My Thoughts (Mes Pensées)

My Thoughts is a collection of Montesquieu's private notebooks, maintained from the publication of Persian Letters in 1721 until his death in 1755 . Unlike his published works, it contains unfinished drafts, projected works that were abandoned, and judgments he considered too fragile or dangerous for print. Montesquieu explicitly stated that not every idea deserves publication, and the notebooks reflect that discipline: they are a mental library where ideas were kept in reserve, tested, or discarded . They reveal an 'esprit en action' rather than a finished system .

The notebooks contain early versions of passages that Montesquieu eventually placed in The Spirit of the Laws, as well as fragments of works dismantled to feed the larger treatise . Crucially, they include an entire chapter that was excised from The Spirit of the Laws . Recent manuscript analysis has identified 'phantom works' surviving only in the Pensées, including a 'Treatise on Duties,' a 'Treatise on the Prince,' and 'On Political Liberty' — the last of which constitutes the matrix for the English chapters of The Spirit of the Laws . My Thoughts is therefore not merely an archive but a working tool for understanding how the published work was built.

The 2024 critical edition of the complete works (Volumes XIV–XV) has broken with the chronological framework previously attributed to the Pensées. Analysis of the three manuscript volumes — 1,500 folios in Montesquieu's hand and those of his secretaries — shows the collection was constituted from 1731 onward, after his European travels, and not before . It was assembled in successive waves at the end of each secretary's service. This revises the interpretation of many early entries and confirms that the Pensées cannot be treated as a simple chronological diary but as a deliberately organized intellectual repository.

Montesquieu regarded writing as 'the most serious of games,' but he also believed that judgment is fragile and that not every idea merits publication . The Pensées were a space of freedom: he could write 'méchant' (spiteful) judgments, test formulations without committing to them, and preserve ideas that might later be deepened . The title itself signals this provisional status — 'Ce sont des idées que je n'ai point approfondies et que je garde pour y penser dans l'occasion' (These are ideas I have not deepened and keep to think about on occasion). They were a private reserve, not a public statement.

The two collections serve different functions. The Spicilège is oriented toward history and constitutes a documentary reservoir — notes on events, statistics, and contemporary reports . My Thoughts is more introspective and philosophical, revealing an active mind at work on morality, politics, religion, and law. Where the Spicilège gathers material for future use, the Pensées tests ideas and preserves judgments that may never be published. Together they form the two poles of Montesquieu's private intellectual life: one outward-facing and documentary, the other inward-facing and experimental.

A common misconception treats the Pensées as a collection of aphorisms or maxims in the style of La Rochefoucauld. Montesquieu deliberately resisted that model: he did not want to appear as the eighteenth-century La Rochefoucauld, and he changed the rules from one entry to the next rather than maintaining a consistent aphoristic form . The work is also not a unified treatise but a heterogeneous assembly — drafts, fragments, reflections, and rejected formulations. Reading it as a book of wisdom maxims misses its function as a workshop for his published thought.