War & Peace Quote by Charles de Secondat

War gets demoted from glory to paperwork in this tidy chain of purposes: victory, conquest, preservation. Montesquieu writes like a man suspicious of grand nouns. He refuses to treat war as its own moral universe and instead frames it as an instrument with a job description. The rhetorical trick is the compression: three steps, each one narrowing the romantic imagination until “preservation” snaps into focus. What looks like a celebration of domination is actually a warning label. If preservation is the end, then conquest isn’t a trophy; it’s a burden that must justify itself by producing stability, security, and durable order.

The subtext is a critique of imperial vanity, especially in an early modern Europe where dynastic ambition routinely dressed itself up as necessity. By making conquest merely the middle term, Montesquieu subtly strips it of its usual moral alibi. Conquest that cannot preserve - that creates endless resistance, drains the state, corrodes legitimacy - is not just cruel; it’s irrational, a failure of political reason. It’s also a preemptive strike against the argument that victory sanctifies whatever follows. In his political philosophy, power is always tempted to exceed its rationale; this sentence tries to handcuff that temptation with logic.

Context matters: Montesquieu is writing in the wake of Louis XIV’s expansionism and in the intellectual climate that will soon challenge absolutism. His broader project in The Spirit of the Laws is to map how laws and institutions should restrain power. Here, he’s applying the same sensibility to war: force can begin a political settlement, but only preservation - a livable peace - can finish it.