Politics & Power Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

Liberty rarely vanishes with a drumroll; it disappears with paperwork. Montesquieu’s line is built to sting because it collapses two time scales into one sentence: the speed of political loss versus the slowness of public recognition. “In a day” suggests an event that can be framed as temporary, procedural, even prudent - an emergency decree, a reshuffled court, a “reform” that centralizes power. “Not miss them in a century” is the more unsettling claim: once the machinery changes, people adapt to the new normal with alarming ease, and memory itself becomes governed.

The subtext is less romantic than most Enlightenment slogans. Montesquieu isn’t praising the people’s inherent love of freedom; he’s warning about their talent for accommodation. Rights don’t only depend on good constitutions, they depend on habits: expectations about what a government is allowed to do, what a citizen is allowed to refuse, what feels scandalous. Remove those expectations and you can keep the language of liberty while draining its substance.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of Louis XIV’s absolutism and England’s post-1688 settlement, Montesquieu is obsessed with structure: separation of powers, intermediate institutions, friction in the system. This aphorism is a compact argument for why checks and balances must be baked in, not wished for. Tyranny doesn’t need to persuade you forever; it only needs to reorganize the rules once, then let time do the rest.