misreading of his original ethnographic innocence purely as a form of cultural confusion. For, in grasping that Usbek's attendance at the theater has in fact empowered his vision, the reader shares in the Persians' theatrical apprehension of French society. Indeed, the success of Usbek's and Rica's attempt to comprehend the French will depend on their ability to identify the different stages on which French social drama is enacted, and then discriminate between the degrees of self-consciousness characters bring to the roles they embody.

Perhaps the strongest indication of the porous frontier between stage and street occurs in the private conversation Rica overhears between two stock figures of social satire, chevaliers à la mode who are failing in an attempt to dazzle the beau monde with their wit (LP, 54). “Let's collaborate and be witty in partnership,” one suggests: “We shall give each other assistance, … we shall agree on our subject of every conversation, set its tone … [and] provide mutual protection for ourselves by nodding and shaking our heads to one another.” But the success of this conspiratorial performance, he continues, “depends on having the right models.” Rica learns “of those books … composed for people without wit but hopeful of counterfeiting it,” the manuals of etiquette derived from manners at court and addressed to arrivistes thrown up by the “magic” of movable capital (LP, 43 and 146).¹⁹ He also observes men who studiously adopt the parts of straightman and comic derived from the stage. These roles are already inscribed, their playing demands rehearsal, and their success is contingent upon capturing an audience. For “making a witty remark is not enough: it must be publicized and distributed.” Because Rica finds himself backstage in a performing culture in which designated texts describe patterns of social participation, he can integrate their performance principles into the larger cultural text he studies. The two young Frenchmen whom Rica observes are, moreover, acutely aware of the existence of each kind of text, a minimal requirement for the success of any self-conscious social actor who must, in addition, clearly identify the character of his audience and know equally that this audience is itself composed of persons embodied in roles. At once separate from and part of this audience, the two young men necessarily shuttle between their roles of actor and spectator within a larger social configuration whose stages, “characters,” and idioms of performance The Persian Letters seeks to delineate.

Montesquieu maps the stages that structure French social geography as the Persians traverse its higher reaches: the coffee house, with the Intellectual and the Scholastics (LP, 36 and 128); the court at Versailles, with both Louis XIV and XV (LP, 37 and 107); the country house, with its Parisian-based guests, the Tax Farmer, the Confessor, the Poet, the Old Soldier, and the Rake (LP, 48); Notre Dame, with the Priest (LP, 61); the Magistrate at home (LP, 68). Paris and the court are the bipolar centers of this geography, the predominant stages onto which Rica, for example, places each character of the high society he and Usbek observe (LP, 107). Montesquieu in this way enables the reader to locate stage and social actors within their relevant cultural context. The epistolary exchanges between Persians not only serve to stitch together archetypical scenes in a larger dramatic narrative; their self-conscious, but never fully self-aware, ethnographic stance establishes for the reader an Archimedian point from which to observe exemplary scenes in a cultural drama. These devices permit The Persian Letters to extend an established form of social observation, the “character” literature perfected by La Bruyère, beyond the conventional domain of an exclusively aristocratic environment and its attendant points of view.²⁰ Incorporated into the vision of Montesquieu's Persians is that enlarged perspective of what Erich Auerbach calls “la cour et la ville,” a relatively homogenous cultural stratum composed of the nobility based in the capital and leisured commoners in literate high society who became the powerful arbiters of enlightened public taste by the early eighteenth century.²¹ From this “small group of learned men … the criteria by which to judge a work of art, the action and characters of a play, the sentiments and ideas expressed in it, had spread … to all of cultivated society,” producing “a solid front of cultured public opinion.”²² A circumscribed cultural discourse was a striking feature in this evolution of an elite audience, where entré and participation primarily depended less upon inherited marks of rank and status than on the mastery of its exclusive terms of reference. In The Persian Letters we encounter the social embodiments of this language, and the tracking of a cultural lexicon that has become not merely self-conscious, but so intensely self-referential that group members in communicating to one another simultaneously act out the imperatives of their own discourse.²³

The most obvious way in which Montesquieu foregrounds the theatrical elements of this circumscribed subculture is by identifying his characters with their stage analogs. He designates the Poet, for example, as that ubiquitous theatrical figure, the “buffoon, … the most ridiculous of men,” who writes a wedding ode on the occasion of his host's marriage (LP, 48). In popular culture the buffoon standardly sang and improvised verses in the marketplace.²⁴ In the culture of the elite, however, “le bouffon de cour” was a socially promoted commoner who had as his stage the court, his unique role there being to provide not simply diversion and amusement, but at critical times to speak truths that were otherwise unutterable.²⁵ The figure observed by Usbek who is always on stage, always the performer “who sometimes makes faces,” is not the genuine buffoon, however, but his typified simulacrum, the failed poet of comic literature brought to a great house by starvation who simulates the court fool on a social stage that imperfectly replicates that of the court itself.

