It is not enough to have dealt with political liberty in relation to the constitution : we must examine it in its relation to the citizen.
I have said that in the first case it is defined by a certain distribution of the three powers ; but in the second we must consider it from a different (…)
Philosophical liberty consists in the exercise of one’s will, or at least (if we are to speak of all systems) in the opinion one has that he is exercising his will. Political liberty consists in security, or at least in the opinion one has of one’s security.
This security is never more (…)
The laws that send a man to his death on the deposition of a single witness are fatal to freedom. Reason requires two, because a witness who asserts and an accused who denies make a tie, and there must be a third to decide it.
The Greeks [1] and the Romans [2] required an additional voice in (…)
It is the triumph of liberty when the criminal laws derive every punishment from the particular nature of the crime. All arbitrariness ceases ; the punishment is handed down not by the legislator’s whim, but by the nature of the thing ; and it is not man committing violence against man.
There (…)
An important maxim : great circumspection is required in the pursuit of magic and heresy. Accusation for these two crimes can hugely threaten freedom, and be the source of limitless tyrannies, if the legislator is unable to contain it. For as it does not bear directly on the acts of a citizen, (…)
God forbid I should wish to diminish the horror we feel for a crime which religion, morality, and politics all in turn condemn. It should be banned even if it did no more than give to one sex the weaknesses of the other, and prepare an ignominious old age by a shameful youth. What I will say (…)
The laws of China stipulate that whoever shows disrespect for the emperor shall be punished by death. As they do not define what this disrespect is, anything can furnish a pretext to take the life of anyone at all, and to exterminate any family at all.
When two persons responsible for writing (…)
It is another violent abuse to give the name of crime of lese-majesty to an act that is not one. A law of the emperors pursued as sacrilegious those who questioned the prince’s judgment and doubted the merit of those he had chosen for some office. It was, to be sure, the council and the (…)
When Paulinus had sent word to emperor Alexander that he was preparing to pursue, as guilty of lese-majesty, a judge who had decided against his edicts, the emperor replied that in such an era as his, there was no such thing as indirect crimes against majesty.
When Faustinianus had written to (…)
An English law passed under Henry VIII declared anyone who predicted the king’s death guilty of high treason. This law was quite vague ; despotism is so fearsome that it turns against even those who exercise it. During that king’s last illness, the physicians never dared to say he was in danger, (…)
Montesquieu
Unité Mixte de Recherche 5317, CNRS