The Temple of Gnide

Montesquieu

Translated by Brian Stableford

Originally published anonymously in 1725, and here presented in a fresh translation by Brian Stableford, The Temple of Gnide is Montesquieu’s illicit smash hit from the Age of Enlightenment. The author, whose works were all placed on the Index Prohibitorum by the Church, making it a sin to read them, or even to know of their existence, composed this short novel, or long prose poem, as an attempt to explore the psychological operation of the sexual impulse, and to raise the question of how the social management of that impulse might best be organized.

The Temple of Gnide is not only a symbolization of lust and its psychological and social accommodation, but a symbolization of the narrativization of the erotic, a story that is as much about story construction as it is about the substance of the story being told, and for sophisticated readers, that adds an extra dimension of depth to the narrative.

About the Author
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755), generally referred to simply as Montesquieu, was a French judge, political philosopher and man of letters of the Enlightenment. In 1721 he anonymously published Lettres persanes, which satirized French Regency society, as seen by fictitious Persians. He later devoted himself to his great works which combined history and political philosophy: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) and De l’Esprit des lois (1748), in which he developed his ideas on the distribution of the functions of the State between its different components, later called the “principle of separation of powers.”

Montesquieu, along with John Locke among others, is one of the thinkers of the political and social organization on which modern and politically liberal societies are based.

Paperback, 94 pages
Release date: May 17, 2022
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-096-8
Price: US$12.00

A review by Tom Bowden on The Book Beat’s website. July 2022.

“An obscure, minor work by Montesquieu that required two levels of falsification to elude French censors: claiming that the book was published in London, thereby bypassing the requirement that all books published in France pass a censor’s inspection; and that the book was translated from the Ancient Greek, so that its commentary on sexual mores would not seem at odds with current Church pronouncements. Coded this way, even contemporaries of Montesquieu knew how to read the metaphors, which pronounce a desire from Bacchus to humans, on behalf of the denizens of Mt. Olympus, that humans live happy, harmonious lives, rich in sexual gratification and poor in jealousy and mistrust.”