Education Quote by Charles de Secondat

Cosmopolitan pride is doing the heavy lifting here, and it’s not as innocent as it sounds. Montesquieu frames himself and his cohort as heirs to comfort who nonetheless refuse the intellectual laziness that comfort tends to breed. “Born in a prosperous realm” signals privilege, then pivots to a moral credential: we could have stayed provincial, but chose curiosity. That self-fashioning matters in early 18th-century France, where the prestige of the court and the authority of Church-and-state made “knowledge” feel like a domestic monopoly.

The line’s real bite is in its double move. First, it rejects borders as epistemic fences: political boundaries shouldn’t dictate what counts as truth. That’s Enlightenment rhetoric at its most strategic, because it smuggles critique past censors. If knowledge must roam, then French institutions can’t claim final jurisdiction over ideas. Second, it elevates “the lore of the East” not as exotic decoration but as a competing source of illumination. Montesquieu’s subtext is comparative: France can only see itself clearly when viewed from elsewhere. This is the engine of his broader project in works like Persian Letters, where an imagined Eastern gaze exposes French customs as contingent, even absurd.

Yet there’s an edge of irony: the “East” is also a rhetorical instrument, a screen onto which Europe projects alternate possibilities. The quote performs openness while still controlling the frame, deciding which “lore” counts and how it will be used. That tension is the Enlightenment in miniature: critique powered by curiosity, shadowed by the confidence that the West gets to curate the world’s wisdom.