Montesquieu

"Carlo was tall, handsome, popular and a fine horseman. He spoke French well, was familiar with the Enlightenment thought of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau and Hobbes, and wrote Voltairean essays sceptical of organized religion for private distribution.9"

"Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.6 With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him. He also included Herodotus for his – largely fantastical – description of Egypt."

"He proposed that three members of the town council be removed from office. ‘This measure is violent, possibly illegal, but essential,’ he wrote, ending with a quotation from Montesquieu: ‘Laws are like the statues of certain divinities which on some occasions must be veiled.’13 In this instance, he didn’t get his way."