The bumptious Rake described to Usbek as “a Don Juan” in the same letter perhaps most clearly exemplifies the uses to which Montesquieu puts stock figures drawn from the theater. This character made numerous appearances on the seventeenth-century French stage, with Dorimond in 1658, Villiers in 1660, Corneille in 1667, and Rosimond in 1669. But it was Molière's Don Juan, performed at the Palais Royal in 1665, in which this role received its strongest inscription before the time of Mozart and Da Ponte.²⁶ Never the prisoner of his erotic compulsions, Molière's cynical hypocrite is instead a prideful manipulator bent on conquest, and it is this figure Usbek meets. Both Molière and his plays were significant elements of that court culture,²⁷ whose signs Montesquieu's Persians found dispersed among an elite but socially heterogeneous public. And it is the theatrical mores of this world that are revealed by the self-conscious seducer to a stunned Usbek, who yearns for the unambiguous roles of the Orient when Don Juan discloses that,

the only vocation I have is to enrage husbands or drive fathers to despair. I enjoy frightening a woman who thinks she has caught me, by bringing her nearly to the point of losing me. There are a number of young men like me, who share out the whole of Paris between us in this way, so that the town takes an interest in our every move.

Women “think me better than I am,” he casually allows, “for, between you and me, I'm not much good at this game.” Yet like the Confessor (LP, 61), members of the privileged orders, the Preacher (LP, 64), and indeed the king himself (LP, 37), it is precisely as a performer that the Rake's persona is defined and promoted. All of these characters may be said to “have a very difficult role to sustain” (LP, 61), in that each is required to master the production of a cluster of highly articulated, culturally circumscribed signs of their social identities.

Costume and language together constitute the most clearly defined of these theatrical designators. The Confessor is “the big man dressed in black,” whose “costume is less extravagant than a woman's, but arranged with greater attention.” The failed Poet is, as expected, “badly dressed,” the Old Soldier “dressed differently from everyone else,” while Don Juan is “the large young man with the hair” (LP, 48). These descriptions are all Usbek's, and they read as if taken from the stage directions of a libretto or play. Cultural distance prevents Usbek from rendering, through extended dialogue or the report of subtle shifts in tone of voice, for example, those nuances of character through which persons most often become individuated in the eyes of their peers. Instead, Usbek must seek to comprehend meanings within the social universe he confronts through an encounter with a seemingly narrow range of its most visible signs. This apparent disability, however, entails within itself a considerable interpretive advantage. It permits “Persians” to place within a firmly dramatic context those already signifying, everyday elements of social display about which participants become unreflective as they are habituated to them. They alone observe that “it is the same with manners and modes of behavior as with fashion: the … sovereign imposes his attitudes on the court, the court on the town, and the town on the provinces” (LP, 99). Just as Rica suddenly finds himself socially invisible as he dons Parisian garb (LP, 30), Usbek discovers that men literally dress “according to character in public.” In stressing how elements of the fashion system revalidate the social hierarchy by referring to the self, he makes explicit, and thus theatricizes, their signifying force.

Like costume, language powerfully signifies one's social role. Scholastics “use a barbarous language” (LP, 36); the Tax Farmer's “expression is so vulgar” that “I found in him no signs of education; he lacks the important marks of good breeding.” The Poet “talks in a different style from other people; [he] lacks wit to talk well, but talks so as to seem witty.” Don Juan “talks louder than everyone else” (LP, 48). These widely different pieces of linguistic behavior fall into two distinct regions of signification. The Poet and the Rake both perform their speech acts within the acceptable discursive and stylistic practices of polite society. The differences of tone and style in their speech connote their place in the hierarchy of status. The Priest, whose formulaic utterances constitute the rhetoric of conventional upper-class piety, is also a member of this community, in part defined by its linguistic homogeneity.²⁸ The Scholastic, on the other hand, literally performs in another language—Latin—which decisively sets him apart from the cultural elite whose mastery of a polished vernacular idiom strongly defines its identity. For his part, the Tax Farmer speaks in the unfinished, secondhand jargon of the clumsily aspirant bourgeoisie satirized by Molière and despised by Saint-Simon.²⁹ While on the same stage as the others, he is rendered an object of ridicule by unwittingly violating the rules of le bon usage established by the cultural elite to help secure and extend its predominance. For not only does the Tax Farmer unknowingly recreate the already-scripted comic role of the bourgeois gentilhomme, he performs in a genre alien to his dignified setting, that of the merely “functional” gens de commerce whose upper echelon too eagerly fought for rapid social promotion. These forty financiers who united their resources to buy from the crown the right of collecting indirect taxes were the explicit symbols of a recently elevated, “base” social stratum. Yet “as superior in wealth as [they are] deficient in birth,” the power of this wealth could still be resisted by that hegemonic and self-conscious elite culture whose styles of interaction Usbek's foreignness has given him the privilege to record.

