Montesquieu's Persian Letters: Satire Through Foreign Eyes

In 1721 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, a judge from Bordeaux, anonymously published the Persian Letters. The novel consists of letters by two fictional Persian travelers, Usbek and Rica, describing France to friends back home. Through their outsider eyes, familiar French customs look absurd: the king's power over money and opinion, the Pope's authority, fashion, Parisian vanity and religious quarrels. This device let Montesquieu criticize his own society while appearing to describe a foreign one.

A darker plot about Usbek's harem in Persia, which collapses into revolt while he is away, explores how despotism corrupts both rulers and ruled. Modern readers note that the book relies on European stereotypes of the Islamic world even as it questions French prejudices. Its popularity showed that satire and fiction could carry serious political ideas to a large audience, a strategy the philosophes used again and again.