ABSTRACT
This study has examined Montesquieu’s work as a site of intellectual exchange between England and France in the early Enlightenment, in the context of developments in Anglo–French relations in the same period. The significance of the English constitutional model in Montesquieu’s political philosophy is well known, but this study has demonstrated the depth and breadth of England’s impact on Montesquieu’s work. It has emerged that during his lifetime Montesquieu was continuously influenced by the ideas and ideals of the English Enlightenment. These he encountered in the publications of Huguenot journalists sympathetic to English ways of thinking, in works written by English authors and in England itself. English ideas and ideals resonate throughout his published works and his travel notebooks, from which the nation emerges as a symbol of cultural and political modernity rooted in a longstanding constitutional tradition. England is also synonymous with the practices of open, reasoned debate and political participation that defined the English public sphere. Where previous commentators have presented Montesquieu as a more or less passive receptor of English ideas, this study has shown him actively engaging in ideological debates that exercised both the French and English public spheres. The role played by Montesquieu’s work within the latter arena has also been uncovered, and the author’s attempts to enhance that role by addressing issues of relevance to English audiences have been fully explored. Through his work, Montesquieu thus initiated a series of enlightened exchanges which testify to the dynamic nature of the diffusion and reception of ideas in the eighteenth century, and to the extensive intellectual cross-fertilization linking England and France at this time.
