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In all likelihood the idea of the “Persian Letters” occurred to Montesquieu before he left college. The first of them, dated the 21st of the moon of Muharram (January), 1711, was written in his twenty-second year; the last in his thirty-second. Reflections of his favourite reading are to be found in their framework, and critics have pointed out the many resemblances to Dufresney’s “Amusements,” “The Turkish Spy,” “The Spectator,” the “Decameron,” with borrowings from Erasmus and other less-known writers. But Montesquieu has at least spoiled nothing that he has used. The “Letters” were printed in Amsterdam, and published anonymously in 1721; and at once, as a friend of Montesquieu’s had predicted, “they sold like loaves.” No French writer had ever before said so perfectly what all felt and were trying to say; and it was done so skillfully, so pleasantly, like a man telling a story after supper.

At the time they appeared the social order of the ancien régime was beginning to crumble about the monarchy. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, by exiling the Huguenots, had deprived the country of many of its most industrious subjects, and struck a disastrous blow at its trade; the power of France, build up peacefully by Mazarin and Colbert, had been shattered at Ramilies and Malplaquet; and Louis XIV.’s acceptance of the Bull Unigenitus, directed against the Jansenists, had destroyed the last remnant of religious liberty. As for the parliaments, they were only able to mumble and grumble, endless edicts having pulled their teeth, as it were, one by one; and the condition of the people was desperate in the extreme. It is no wonder that when Louis XIV. Died, the middle and lower classes thanked God with “scandalous frankness” as for a long-expected and certain deliverance. The upper classes were delighted also, although they hardly returned thanks in the same quarter, nor for the same reason. It was not a lightening of taxation, some liberty of conscience, more equal laws, that the latter anticipated, but the old licence, the “unchained libertinage,” the idea of which had never disappeared, but had been handed down, as Sainte-Beuve says, in direct and uninterrupted descent from the Renaissance to the Fronde, from the Fronde to the Regency, through De Retz, Saint-Evremond, Vendome, Bayle, to the Epicureans, Pyrrhonists, professors of an imperturbable impiety, the unbelievers, as full and certain in their unbelief as Bossuet was in his faith, who made a byword of the eight years from the death of Louis XIV. To his successor’s assumption of power. Grown sanctimonious in his old age, Louis XIV. Had made his subjects hypocrites. At his death the boast of vice succeeded to ostentatious devotion; the court like one man changed from Tartuffe into Don Juan. All things were discussed, examined, and torn to shreds. The intestine quarrels of the Church gave scoffers the opportunity they would have made. Dubois debauched politics; Law, finance; and the populace debauched themselves: for gaming, which had before been confined to people of quality, became the common amusement. Incest, too, was quite à la mode; and those who could not be in the height of the fashion had to be satisfied with lesser vices. The autocratic rule of the Grand Monarque gave place to the laissez-aller of Philip of Orleans, the “unbelieving Regent.” Hope, desire, speculation, knew no bounds, all things in heaven above and in the earth beneath having become common and unclean. It is this period that is reflected and criticized in the “Persian Letters.”