The art of the chapter heading in Montesquieu or 'De la constitution d'Angleterre'.

An examination of the chapter headings of the manuscript of L'Esprit des lois in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris enables us to follow the different phases of a twenty-year redaction process. The main tendencies in Montesquieu worth noting are his concern with the conciseness and simplification and the recurrent concern to give the headings a greater degree of generality, the better to bring out the principles that constitute the real heart of the spirit of the laws. This paper looks more closely at the heading of a particularly strategic chapter in L'Esprit des lois, 'De la constitution d'Angleterre' (XI, 6); the eight stages through which this astonishingly simple heading passed are like a journey, undertaken between 1739 and 1745. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]