War & Peace Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

There is a cold logic baked into Montesquieu's line: violence is not just how certain states are born, it becomes their operating system. If conquest is the founding myth, peace is never simply a policy choice; it’s an identity crisis. The sentence works because it strips away the romantic varnish of empire and treats it like a machine with one fuel source. Stop feeding it, and it stalls.

Montesquieu is writing as an Enlightenment philosopher watching Europe’s great powers expand through colonial grabs and dynastic wars, and he understands something modern analysts still wrestle with: institutions inherit their origin story. An empire built by war develops incentives that reward war - generals with careers to justify, tax systems calibrated for armies, political legitimacy tied to victory, subject populations held in line by threat. Even when expansion “finishes,” the empire has to keep moving: new campaigns to pay old debts, new enemies to keep the center unified, new triumphs to distract from the costs of ruling.

The subtext is a critique of empire’s self-justifying morality. If your authority rests on domination, you can’t easily pivot to consent without exposing the original sin. Montesquieu also hints at strategic paranoia: empires create the very insecurity they claim to solve, because conquest breeds resentment and rival coalitions. War becomes both cause and alibi.

It’s a neat, unsentimental diagnosis: the trouble with founding power on force is that force starts to feel like the only language the state can speak.