Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), was a Bordeaux magistrate and landed nobleman who became one of the leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment. The anonymous Persian Letters (1721) made his name. He later wrote Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734) and The Spirit of the Laws (1748), whose theory of the separation of powers shaped the framers of the United States Constitution.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
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