The use of the theatrical forms of “character,” costume, and speech in The Persian Letters all contribute, as Montesquieu intended, to an understanding of Usbek's misreadings of Parisian culture as more apparent than real. They further encourage a sense of complicity between Montesquieu and his audience. As the reader accepts the work as the decoding of a social drama, the reader becomes ever more attuned to the authorial subtext of each letter, since the reader has learned that its primary messages are contained there. Yet as one learns how to read these letters properly and understand the intentions of Montesquieu, their real author, one becomes steadily skeptical of Usbek, their primary fictive author, since his foreignness, his own point of privilege that authorizes him to write, must itself have a subtext of which he is unaware and to which we are made increasingly alert. Just as Usbek intuitively trusts an informant at the country house because of the unforced “naturalness” of his manners, because this man speaks to him in a socially embedded but at the same time transparently humane discourse, Montesquieu's insistent cultural relativism cannot fail to generate the reader's mood of suspicion about Usbek's richly informative letters. For in the midst of critically appraising the settled dispositions of an alien environment, Usbek's writing nevertheless reveals a consciousness unaware of its own most significant cultural determinants. As we learn that each mode of communal behavior is deeply conventional, since all forms of behavior are grounded in custom and habit, we will refuse to be deceived about Usbek's response to his own experience, and await the moment when his existence in Europe serves to expose those features of the “Orient” that he has unknowingly introjected.

Rica discloses the complex relations between nature and culture through which Montesquieu articulates this tension. “I have seen people,” he says of a small group within the French cultural elite, “in whom virtue was so natural that it was not even noticeable; they followed their duty without hesitation, performing it as if by instinct” (LP, 50). Rica assumes, perhaps with Montesquieu, that while all particular codes governing morals are cultural artifacts, and therefore not simply natural, virtue is that essential personal characteristic that is capable of seeming to be so. Natural virtue takes on the property of a well-rehearsed and perfectly acted performance, one in which neither performer nor audience discerns the dramaturgical elements inherent in every social exchange. This insight of Rica's needs to be situated within the context of Montesquieu's larger political project, and placed on the same plane as his thesis about honor, the primary “spring” animating monarchies (EL, III, 6 and 7). The crucially significant feature of behavior in modern kingdoms, Montesquieu claims, is the gulf actors silently experience between their ostensible commitment to other-regarding, public ideals and the self-interested motives that govern private aspiration. This “false honor” (EL, III, 7) characterizes “well-regulated monarchies,” in which “everyone will be close to a good citizen, [but] one will rarely find good men; for to be a good man [politically speaking], one must have a good intention” (EL, III, 6). Montesquieu sought to show that not all moral vices were political ones (EL, XIX, 11); on the contrary, sheer self-interest could, under appropriate cultural constraints, dictate that a person act according to the honorable ideal by appearing to be inspired by its maxims. The mask of honor, when it becomes a required civil costume, would then shape one's public face within a socially competitive market for marks of esteem.³⁰

Through the Persians' vignettes of elite society, then, Montesquieu expressed his understanding of monarchies as inherently theatrical formations. The hypocrisies required of self-interested actors in public are a necessary consequence of their very freedom to act, which, “joined with the force of laws, may lead to the end of government,” which is liberty (EL, III, 6). Montesquieu cautioned readers who, like Rica, and at times himself, would valorize those virtuous individuals for whom duty meshed with desire, that the unsparing account offered in The Spirit of the Laws of the duplicities attending contemporary noble aspiration should not be taken as “a satire on monarchical government” (EL, III, 6). For their full appreciation and defense, the principles of monarchy required an understanding of the internal dynamics of politically fragile, but morally admirable, virtuous republics on the one hand, and, on the other, of immobile despotisms animated by fear. So, too, does Usbek's discovery of the theatricality of European public life become something other than an object of ridicule as Montesquieu places it within the context of the emotional tyranny that shapes Usbek's definition of himself in relation to his domestic affairs. Only the dramatic norms and theatrical proprieties of the performing society he visits temporarily restrain the caprice of despotic power Usbek's culture has taught him to regard as natural.

THE DECLINE OF THE EAST

Despotism, it has sometimes been remarked, is the weakest of Montesquieu's governing conceptions, since it serves merely as a placeholder in his politics, an entirely negative theoretical space capable of containing any instance of the violation of the laws of nature set down in Book I of The Spirit of the Laws.³¹ The need for freedom from violence, for satisfaction of physical wants, for expressive sexual relations, and for social intercourse are universal laws inscribed by a benign deity into “the necessary relations arising from the nature of things” (EL, I, 1). Justice is the supreme criterion of the laws. Their application to political forms produces in Montesquieu's argument a valorization of republics animated by virtue, and modern monarchies animated by (false) honor, over and against despotisms animated by fear. On this level of understanding, there is no significant distinction between virtue and false honor, since each is subsumed under the category of “moderate” governments, those polities uniquely capable of sustaining liberty.³² Moderate governments follow the laws of nature, while despotic governments violate them, and are thus corrupt in their very essence (EL, VIII, 10). This assumed, Montesquieu rarely seeks to show in concrete detail the ways in which despotic governments are corrupt,³³ and after a compressed and at times opaque initial discussion of the laws of nature, he rarely refers to them in the body of The Spirit of the Laws. The Persian Letters, on the other hand, takes the laws of nature as the primary subtext around which the novel is composed; it is the place where Montesquieu unravels the human dynamics of despotism about which The Spirit of the Laws remains so frustratingly reticent.

