Translator’s note: The role of manners in achieving certain political ends, particularly stability, was a topic that much interested the eighteenth century. In this essay, Saint-Lambert ranges across space and time—from ancients to moderns, from despotisms to democracies—to reflect upon the nature and effects of manners, drawing on but criticizing Montesquieu’s discussion of the relationship between manners, laws, and regimes.

Manners. In the most generally accepted sense, these are the customs established to make the commerce that men ought to have among themselves milder. They are the expression of mores, or merely the effect of submission to customs. They are to morals what the cult is to religion: they manifest them, preserve them, or take their place, and consequently they are of greater importance to societies than moralists have thought.

It is not well enough understood how our machinelike habit makes us engage in acts whose moral principle we no longer have within us, and how this habit contributes to preserving that principle. When certain acts or movements are connected in our minds with the ideas of certain virtues or sentiments, those acts or movements recall those sentiments and virtues within us. See Connection of ideas.

In China, children give their parents extraordinary honors. They constantly show them external signs of respect and love. It is likely that there is more display than reality in these external signs, but respect and love for parents is livelier and more consistent in China than in countries where the same sentiments are commanded [ ordonnés ], [1] without laws prescribing the manner of manifesting them. In France, the people are far from respecting all the grandees they greet, but the grandees are more respected there than in countries where the established manners do not impose signs of respect toward them.

Among the Germans, and afterward among us in the age of chivalry, women were honored like gods. Gallantry was a cult, and in this cult as in all others, there were the lukewarm and the hypocrites. But they still honored women, and they certainly loved them and respected them more than the kaffir who makes them work while he rests, and the Asiatic who enchains them and caresses them like animals designed for his pleasures.

The habit of certain acts, certain gestures, certain movements, certain external signs maintains the same sentiments within us better than all the dogmas and all the metaphysics in the world.

I said that the machinelike habit makes us engage in acts whose moral principle we no longer have within us. I said it preserves the principle within us. It does more; it increases it and generates it.

There is no passion in our soul, no affection, no sentiment, no emotion that does not have its effect on our body, that does not raise, collapse, relax, or tighten some muscles, and that does not have a more or less specific expression in our varying exterior. Pains and pleasures, desires and fears, love and aversion—whatever may be their moral cause—have within us more or less the physical effects that are made manifest by signs that are more or less perceptible. All the affections marked on the face present a certain expression; they make up what is called the physiognomy ; they change the body’s habit; they give bearing and take it away; they cause us to make certain gestures, certain movements. This is an uncontested truth.

But it is no less true that once the movement of the muscles and nerves that is the usual effect of a certain passion is stimulated and repeated within us without the aid of that passion, it reproduces itself there to a certain point.

The effects of music on us are palpable evidence of this truth. The impression of the sonorous body on our nerves stimulates different movements there, many of which are of the same kind that a certain passion would stimulate. And if these movements succeed each other, if the musician continues to bring the same sort of disturbance to the nervous system, then soon this or that passion—joy, sadness, anxiety, etc.—is transmitted into the soul. It follows from this observation, whose truth any man endowed with a little refinement in his organs can attest within himself, that if certain passions bring certain movements to the body, these movements bring the soul back to these passions. Now since manners consist for the most part in gestures, bodily habits, gait, then actions—which are the signs, the expression, the effects of certain sentiments—are bound not only to manifest or preserve these sentiments, but sometimes to generate them.

The ancients paid more attention than we do to the influence of manners on mores, and to the relations between the habits of the body and of the soul. Plato distinguishes two sorts of dance. The one is an art of imitation—properly speaking pantomime—which is the only dance appropriate to the theater. The other is the art of accustoming the body to decent bearing, to making ordinary movements with propriety. This kind of dance has been preserved by the moderns, and our dancing masters are professors of manners . Molière’s dancing master was not as wrong as we think in, if not preferring himself, then at least comparing himself to the philosophy master. [2]

Manners should express the respect and submission of inferiors toward superiors, the marks of humanity and condescension by superiors toward inferiors, and the sentiments of benevolence and esteem between equals. They regulate deportment and prescribe it to the different orders, to the citizens of the different estates.

