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What are the main themes in Montesquieu's The Persian Letters?
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The main themes in Montesquieu's The Persian Letters include cultural relativism, humanism, and satire. Through fictional Persian travelers, Usbek and Rica, Montesquieu explores cultural diversity and the universality of natural laws. The work critiques both Eastern and Western societies, highlighting the superficiality of cultural differences and the shared human nature. Satirically, it exposes moral decline and decadence in French society during the early 18th century, using foreign perspectives to critique its excesses and absurdities.
The central theme of The Persian Letters is cultural relativism; he explores this theme by using the voices of two fictional Persian travelers: Usbek and Rica. Montesquieu got his details from accounts of the travels of Jean Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. At the beginning, he has Usbek say,
I began by examining humanity and I believed that, amidst the diversity of laws and mores, they were not led by their fancies alone.
He invokes the diversity of cultures to argue that in spite of apparent differences, even very different cultures were at their core obeying the same natural law and order. Through his characters, Montesquieu seeks to distinguish between what is malleable and what is common to all human experience. The implications for politics are that we see varieties of despotism everywhere, but we also see indications of a natural law of liberty. The implications for psychology: we see a...
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great variety of male-female relations and of human self-images, but we also see evidence of the permanence of human nature.
The general tone of the Persian Letters is unmistakably humanistic, in keeping with the Enlightenment tradition of which it forms a part. Throughout the PersianLetters Montesquieu is keen to highlight what unites humanity rather than what separates it. Although he presents us with a huge culture clash between East and West, the satirical thrust of the work renders such differences that exist between the two cultures as ultimately superficial and relatively unimportant. To this extent, it's notable that the character of Usbek is as profoundly critical of the tyrannical Turkish harem system as he is of the various foibles and absurdities of French society.
Montesquieu adopts a polyphonic approach in telling his story, inhabiting numerous cultural, religious, and gender identities. This allows him to achieve a more universal perspective on humanity, one that transcends multiple identities while still being rooted in them.
It is important to remember that this work is actually a satire, and therefore, although it ostensibly draws our attention towards the subject matter of Persian harems through the two central characters of Usbek and Rica, its central theme is actually a very clever satire of French satire as these two foreigners journey into Europe and make various observations about French society from their perspective as outsiders. The theme of this text is therefore the moral decline and decadence that became firmly rooted in France from 1712 in the last years of the reign of Louis XIV and during the minority of Louis XV.
To see this satire in action we need look no further than the observations that Rica makes about the society he travels through. For example, he claims that the King of France was richer than the King of Spain. Even though the King of Spain had vast mines of gold and silver at his disposal, the French King was more wealthy because of the vanity of his subjects, which was a greater source of wealth. Rica argued that the gullibility of the French citizenry was so great that the French King had only to say that paper was the currency and the French people would be satisfied.
Therefore, Montesquieu uses the device of two foreigners travelling abroad to comment critically upon French society and its various excess. The clear theme is this satirical purpose, as French society and its various failings are mercilessly exposed and ridiculed.