Persian Letters

Summary

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. Usbek has left Persia partly in search of knowledge and partly to escape enemies at court. He leaves behind a seraglio of wives, among them Zachi, Zelis and his favourite Roxane, guarded by eunuchs led by a Chief Eunuch who writes to him of his own mutilation and of the hatred he bears the women he controls. In Paris and elsewhere the two travellers observe French society with the eyes of outsiders, and their naive descriptions turn familiar institutions into absurdities: the king as a magician who makes people believe paper is money, the pope as another magician who makes them believe three are one, the fashions that change so fast that a woman returning from the country seems out of date, the vanity of salons, the pedantry of scholars, the pretensions of nobles and the quarrels of theologians. Interspersed are longer reflections on politics and morality. Usbek tells the fable of the Troglodytes, a people who destroy themselves through selfishness and then flourish through virtue, only to ask for a king when virtue becomes a burden. He discusses depopulation, religious tolerance, despotism, justice and the right to take one's own life. Rica, lighter and more adaptable, becomes something of a Parisian himself. As the years pass, letters from Isfahan grow more alarming. The women quarrel, the eunuchs lose control, and there are reports of infidelity and intrigue. Usbek, who reasons so liberally about European tyranny, responds with orders for harsh punishments and gives the eunuchs absolute power. The final letters describe the collapse of the seraglio. Roxane, discovered with a lover who is killed, writes Usbek a defiant final letter: she has deceived him, she has always been inwardly free, and she has taken poison. The ending turns the satire back on its narrator: the philosopher who analyses despotism abroad is himself a domestic despot, and his household becomes an image of the political tyranny the book condemns.

Top Lessons

• Seeing one's own culture as strange

  By describing France through Persian eyes, Montesquieu makes the familiar absurd. The device teaches readers to question customs they take for natural.

• Reason does not guarantee virtue

  Usbek argues eloquently against despotism while ruling his seraglio by terror. The novel shows that enlightened opinions can coexist with tyranny in private life.

• Virtue as the foundation of self-government

  The Troglodyte fable argues that a free society depends on citizens who choose justice, and that people sometimes prefer a master to the burden of virtue.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Of interest mainly for the Enlightenment debate on suicide: one of Usbek's letters argues that European laws punishing suicide are unjust, an important early secular defence of the right to die that anticipates Hume's essay on suicide. The eunuchs' letters describe castration as both bodily mutilation and psychological wound. Roxane's death by poison ends the book. Medicine as such is not a theme, beyond passing satire of physicians and quack remedies in the Paris letters.

• Letter 76 (numbering varies by edition)

  Usbek argues that laws against suicide are unjust, since a man oppressed by misery should be free to leave a society that no longer benefits him.

• Early seraglio letters (c. Letters 9 and following)

  The Chief Eunuch describes his castration and his resentment of the women he guards.

• Final letter (Letter 161 in the 1758 numbering)

  Roxane writes to Usbek after taking poison, declaring her deception and her inner freedom.