ABSTRACT
For all of the celebrity of De l'esprit des lois—commonly regarded as the most influential work of political thought of the French Enlightenment—the political stance of its author has always been a matter of dispute. The basic positions were established in a sharp exchange early in the last century, when Elie Carcassonne's portrait of Baron de Montesquieu as a liberal constitutionalist drew a blunt rejoinder from Albert Mathiez, who described him instead as a "feudal reactionary". A brief consideration of the issue that is central to any judgment about the social interpretation of Montesquieu today: the handling of the topic of nobility in De l'esprit des lois itself. There is no close counterpart anywhere in early modern political thought for the specific analysis of monarchy, internal to the typology, that follows in De l'esprit des lois. Its fundamental feature is the umbilical connection that Montesquieu establishes between monarchy and nobility.