It is clear that manners as well as mores are bound to vary according to the different forms of government. [3] In despotic countries, marks of submission on the part of inferiors are extreme. The satraps of Persia used to prostrate themselves in the dust before their kings, and the people likewise prostrated themselves before the satraps; Asia has not changed.

In despotic countries, the marks of humanity and condescension on the part of superiors are reduced to very little. There is too big a gap between what a man is and what a man in office [4] is for them ever to be able to approach each other. There, superiors show inferiors only disdain and sometimes an insulting pity.

Since the equal slaves of a common master have no esteem either for themselves or for their peers, they show no marks of it in their manners . They have weak feelings of benevolence for each other. They expect little from each other; slaves raised in servitude do not know how to love. They are more eagerly occupied in shifting the weight of their irons onto each other than in helping each other bear them. They have more the air of imploring pity than of expressing propriety.

In democracies, in governments where the legislative power resides in the body of the nation, manners show only weak evidence of dependency relations—of whatever kind. There are fewer manners and established customs than expressions of nature. Liberty is manifested in the bearing, the character traits, and the actions of every citizen.

In aristocracies, and in countries where public liberty is no more but where civil liberty is enjoyed—in countries where the few make the laws, and especially in those where one alone rules, though by the laws—there are many manners and customs by convention. In these countries, to please is an advantage, to displease a misfortune. One pleases by one’s charms and even one’s virtues, and manners are usually noble and agreeable. The citizens have a mutual need to preserve each other, assist each other, elevate or enjoy each other. They are afraid of alienating their fellow citizens by letting their faults be seen. Everywhere, one sees hierarchy and esteem, respect and liberty, the desire to please and sincerity.

Normally in these countries, one notices at first glance a certain uniformity; the characters seem to resemble each other because their differences are hidden by manners . Much more rarely than in republics does one find those original characters who seem to owe nothing except to nature—not only because manners impede nature but because they change it.

In countries where there is little luxury, where the people are occupied by commerce and by the cultivation of the land, where men view each other more out of interests of first necessity than reasons of ambition or a taste for pleasure, the externals are simple and honest, and manners are more sensible than affectionate. [5] There, it is not a question of finding charms and displaying them; one promises and demands only justice. In general, in all countries where nature is not disturbed by emotions imprinted by government, where the natural is rarely forced to present itself and is fairly unfamiliar with the need to constrain itself, manners count for nothing; there are very few manners unless the laws have established them.

President Montesquieu criticizes the legislators of China for mixing together religion, mores, laws, and manners . [6] But wasn’t it to eternalize the legislation they meant to enact that those sublime geniuses bound together things that in many governments are independent, and sometimes even opposed to each other? It was by supporting the moral with the natural and the political with the religious that they made the constitution of the state eternal, and the mores immutable. If there are circumstances, if the centuries bring moments when it would be good for a nation to change its character, then the legislators of China have been wrong.

I observe that the nations that have preserved their national spirit the longest are those in which the legislator has established the closest connection between the constitution of the state, religion, mores, and manners , and above all those in which manners have been instituted by the laws.

In antiquity, the Egyptians were the people that changed the most slowly, and that people was guided by rites, by manners . The subjects of Psammetichus and Apries are recognizable under the dominion of the Persians and the Greeks; they are recognizable under the Romans and under the Mamelukes. [7] Even today among the modern Egyptians, vestiges of their ancient customs are still seen, so powerful is the force of habit.

