The Spirit of the Laws (French:
De l'esprit des lois, originally spelled
De l'esprit des loix; also sometimes called
The Spirit of Laws) is a
treatise on
political theory first published anonymously by
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu in 1748 with the help of
Claudine Guérin de Tencin. Originally published anonymously partly because Montesquieu's works were subject to censorship, its influence outside France was aided by its rapid translation into other languages. In 1750 Thomas Nugent published the first English translation. In 1751 the
Catholic Church added
De l'esprit des lois to its
Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books"). Yet Montesquieu's political treatise had an enormous influence on the work of many others, most notably:
Catherine the Great, who produced
Nakaz (
Instruction); the Founding Fathers of the
United States Constitution; and
Alexis de Tocqueville, who applied Montesquieu's methods to a study of American society, in
Democracy in America.
Macaulay offers us a hint of Montesquieu's importance when he writes in his 1827 essay entitled "Machiavelli" that "Montesquieu enjoys, perhaps, a wider celebrity than any political writer of modern Europe."