When he describes the performing culture of contemporary France, Montesquieu is free to employ a wide range of discrete cultural signifiers to guide the reader because he could assume an immediate familiarity on the part of his literate, essentially elite audience with the Parisian society of which it formed a fundamental part. Minute details of custom, fashion, and historical reference could take on multiple resonances in this reading environment, and reveal the micro worlds of meaning enclosed within each nuance of social life. The very mention of Versailles, or a monk's habit, brought with it a range of textured associations upon which the Persians' commentary could then trade. In articulating the “Orient,” however, Montesquieu, like his readers, confronted an alien cultural domain, one almost wholly delineated in the imagination by literature itself, by fantasies such as Marana's Turkish Spy (1694), and the often mythic accounts of travelers such as Chardin and Tavernier upon whom Europeans relied for their knowledge of the East (LP, 72).³⁴ In his depiction of Usbek's Persia, therefore, Montesquieu employs signifiers as formal symbols, the category of sign most familiar in literary texts, as opposed to the more oblique and multivalent signs deployed in the flood of early eighteenth-century ethnographic reports that Usbek's and Rica's letters from Europe are meant to mimic. Moreover, in shifting the levels of signification as he shuttles the reader between Paris and Persia, Montesquieu shifts his mode of analysis as well. He moves from the metaphorical representation of concrete European practices, which stand for a complex of historically embedded communal attitudes, to the allegorical enactment of an archetypical spiritual struggle, an almost formally dramatic and typological rendering of the formation of the self in its confrontation with the other. In this historically barren space, signs bear their meanings as they generate clusters of symbolic images. For while “Parisians” in The Persian Letters are figures, often drawn from the stage, which represent primary social types, “Persians” in the Orient are fractured embodiments of a psychological configuration, unidimensional registers of selfhood through which the reader encounters that fear of the other and the violation of nature that together constitute despotism.

The meaning of the Orient is structured by the relationship between Usbek and his wives. Montesquieu employs two privileged symbols to portray its dynamics: the face, particularly the eyes, and the sexual organs. The eyes and the organs of Usbek's wives are primary locations for the exercise of his power. Likewise, Usbek's own eyes and sex are his essential instruments for the subjugation of others in a symmetrical model of perverse power relations, one in which, as Montesquieu later put it, the pleasures of dominion are found “delightful by those very persons whom they are made to confine” (EL, XV, 11). Yet Usbek controls neither the eyes nor the sexual organs of any of his wives for the sake of having unrestricted use of either, nor are Usbek's eyes or his own sex primarily understood as the sources of his most heightened sensations. Rather than sites of supreme sensual pleasure, the eyes and the sexual organs are the fundamental outward signs of the inner self. When Usbek controls both he becomes the master of another's person.

Indeed, it is the “personal slavery … peculiar to voluptuous peoples,” a condition of “unlimited authority … calculated for pleasure rather than [productive] utility” (EL, XV, 10) that Usbek's seraglio at Ispahan is meant to delineate.³⁵ As slaves, Usbek's wives fully exist only insofar as they are permitted to see and be seen by Usbek himself. Thus Zashi offers as a sign of her obedience to Usbek the fact that during a trip to the country she avoided being seen by anyone (LP, 3), and Fatima similarly notes that no one may gaze upon her (LP, 7). Usbek reminds Roxane that she has “never been soiled by the lascivious glances of any man; even your father-in-law … has never seen your beautiful mouth; you have never neglected to conceal it by wearing a sacred veil” (LP, 26). The veil thus becomes the most prominent, publicly displayed sign of Usbek's subordinating power; as it blocks the gaze of unauthorized eyes, at the same it conceals sexually significant bodily parts that only Usbek's eyes may view. Usbek recognizes that an Italian woman's capacity to see and be seen by men is a sign of her “great freedom” (LP, 23). In Paris, likewise, women leave their faces bare, and in Usbek's sexually saturated imagination they “have lost all restraint, … [it is] as if they were asking to be made to yield; they seek the gaze of men” (LP, 26).³⁶ If Usbek is to maintain his position of dominance, it is essential that his wives remain veiled and thus deindividuated persons in the eyes of all others but himself. The veil again takes on significance when Usbek's wives begin to rebel. The chief eunuch reports to him the “dreadful” account of Zelis dropping her veil on the way to the mosque, when she “was seen by the people with her face almost uncovered” (LP, 147). And in his attempt to quell the rebellion, the eunuch signals his authority over the seraglio by forcing the wives to don veils even when they are alone (LP, 156). Usbek imposes the veil as an emblem of his despotic authority, and the unveiling of his wives thus becomes the formal symbol of their rebellion. By preventing his wives from seeing others or being seen by them, Usbek imposes his person as the only possible other for them. Moreover, in limiting their visual contact with himself, this other, he not only refuses his wives the freedom to choose preferred others for themselves, he also denies them the liberty even to communicate with, and so become persons for him, the unique other that he has imposed upon them.

