The extensive connections between Montesquieu and the English Enlightenment are evident in the author's political philosophy. These connections are widely acknowledged and, when examined in context, reveal the extent to which Anglo–French intellectual exchanges stimulated the development of political thought on both sides of the Channel in the early Enlightenment. Yet it is important not to overlook the influence of the English ideas at work in a lesser-known dimension of Montesquieu's work: the aesthetic theories outlined in his Essai sur le goût dans les choses de la nature & de l'art (c. 1753–5). The Essai was Montesquieu's only direct contribution to Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751–72). In their preliminary discourse to this unrivalled compendium of Enlightenment thought the editors sought to establish their credentials as reviving a national French tradition of groundbreaking philosophical investigation. The genealogy of knowledge they sketched implied that philosophy had been born in France, but had been reared in England. The Encyclopédie marked philosophy's return to its native land, yet the editors had to acknowledge the importance of English ideas in bringing it to maturity. They duly recognized themselves to be continuing a project begun by Ephraim Chambers and also invoked the intellectual patronage of Bacon, Newton and Locke. Montesquieu's Essai is therefore placed in a work where English philosophy is appropriated and given French finesse. Montesquieu was working on the Essai at the time of his death in 1755. In 1753 he had been asked by D'Alembert to supply the encyclopaedia articles ‘Democracy’ and ‘Despotism’ but had refused the request, declaring: 'I have already plumbed the depths of my knowledge on these heads … It occurs to me that maybe I could write on ‘Taste’. Montesquieu's preference no doubt reflects his own eclectic intellectual tastes (he was later to feature in Diderot's article on ‘Eclecticism’) but is also an invitation to explore the complex relationship between aesthetics and politics in the eighteenth century.