Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

A throwaway line with the swagger of a statistic: Paris is not conquered by war or plague, but by its own appetite. Montesquieu turns the city into a self-devouring organism, and the joke lands because it flatters and indicts at once. Everyone in polite society recognizes the ritual - the long midday meal, the late supper, the social choreography of courses and conversation. He compresses that entire world into a mock epidemiology: lunch and dinner as twin executioners.

The intent is less about literal overindulgence than about diagnosing a culture that mistakes refinement for health. Enlightenment thinkers loved to treat society like a system you could anatomize; Montesquieu does it with a grin, using hyperbole as a scalpel. The subtext: Parisian elites are so committed to pleasure and display that they will gladly trade vitality for the performance of living well. It also hints at inequality without naming it. The people being "killed" are the ones with the leisure to be at table in the first place - the city’s fashionable half dying twice a day.

Context matters: early 18th-century Paris is the engine room of European taste, gossip, and intellectual life, and also a place where medicine is primitive and digestive complaints are a common language. Montesquieu, the aristocratic observer of manners, uses food as a proxy for broader decadence: a metropolis whose dangers are not external threats but internal habits, normalized because everyone laughs along.