In 1721 when Montesquieu's first published work, the Lettres persanes, was printed anonymously in Amsterdam, England and France had been at peace for eight years and had been allies for five. The Anglo–French alliance of 1716 was a direct result of the deaths of England's Queen Anne and of the French King Louis XIV in 1714 and 1715 respectively. In England, the accession of Anne's Hanoverian cousin, George I, was intended to preserve the democratic, Protestant regime established by the Glorious Revolution. This regime was however immediately threatened by the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, in which French collusion was suspected. In France, Philippe d'Orléans took over as Regent during Louis XV's minority (1715–23). He too was in a weak domestic position, his power threatened by the Spanish faction at court who wished to transfer the regency to Philip V of Spain. The two vulnerable rulers therefore decided to cooperate for mutual benefit, concluding an alliance that saw France guarantee the Hanoverian Succession and England pledge support to France against Spain. The Jacobite Pretender was also expelled from French soil. Although the alliance was a matter of political necessity for George I and the French regent it was ‘unpopular and fragile’, and met with significant domestic opposition on both sides of the Channel. Cardinal Dubois, the French negotiator, writes of the ‘fury’ expressed in pamphlets and public meetings where the alliance was discussed. Yet for some French political thinkers, Montesquieu among them, the alliance with England represented the possibility of rapprochement with a nation that they increasingly saw as a model for France to emulate.

Louis XIV's rule had been synonymous with political absolutism, enforced religious uniformity, and the pursuit of ruinously expensive military campaigns in Europe. His death created a vacuum in French politics that was quickly filled with plans for political and fiscal reform. In the years following the Peace of Utrecht (1713), England's financial prosperity was in stark contrast with France's debt-ridden and sclerotic state.