Thinkers Timeline

Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, philosopher, and diplomat. He is often called the father of international law. He was born on 10 April 1583 in Delft, in the Netherlands. His Dutch name was Huig de Groot. The Latin form, Grotius, is the name he is now known by in most of the world. His family was educated and well-connected. His father had been mayor of Delft and a curator of Leiden University. Grotius was a child prodigy. He entered Leiden University at age eleven. He earned a doctorate in law in France at fifteen. He published his first books in his teens. He became a working lawyer and politician in his twenties. By thirty he was one of the most respected scholars in Europe. His political career ended badly. The Netherlands in his time was torn by religious and political conflict. Grotius supported one faction. When the other side won, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1619 in Loevestein Castle. After almost two years, his wife smuggled him out in a chest of books. He fled to Paris. It was in Paris, in 1625, that he published his masterpiece: De Jure Belli ac Pacis, On the Law of War and Peace. The book established the foundations of modern international law. Europe at the time was tearing itself apart in the Thirty Years War. Grotius wanted to find rules that could limit the violence and bring some order to relations between nations. He later served as Sweden's ambassador to France. He died on 28 August 1645 in Rostock, Germany, after his ship was wrecked on the Baltic coast. He was 62.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a French lawyer and political thinker. He was born in 1689 at the family castle of La Brède, near Bordeaux in southwest France. His family belonged to the lesser nobility. He studied law and worked as a judge in the Bordeaux high court for twelve years. The work was tedious, but it gave him a deep first-hand knowledge of how laws and courts actually function. In 1721 he became famous, almost by surprise, with the Persian Letters. The book is a comic novel about two Persian travellers in France who write letters home about French customs. Through their puzzled outsider eyes, Montesquieu mocked French society, religion, and politics. The book was a bestseller across Europe. Soon Montesquieu sold his judge's office, joined the French Academy, and turned to full-time writing. For the next twenty years he travelled, read, and worked on his great book. He spent over a year in England, watching parliament and the courts. He read history and travel writing from many parts of the world. The result was The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. It was a vast comparative study of government across many cultures and times. The book was banned by the Catholic Church but read everywhere. Montesquieu died in 1755 in Paris. His ideas, especially about separating the powers of government, would shape the United States Constitution forty years later, and constitutional thought ever since.