"Montesquieu, the Persian Rousseau, and Napoleon’s" Topic

…French Revolution in India

"The coming year 2021 marks the tercentenary of the publication of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. At first glance, the philosophe who penned a novel about a fictional Persian's travels to Paris in the first half of the eighteenth century seems to share little in common with the Corsican who marched his army across three continents at its end. But in fact, both men were motivated by the same sequence of events to cast their eyes towards Persia. Pierre Victor Michel's embassy to Shah Soltan Hosayn in 1708 and Mohammad Reza Beg's delegation to Louis XIV in 1715 inspired Montesquieu's peripatetic Persian protagonist and Napoleon's 1808 treaty with Persia's Fath-Ali Shah. Napoleon was an avid student of Persian history. His admiration for Persian conqueror Nader Shah ran so deep that he brokered his treaty to continue Nader's invasion of the Asian subcontinent and bill it as a French Revolution in India…."

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