The veil is thus a privileged sign of Usbek's authority that stands in a relation of equal importance to the sexual power over his wives from which he derives his self-regard. Usbek's dominion over their sexuality, and the unrestrained despotism of his sexual imagination, are enforced by his eyes. “Happy Usbek,” Zashi writes, “what charms were displayed before your eyes … your inquisitive eyes investigated our most sacred places; at every moment you made us pose in a thousand different positions; new commands brought on over new compliance” (LP, 3). Only he may view their sexual organs, while they must relinquish command over their bodies to him. And Usbek fully understands that the significance of these transactions lies less in the immediate sensual pleasures they may afford than in the heightened experience of dominance they symbolize. For in the seraglio, as in the Orient itself, he writes:

Even pleasures are grave and joys are taken severely; they are hardly ever indulged in except as a means of indicating authority and subjection.

(LP, 34)

Sexual power is thus no more an end in itself, an unmediated object of delight, than is the visual power it certifies. But by exercising both kinds of power over his wives, Usbek gains control over a more fundamental entity, their very selves. By keeping his wives in visual and sexual as well as physical captivity inside the seraglio, Usbek is then free to impose himself as the other for whom they must act and in relationship to whom they must define themselves. The only alternative candidates for other-relations, the eunuchs, possess no sex, and thus possess no full self in this universe where identity is construed as a derivative of potency, and potency is the rigorously policed symbol of dominion. Indeed, it is with the eunuchs that Montesquieu makes explicit the conjunctions between sex and self. Usbek describes his eunuchs as “vile tools … which I can break at my whim and who exist only insofar as you can obey; … who breathe only as long as my happiness, my love, or even my jealousy require your degraded selves … (LP, 21). The eunuch Paran writes of being “degraded” by the “losing of his humanity” (LP, 62), while the chief eunuch ruefully describes the moment of his castration, when he was “separated from myself forever” (LP, 9). Literally without sex, the absence that authorizes their eyes to see what is otherwise forbidden, the eunuchs exist as “blindly obedient” (LP, 2 and 9), minimal selves incapable of performing the role of the other.

This link between sex and self articulates for Montesquieu the essence of master-slave relations: Slavery is that condition in which self-definition is possible only within one's role as slave, a political configuration in which the master's authority is constituted by his power to designate identity, and to deny alternate roles to those he dominates. “I cannot imagine,” Usbek writes to Roxane, “that you have any other object than to please me” (LP, 26). Thus the master deprives the slave of the very essence of the self-defining subject. As slave, one has a self only in that role, a role that renders even that self created by the master, the master's object. The chief eunuch is painfully perceptive about this. “My will,” he says of Usbek, “is his property” (LP, 22). In slavery the power of self is claimed by another, just as the liberty freely to act as other for another self is extinguished by its laws.

Yet it is crucial for the success of Montesquieu's allegory of self-dispersion and re-creation that the master-slave relationship contain within itself a paradox. For Usbek, while possessing this shaping power over his wive's selves, is nevertheless dependent on them for playing the role of other for him. His self-understanding demands that they be free to choose this role, that they somehow defy the law of noncontradiction and give uncoerced recognition to the master whose slave they nevertheless remain. “I wish you to forget,” Usbek fantasizes to his wives, “that I am your master and to remember me only as your husband” (LP, 65). In the Orient, where wives are at every moment slaves, Usbek as Oriental can only inhabit the role of master and never simply of man, lover, or friend. He is only fully himself insofar as he has slaves. Realizing this, Zelis writes to Usbek:

Although you keep me imprisoned I am freer than you. Even if you redouble your efforts to guard me, I should simply take pleasure in your disquiet, and your every suspicion, jealousy and vexation are so many signs of your dependence.

(LP, 62)

Though despot, Usbek is a singularly restricted subject of his own despotism.³⁷ In order to preserve his self, he must continually watch and keep his wives in subjugation, the others whose recognition and obedience certify his identity. Yet this relentless monitoring of the women only heightens their role as privileged spectators of Usbek's own performances, diminishes these performances in their eyes, and so clarifies his own subjection by the others upon whose vision he paradoxically depends. The master-slave relation, at either end of its polarities, is thus for Montesquieu rendered as an interdependent tyranny of the other. Finally, “useful neither to the master nor to the slave” (EL, 15, 1), it is a formation constituted by the strict bondage of rigidly circumscribed selves to univocal, inelastic roles. Despotism entails the isolation of the self from all others, certainly from lovers (LP, 159), even from fellow slaves (LP, 147), and, uniquely, from the unapproachable, imposed other for whom one is obliged to perform.³⁸

