Tea at Trianon: Montesquieu’s Warning

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, December 19, 2022

Montesquieu’s Warning

From Law and Liberty:

In the book of Genesis, God gives the humans He just created certain tasks to perform. Among them, He says to “be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.” The contemporary West, once the center of Christendom, has failed to adhere to this mandate. The average fertility rate needed merely to keep population levels steady is 2.1 children per woman. In 2021, the fertility rate among European women was 1.61. America used to defy these low rates but joined its European compatriots beginning in 2007, a product, at least in part, of the Great Recession. We now regularly receive dire reports about the fertility rate among American women as well. With low fertility rates come the threat of depopulation, a shrinking workforce, less proactive communities, and decreases in productivity as well as economic dynamism.

On that front, we received a small amount of good news recently. 2021 marked the first year since 2014 that the number of births in the United States increased. The fertility rate went up from 1.64 to 1.66 children per woman, despite fears the pandemic would drive numbers down further. That still means fertility rates remain at a historical low, well short of mere replacement levels. Perhaps this slight uptick portends a broader and deeper rebound in Americans having children. Unfortunately, however, there is more reason to doubt this seemingly positive development. The opposite trend seems too longstanding, and thus, too fixed on the path of decline. We need to ask what options America possesses to reverse this general trend. What political options exist to spur childbirth in our culture and the economy? In essence, can public policy make America fertile again?

Montesquieu, the 17th-century French political thinker, provides an under-studied but worthwhile discussion of this subject. The American Founders leaned heavily on his seminal treatise The Spirit of the Laws for our systems of federalism and separation of powers. Yet, that same work dedicated an entire section to the issue of how a country’s laws related to the size of its population.

Montesquieu doesn’t paint a rosy picture for America. He begins with the particular difficulties involved in human reproduction. It comes from our reason combined with our freedom. Montesquieu points to “the way of thinking, character, passions, fantasies, caprices, the idea of preserving one’s beauty, the encumbrance of pregnancy, that of a too numerous family, disturb propagation in a thousand ways.” Animals reproduce from instinct. Humans can decide to try and avoid pregnancy. Their reason and passions give them various excuses to avoid reproducing.

But problems particular to time and place can dissuade further the desire to have children. Thus, Montesquieu admits that “Regulations concerning the number of inhabitants depend greatly on circumstances.” He then mentions differences in circumstances. Some population decreases, for instance, come from the combination of “internal vice and a bad government.” This internal origin presents a much harder problem to address than, say, an invader’s acts of destruction. Such acts are obvious and how to address them, namely by military victory, is clear. But regarding internal reasons for population decline, Montesquieu goes on to say that “Men there have perished from an imperceptible and habitual illness.” They suffer from bad habits whose culpability in depopulation we struggle to pinpoint. Such a situation describes our own.

First, we do too much to discourage marriage. Our government regularly has penalized marriage in filing taxes, especially for low-income earners. Our cities build and zone housing to make it hard, if not impossible, for larger families to reside there. Moreover, our culture’s long-running sexual revolution also discourages wedlock by normalizing cohabitation as well as sex outside of marriage. One could argue marriage inhibits population, tying men to reproducing with one female partner. Montesquieu, however, writes that “public continence is joined naturally to the propagation of the species.” In general, marriage comes about “wherever there is a place for two persons to live comfortably.” Marriage both arises from comfort and creates comfort in living, especially for raising children.

Marriage creates comfort because rearing human beings takes much longer and more effort than rearing animals. Because humans possess reason as well as passions, they must receive instruction, not just nourishment, in order to learn both to “sustain their lives” and to “govern themselves.” Thus, while female animals may alone take on the nourishment of young, the greater requirements for human offspring dissuade single mothers from having additional children.

Marriages, moreover, should see the wife as joining the husband’s family. Doing so, Montesquieu argues, makes the family a sort of “property” for the man, one that drives him to have male offspring in order to maintain the family line. The same proves true for last names. Sharing a name creates pride in its status and interest in its continuance. Thus, Montesquieu also supports the intimidating proposition that men should ask the father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He argues that fathers, not the other potential option—the state—should have a say over getting the children married, since they will look out best for the benefit of their families. This attitude of family as property, legally supported, “contributes much to the propagation of the human species.” (Read more.)