Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Secondat

Luxury is doing more work here than velvet and champagne. Montesquieu is naming a political solvent: comfort that dulls vigilance. A republic, in his telling, runs on a scarce fuel he elsewhere calls "virtue" - not piety, but civic self-restraint, the willingness to put public interest ahead of private appetite. When wealth becomes the main social language, citizens start behaving like consumers of government rather than stewards of it. Offices turn into prizes, laws into levers, and inequality into an accepted fact of nature. The state doesn't get conquered; it gets franchised.

The jab at monarchies is colder: they don't need virtue, they need cash. A crown survives on payrolls, patronage, and the constant purchase of loyalty. Poverty here isn't the moral purity of the humble; it's fiscal collapse, grain shortages, unpaid soldiers, and a court that can no longer stage legitimacy. When the money dries up, the spectacle fails, factions harden, and the ruler's aura becomes just another expense item.

The structure of the line is the point: two regimes, two vices, two different modes of decay. Montesquieu writes in an 18th-century Europe watching commercial wealth expand and absolutist states strain under war finance. The subtext is strategic, even admonitory. If you want a republic to last, you police luxury not because pleasure is sinful, but because it privatizes the citizen. If you want a monarchy to last, you avoid poverty not out of compassion, but because deprivation turns subjects into accountants of power - and eventually, auditors with knives.