THESPIAN POLITICS

The importance of the rebellion in the seraglio for the design of The Persian Letters is twofold. On the one hand, it releases Usbek's wives from the tyranny of the other by permitting them to act for and thus interact with others of their own choosing. Free to enter into relations (significantly, sexual relations out of Usbek's sight) with unimposed others, the wives enter into full selfhood when they pluralize self-other relations. By enlarging the audience of their performances they diffuse its dominion; by choosing its members they may engage with them in relations of reciprocity and thus mutual responsibility. For Usbek, however, the rebellion dissolves his identity. When deprived of slaves, Usbek is deprived as well of the others upon whose existence his self-definition as master depends. As news of the rebellion reaches him in Paris, Usbek suddenly understands that he “seem[s] not to exist any more,” and knows that, upon returning home, he “shall be surrounded by walls more horrible to me than to the women they enclose,” an isolation of the self from the others it requires fully to exist (LP, 155). In ending their despotism, in destroying a morally disambiguated world in which only one person may act freely, the wives erase the despot's identity, leaving Usbek in that state of self-negation he formerly envisaged only for slaves. And, by ending their slavery, the wives deny Usbek's authority to violate nature's laws. For only after the rebellion can they be free from violence, free to have sexual relations, and free to live in society. As Roxane tells Usbek, “I have reformed your laws according to the laws of nature” (LP, 161).³⁹

The isolation of the self from others, then, is the foundation of despotism, a site of psychological disfigurement and self-mutilation that violates natural laws. The heart of Montesquieu's allegory, the seraglio sequence, occupies most of the last part of The Persian Letters (LP, 147-161). At its finale, when Roxanne assumes the role of the neoclassical dramatic heroine in her dying soliloquy (LP, 161),⁴⁰ the reader's center of attention has effectively been diverted from Montesquieu's representation of French society to an uneasy examination of the potential “Oriental” within each person. And it is from this final self-inspecting perspective that Montesquieu's reader comes most fully to appreciate the force and significance of the cultural, rather than the psychological, contrast between despotism and the reader's own (monarchical) society. In the light of the emergence into selfhood of Usbek's wives as they seize the power freely to perform for others, the isolation lying at the root of despotism serves to place the performing culture of France in its proper political focus. Just as features of Usbek's “little empire” (LP, 9) at Isphahan were intended by Montesquieu to warn of the dangers of despotism by providing a coded account of Louis XIV's centralizing ambitions,⁴¹ his comparisons of French “gaiety” to “Oriental gravity” takes on a revived importance for the reader after Usbek's disintegration. As Usbek himself says of “the little contact [Orientals] … have with each other”:

They only see each other when ceremonial obligation demands it. Friendship, that sweet union of hearts, which is what makes life so sweet here, is almost unknown to them. They withdraw to their houses, where they always find [the same] company waiting; so that each family is so to speak isolated.

(LP, 34)

Required by the demands of his elite culture to perform, the individual in France, “formed solely for society” (LP, 87), is steadily enjoined by the strictures of that society to refuse isolation, for he must communicate with others in order precisely to define his social place and attempt through the arts of civility to advance publicly his private ambitions. Honor, the principle that informs these social relationships, in this way serves as a shield against despotism by defining the public stage. It protects the liberty of subjects by underwriting their freedom to act in that plurality of roles—as friend, husband, lover, poet—required by free persons.⁴²

When Rica writes that “with us everyone's character is uniformly the same,” he further clarifies this contrast between France and the Orient:

People do not seem what they are, but what they are obliged to be. In this servitude of heart and mind, nothing is heard but the voice of fear, which has only one language, instead of nature, which expresses itself so diversely and appears in so many different forms.

(LP, 63)

In despotisms roles must be singular and univocal, since performances are limited to one language and one form. Rather than opportunities for self-expression, language, and form, role and style themselves become in this political configuration constraints imposed upon persons who, like Usbek's wives, can only defend their selves by “dissimulation, which among us is so widely practiced and essential an art, [but] unknown here [in France],” where “everything is said, everything can be seen, and everything heard” (LP, 63). Rica, whose “mind is gradually losing its Oriental aspect” (LP, 63), most easily assimilates into the theatrical European world, where he “grasps everything promptly” (LP, 25). Unlike the distant, reflective Usbek, whose insistence upon his “sincerity” and desire to “unmask” the Persian court first drove him into exile (LP, 8), Rica quickly responds to the dramatic surfaces of French society. In so doing he reveals to the reader that the manners and habits of the masked and costumed characters on the French stage are socially sanctioned devices that at once permit freedom of expressive action and control through intersubjective restraints the despotic self-love to which all persons, and not merely Orientals, are prone. In this society, “sincerity,” like the “naturalness” of Usbek's informant at the country house, is but one dramatic possibility within a large repertoire of acceptable behavioral styles, all of which are properly comprehensible only within the theatrical culture that frames them.

