Les Lettres persanes Reading Order

Les Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721) by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, is the founding text of the French Enlightenment satirical tradition — an epistolary novel in which two Persian noblemen, Rica and Usbek, travel through Europe (Paris, Venice) and write letters home that expose both the absurdity of European (especially French) customs and, by contrast, the problems of the society they have left behind in Persia. The satirical device — the outside observer who sees through the conventions invisible to insiders — is the central instrument of Enlightenment critique, and Montesquieu was its greatest French practitioner. But the Persian Letters is not merely an external satire of French society: Usbek's letters from Paris are intercut with the letters of his wives and eunuchs from his harem in Ispahan, and as Usbek's Persian despotism collapses in his absence — the wives rebel, the eunuchs lose control, and Roxane (his most trusted wife) kills herself after confessing her freedom — the novel becomes a meditation on the relationship between political despotism and sexual despotism, liberty and constraint. The harem plot that Usbek cannot control from Paris mirrors the absolute monarchy that Louis XV cannot reform from Versailles: both forms of despotism are self-defeating because they destroy the virtue that consent requires.