Montesquieu
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40 free Montesquieu trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Montesquieu is a name most people meet once in a civics lesson and never again, which is a pity, because the man behind it is full of surprises. He was a French baron who wrote a hit satire before he wrote political theory, ran experiments on the side, and travelled across Europe taking notes on how other countries were governed. This quiz collects the best fun facts about him: his unusual christening, his life at the Château de la Brède, the novel Persian Letters and its two bewildered travellers, the big ideas of The Spirit of the Laws, and the long shadow he cast over the rulers and revolutionaries who borrowed from him. It suits students revising the Enlightenment, teachers who want a quick classroom round, and anyone who likes knowing the story behind a famous name. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few facts worth repeating.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Montesquieu is the principal source of which theory of government, now written into many constitutions?
Separation of powers
Separation of powers, he argued, protects liberty because no one body can make the laws, enforce them and settle disputes all at once. The framers of the US Constitution built the idea in.
Q 02Montesquieu's noble parents are said to have chosen which unlikely figure as their son's godfather?
A beggar
A beggar stood godfather, the story goes, so that the future baron would remember all his life that the poor were his brothers.
Q 03To support his climate theory, Montesquieu froze which animal's tongue and studied it under a microscope?
A sheep
A sheep supplied the tongue: he watched its tiny bumps shrink when frozen and rise again as it thawed, and concluded that people in cold countries feel things less keenly.
Q 04America's founders cited Montesquieu more than any other source except which book, one survey found?
The Bible
The Bible alone outranked him: political scientist Donald Lutz counted citations in late-1700s American writing and found Montesquieu the most quoted authority on government.
Q 05From 1981 to 1994, Montesquieu's face appeared on which everyday French item, later given to Gustave Eiffel?
A banknote
A banknote for 200 francs bore his portrait until a new series handed that denomination to the engineer of the famous tower in 1996.
Q 06Which ruler admitted pillaging Montesquieu's work for the Nakaz, an instruction for a new law code?
Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great lifted hundreds of articles from Montesquieu and Beccaria, then altered the parts that clashed with her vision of Russia as an absolute monarchy.
Q 07At the Horn Tavern in Westminster in 1730, Montesquieu was initiated into which fraternity?
The Freemasons
The Freemasons admitted him at a lodge that met in the tavern. Back in France, his membership later drew unwelcome attention from Cardinal Fleury.
Q 08Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was added in 1751 to which institution's list of banned books?
The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books, even though he had published a full Defence of the work the year before.
Q 09Montesquieu held high office in the Parlement of Bordeaux, which was chiefly what kind of body?
A court of law
A court of law is what every French parlement was: a bench of appeal judges, not lawmakers. He presided over the criminal chamber in Bordeaux, hearing cases and supervising prisons.
Q 10Montesquieu is a title taken from a barony: which family name was the philosopher actually born with?
De Secondat
De Secondat was his surname; he was born Charles-Louis, and the name the world knows him by arrived with a barony he inherited as a young man.
Q 11In Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, which principle keeps a despotic government running?
Fear
Fear drives a despotism, he wrote, just as love of virtue drives a republic and love of honour a monarchy; a regime that loses its principle cannot last long.
Q 12Which founder, the 'Father of the Constitution', called Montesquieu the oracle always consulted and cited?
James Madison
James Madison paid the compliment in Federalist No. 47, an essay he published under the pseudonym Publius in a New York newspaper in 1788.
Q 13Montesquieu's ironic list of arguments for slavery says which commodity would cost too much without it?
Sugar
Sugar is the commodity he names, in a deadpan list of pro-slavery arguments set down without comment. Elsewhere in the same book he calls slavery wrong because all humans are born equal.
Q 21Montesquieu inherited his title, a fortune and a seat in the Bordeaux Parlement from which relative?
His uncle
His uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu, had taken him in as a ward when his father died three years earlier.
Q 22Bored with the Bordeaux Parlement, Montesquieu gave up his inherited office by doing what with it?
He sold it
He sold it, which was perfectly legal: such posts were property under the old regime, freely bought, sold and inherited subject to payments to the king.
Q 23Montesquieu's Persian Letters mocks the 'System' of which Scottish financier, which collapsed in 1720?
John Law
John Law was a gambler who had fled a death sentence for killing a man in a duel; he rose to run France's finances and became the richest man in Europe before his bubble burst.
Q 14Montesquieu's birthplace, the moated Château de la Brède, sits amid which kind of farmland?
A vineyard
A vineyard surrounds the Gothic castle, begun in 1306, where he wrote most of his works. Visitors can still see his library and bedroom, kept as they were in the 18th century.
Q 15Montesquieu's Persian Letters opens in the final years of which long-reigning French king, who died in 1715?
Louis XIV
Louis XIV rules for the first three years of the travellers' stay in Paris; the rest of the novel unfolds under the regency that governed for his five-year-old heir.
Q 16In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the travellers Uzbek and Rica set out for Paris from which city?
Isfahan
Isfahan is where Uzbek leaves five wives in a seraglio guarded by eunuchs, and the household's slow collapse in his absence becomes the dark thread of the novel.
Q 17Montesquieu's 1734 study of Rome's greatness and decline helped inspire which historian's far longer work?
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon drew on it for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which runs to six volumes where Montesquieu needed only 23 chapters.
Q 18Montesquieu's history of the Romans ends in 1453, when Constantinople fell to which invading power?
The Ottomans
The Ottomans' capture of the city closes a book that begins with the founding of Rome in 753 BC, though he had first meant to write only a few pages on the subject.
Q 19Which body of forty members known as 'the immortals' elected Montesquieu in 1728, despite some opposition?
The Académie française
The Académie française elected him in January, and by April he had left on a tour of Europe that kept him away from France for three years.
Q 20Montesquieu's wife, Jeanne de Lartigue, practised which outlawed faith when the couple married in 1715?
Protestant
Protestant worship had been banned in France since the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, yet Jeanne de Lartigue kept her faith and brought her husband a large dowry.
Q 24In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Rica calls which figure a magician who convinces a king that three are one?
The Pope
The Pope, in Rica's baffled report, can also persuade people that the bread they eat is not bread. Much of the book's early humour comes from the visitors misreading what they see.
Q 25In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, which favourite wife of Uzbek ends the novel with a defiant final letter?
Roxane
Roxane, the one wife whose virtue Uzbek trusted, takes a lover and then her own life, telling her husband in that last letter that her mind had always stayed free.
Q 26Montesquieu's Persian Letters claimed to be printed in Cologne but really came from a press in which city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam was the real source: 'Pierre Marteau of Cologne' was a front for the press of Jacques Desbordes, by then run by his widow, Susanne de Caux.
Q 27Which upheaval, ending the year Montesquieu was born, made England the monarchy he later admired?
The Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 shaped the system he went to see for himself, living in England from late 1729 until the spring of 1731.
Q 28Which French writer applied Montesquieu's methods to the United States in Democracy in America?
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent to study American prisons, spent nine months travelling the country, and came home with a portrait of its whole society instead.
Q 29Which 20th-century economist told French readers that Montesquieu was their true equivalent of Adam Smith?
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes made the claim in the French edition of his General Theory, praising Montesquieu's clear-headedness and good sense above those of the physiocrats.
Q 30Which ailment troubled Montesquieu from the 1730s onward and shadowed his later years at La Brède?
Failing eyesight
Failing eyesight dogged him for two decades and a cataract left him dreading blindness, yet in those same years he completed The Spirit of the Laws.