With The Persian Letters, Montesquieu began to temper his regret for the demise of undivided personality and integrated identity, values embodied by the virtuous citizens of antique republics.⁴³ While he once lamented that Europe was filled with “too many Narcissi who … would be lost without others to tell them of their self love. … Seduced by appearances, they make a virtue of theater,”⁴⁴ Montesquieu's experience of actual republics strongly reinforced Rica's ethnographic insights. This experience promoted in Montesquieu a heightened appreciation of theatricality as a potentially vitalizing, though less than virtuous, feature of modern political life. In Venice, where the people were “patient, submissive and downtrodden,” the ruling elite thought only of its own interests, and the always continuing dialogue between sex and self produced “a kind of liberty that most decent people would not wish to have: to go in broad daylight to visit prostitutes; to marry them; to be excused from Easter communion; to be anonymous and independent in your actions: this is the kind of liberty that one has here.”⁴⁵ Montesquieu saw in this deformed egoism no politics of authenticity, but rather an inverted image of the isolated, politically exposed selves who inhabited his symbolic Orient, where, Rica told his readers, theaters were unknown. Montesquieu found that the “civility” of monarchies, their manières informed by honor, though “false,” effectively restrained these narcissistic temptations, which he first explored in Usbek's character. The ideal of honor formed “a barrier” against isolation and anonymity, a buffer between the liberties of society and the despotism of the seraglio, “which men have placed within themselves to prevent the[ir] corruption” (EL, XIX, 16). Most important, it required that these men communicate and perform in public, and so become “something of a spectacle to the other” (EL, XIX, 8). Self-regarding mirrors of each other, Montesquieu hoped that in the theater of their mutual reflections the liberty of political actors might be sustained.

Notes

1. See Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” Representations 11 (Summer 1985), 63-94.

2. Thomas Hobbes, “Of Man,” Leviathan, ed. by C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 217-218.

3. Clifford Geertz, Negara. The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: University Press, 1980), 121.

4. For studies of these processes in the classical French setting from which Montesquieu wrote, see Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le roi-machine. Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981), and Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le prince sacrifié. Theâtre et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1985).

5. Benjamin R. Barber, “Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination,” Daedalus 107 (1978), 79-92.

6. See, particularly, Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” Albion's Fatal Tree (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 17-64.

7. Tom Paine, “The Rights of Man,” Common Sense and Other Political Writings (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 120.

8. E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 4 (1974), 389.

9. See Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

10. The “impartial spectator,” a notion probably first introduced by Addison in Spectator no. 274 (January 14, 1711-1712) to denote sound and balanced moral judgment, is most often associated with the central principle of Adam Smith's moral philosophy, particularly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III. The formulation we employ here is taken from Rousseau, who argues that when “we are purely spectators, we immediately take the side of justice,” but when we enter into theatrical relations, “only then [do] we prefer the evil that is useful to us to the good that nature makes us love.” Politics and the Arts. Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theater, trans. by Alan Bloom (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960), 24.

11. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), chaps. 2 and 6, especially 247-248.

12. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 3-56, follows Trilling's line of argument and tries to enlist Montesquieu as a proponent of radical individualism.

13. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 248.

14. All references to Montesquieu refer to the Oeuvres Complètes, ed. by Daniel Oster (Paris: Seuil, 1964), and will be cited as O.C. For convenience, references to Les lettres persanes (hereafter, PL, followed by letter number) and L'Esprit des Lois (hereafter, EL, followed by book and chapter number), will appear parenthetically in the text.

15. The categories of signifying and nonsignifying behavior derive from Iurii M. Lotman's work, most especially, “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. by A. D. Nakhimovsky and A. S. Nakhimovsky (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 67-94. These categories are employed in a general account of theatricality and eighteenth-century social theory in E. J. Hundert, “Theatrical Representation in the History of Identity: Henry Fielding's Performing Self and its Collapse,” Poetics Today (1989).

16. Louis XIV, Usbek writes, “governs with equal talent his family, his court and his state. People have often heard him say that, of all the governments in the world, that of the Turks, or that of our august sultan, would please him best—so much significance does he attach to Oriental politics” (LP, 37).

17. This point is an elaboration of a comment by Jean Starobinski, Montesquieu (Paris: Seuil, 1953), 63.

18. Montesquieu's own theatrical interests and knowledge are surveyed in Jean Tarraube, “Montesquieu Amateur de Theatre,” Archives des Lettres Modernes V, 3 (1974), no. 151, “Etudes sur Montesquieu,” pp. 22-51.

19. For a discussion of this literature, see Maurice Magendie, La Politesse Mondaine et les théories de l'honnêteté, en France au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 a 1660 (Paris: Alcan, n.d.); Norbert Elias, The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), each trans. by Edmund Jephcott. See too, John Christian Laurson, “From Court to Commerce: David Hume and the French Vocabulary of ‘Politeness’ in the Scottish Enlightenment,” paper presented to the conference, “The Political Thought of the Scottish Enlightenment in its European Context,” Edinburgh, April, 1986, especially 4-6. We are grateful to James Moore for bringing this paper to our attention.