After the Egyptians, the Spartans are the people who preserved their character the longest. They had a government in which mores, manners , laws, and religion joined together, fortified each other, and were made for each other. Their manners were instituted. The form and topics of conversation, the deportment of the citizens, the way in which they approached each other, their conduct during meals, the details of propriety and decency—in short, the externals—all had occupied Lycurgus’s talents along with virtue and the essential duties. Thus, in the reign of Nerva, the Lacedaemonians [i.e., the Spartans] — who had been subjugated for a long time and were no longer a free people— were still a virtuous people. Nero, going to Athens to cleanse himself after his mother’s murder, did not dare move on to Lacedaemon. He feared the looks of its citizens, and there were no priests there who expiated parricides. [8]

I believe that the French are the modern European people whose character is most pronounced and has experienced the least alteration. They are, says M. Duclos, what they were in the time of the crusades: a lively, gay, generous, brave, sincere, presumptuous, fickle, conceited, rash nation. [9] France changes fashions but not mores. Manners , so to speak, made up part of her laws in the past. The code of chivalry, the customs of the old valiant knights, the rules of the old-style civility had manners as their purpose. More than in the rest of Europe, in France they are still one of the purposes of that second education one receives upon entering the world, which unfortunately accords too little with the first.

Manners , therefore, should be one of the goals of education, and can be established even by the laws, at least as often as by example. Morals are the interior of man, manners are his exterior. To establish manners by laws is merely to establish a cult of virtue.

One of the main effects of manners is to impede the first impulses within us. They take away the soaring energy of nature, but by giving us time for reflection, they also prevent us from sacrificing virtue to present pleasure— that is, the happiness of life to a moment’s interest.

In the imitative arts, this should not be taken too much into account. The poet and the painter should give nature all its liberty, but the citizen should often constrain it. It is quite rare that whoever puts himself above manners for a frivolous interest would not put himself above morals for a large one.

In a country in which manners are an important matter, they live on after morals, and indeed morals need to be vastly altered for any change in manners to be perceptible. Men still display themselves as being what they ought to be when they no longer are that way. In Europe, the interests of women have long preserved the externals of gallantry. Even today, they still place an extremely high value on polished manners . Therefore, they still receive homage, they never experience bad conduct, and people still rush to offer them useless services.

Manners are corporeal. They speak to the senses, to the imagination—in fact, they are palpable. That is why they survive morals; that is why they preserve them better than precepts and laws. It is for the same reason that ancient customs persist among all peoples, even though the motives that led to their establishment are no longer preserved.

In the part of Morea that used to be Laconia, people still assemble on certain days of the year to hold public feasts, even though the spirit that led Lycurgus to establish them has now quite completely died out in Morea. Cats had temples in Egypt; it would be unknown today why they have hospitals if they had not previously had temples.

If there were civilized peoples before the invention of writing, I am persuaded that they preserved their mores for a long time in the way that the government had instituted them. Since they did not have the aid of letters, they were obliged to perpetuate the principles of morals by manners , tradition, hieroglyphs, pictures—in short, by perceptible signs, which are etched more strongly on the heart than writing, books, and definitions. The Egyptian priests preached rarely and painted a lot.

1. This is possibly a reference to the fourth commandment (Exod. 20:12).

2. The reference is to the dancing master in Molière’s 1670 play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, act I, sc. 2. For an English translation, see The Merchant Gentleman.

3. Montesquieu announces this relationship in The Spirit of the Laws , 1.3, and returns to it many times throughout the work.

4. Homme en place, referring loosely to being in a position of authority or dignity.

5. The word is affectueux, which may also mean “impassioned.”

6. The reference seems to be to Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 19.16–19, although it is not clear how critical of the Chinese the author is there; see also 14.5.

7. Psammetichus (r. 664–610 b.c.e.) and Apries (r. 589–570 b.c.e.), Egyptian pharaohs; the Mamelukes were slave soldiers who converted to Islam and ruled Egypt, 1250–1517.

8. Nero (r. 54–68) and Nerva (r. 96–98), Roman emperors; the death of Nero’s mother Agrippina occurred in 59.

9. Charles Pinot Duclos, Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (1751). See the first sentence of chapter 7. An abridged, anonymous English translation of this work appeared in volume 1 of Memoirs illustrating the manners of the present age (Dublin: G. Faulkner, 1752).