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To the above poster, you really do neat to cite Wikipedia when you just copy and paste a huge section from it. As for Montesquieu's role in French Reformation, I would suggest that he was most influential in his promotion of "separation of powers," meaning that Montesquieu elaborated on a system of government in which there were various branches that counter-balanced one another. This was an extremely important concept that had perhaps been implemented in England's Monarch-Parliamentary system, but it hadn't been fully thought out to the degree that Montesquieu was successful in doing. His belief in the separation of powers was very revolutionary because it meant that the social system of France would have to be disrupted (read below). Perhaps Montesquieu was thus a contributer to the French Revolution, and I would say that many of his theories of separation of power were later important in the many models of French government that would be tested in the 1790s and up until modern times. I hope that helped!

From wikipedia:

Montesquieu's most influential work divided French society into three classes (or trias politica, a term he coined): the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons. Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing: the sovereign and the administrative. The administrative powers were the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary. These should be separate from and dependent upon each other so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two, either singly or in combination. This was radical because it completely eliminated the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the people at large represented by the Estates-General, thereby erasing the last vestige of a feudalistic structure.

After having studied at the College of Juilly, he married. His wife, Jeanne de Latrigue, a Protestant, brought him a substantial dowry when he was 26. The next year, he inherited a fortune upon the death of his uncle, as well as the title Baron de Montesquieu and Président à Mortier in the Parlement of Bordeaux. By that time, England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution (1688–89), and had joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. And in 1715 the long-reigning Sun King, Louis XIV died and was succeeded by the weaker and more feeble Louis XV. These national transformations impacted Montesquieu greatly; he would later refer to them repeatedly in his work.

Soon afterwards he achieved literary success with the publication of his Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721), a satire based on the imaginary correspondence of an Oriental visitor to Paris, pointing out the absurdities of contemporary society. He next published Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans, 1734), considered by some scholars a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. De l'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws) was originally published anonymously in 1748 and quickly rose to a position of enormous influence. In France, it met with an unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the regime. The Roman Catholic Church banned l'Esprit – along with many of Montesquieu's other works – in 1751 and included it on the papacy's notorious Index. But from the rest of Europe, especially Britain, it received the highest praise.


Besides composing additional works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and eighteen months in England before resettling in France. He was troubled by poor eyesight, and was completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He was buried in L'église Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France.