20. For Montesquieu's appreciation of this tradition see, Pensées, nos. 822 and 832, in O.C., pp. 971 and 972, and Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford: University Press, 1961), 34-35. See too, Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères ou les Moeurs de ce siècle, ed. by Robert Garapon (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 163-164: Politesse consists of “a certain attention to making others contented with us and with themselves through our words and manners,” of pleasing one another, for a “little attention to having sweet and polished manners can prevent bad impressions.”

21. John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford, CA: University Press, 1959), 15-16, points to a similar cultural configuration and its relation to the theater in early eighteenth-century London.

22. Erich Auerbach, “La Cour et la Ville,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 157.

23. Daniel Roche, “Milieux académiques provinciaux et société des lumières,” ed. by Geneviève Bollème et al., Livre et société dans la France du 18e siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1965), 93-185, explores the degree to which these imperatives penetrated the provincial elite world from which Montesquieu came.

24. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Harper, 1981), 94.

25. See Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936); Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester, 1986).

26. For the variations of the figure Festin de Pierre on the French stage in the second half of the seventeenth century see Henry Carrington Lancaster, “A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century” (Vol. II, Part III), The Period of Molière (Baltimore: Hopkins, 1936), 634-647.

27. Paul Benichou, Man and Ethics, trans. by Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Anchor, 1971) is the best introduction to the ideological tensions of this culture. For a suggestive interpretation of Usbek's character in the light of Alceste in Le Misanthrope, see Suzanne Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction. A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1984), chap. 3.

28. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 157. See too John Lough, Paris Theater Audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Oxford, 1957).

29. See Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Régime. French Society 1600-1750 trans. by Steve Cox (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), 242-244.

30. Montesquieu derived this notion, along with his spectatorial conception of modern social life, from Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, which he cites in a note to EL, XIX, 8. This connection deserves more study. See Melvin Richter, The Political Philosophy of Montesquieu (Cambridge: University Press, 1977), 43-45; Pierre Rétat, “De Mandeville à Montesquieu: honneur, luxe et dépense noble dans L'Esprit des Lois,” Studi Francesi 17 (1973), 238-249; Dario Castiglione, “Considering Things Minutely: Reflections on Mandeville and the Eighteenth-Century Science of Man,” History of Political Thought 7, no. 3 (Winter 1986), 463-488.

31. Mark H. Waddicor, Montesquieu and the Philosophy of Natural Law (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970).

32. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1965), I, 22-23; Tzvetan Todorov, “Droit Naturel et Formes Gouvernement dans L'Esprit des Lois,” Esprit 7, no. 3 (March 1983), 35-48.

33. Two important exceptions to this claim are Book X, dealing with conquest, and Book XV, on slavery, perhaps the most influential eighteenth-century discussion of the subject.

34. G. L. Van Roosbroek, Persian Letters Before Montesquieu (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1932); Paul Vernière, “Montesquieu et le monde musulman d'après l'Esprit des Lois,” Actes de Congrès Montesquieu (Bordeaux, 1956), 175-190; Susan Strong, “Why a Secret Chain?: Oriental Topoi and the Essential Mystery of the Lettres persanes,” SVEC 230 (1985), 167-180.

35. See too EL, XVI, 9, and Aram Vartanian, “Eroticism and Politics in the Lettres persanes,” Romantic Review 60 (1969), 23-33.

36. The point is brought home in the tale of the two Ibrahims when the celestial Ibrahim grants his wives their freedom by forbidding them to wear veils (LP, 41). See too LP, 20.

37. A point Montesquieu would later generalize into a principle. In despotisms “every tyrant is at the same time a slave.” EL, IV, 3.

38. Usbek's wives are made to wear the veil even when alone; when disciplined they are “no longer permitted to speak to each other; it would be a crime even to write …” (LP, 156).

39. For Montesquieu's complex views on the effects of women on social life see Jeannette Geffriaud Rosso, Montesquieu et la fémininité (Pisa: Goliardica, 1977) and Paul Hoffman, La Femme dans la pensée des lumières (Paris: Ophrys, 1977), 324-351. For the dangerous effects of unconstrained women see Pensées no. 860, in O.C., p. 974, and EL, XIX, 7-8.

40. For the neoclassical dramatic conventions governing Roxane's heroic suicide see, J. M. Goulemot, “Montesquieu; du suicide légitimé à l'apologie du suicide héroique,” in Gilbert Romme et son temps (Clermont-Ferrand: De Bussac, 1966), 307-318, and Rosso, Montesquieu et la fémininite, 328-339. Perhaps the most well-known example is Cleopatra's dying soliloquy in Dryden's All For Love.

41. For these details see Orest Ranum, “Personality and Politics in The Persian Letters,” Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 4 (1969), 606-627.

42. On this point, which links Montesquieu's argument to Tocqueville's, see Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 27-53.

43. David Lowenthal, “Montesquieu and the Classics: Republican Government in The Spirit of the Laws,” ed. by Joseph Cropsey, Ancients and Moderns (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 258-287. See too Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography. chap. V.

44. Montesquieu, “Eloge de la Sincérité,” (1717), in Q.C., 43-44.

45. O.C., p. 216; and compare, LP, 31.