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Rh Charles Louis de Secondat was born in 1689, a year after the Revolution which ended the Stuart dynasty, five years before the birth of Voltaire, 100 years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He died in 1755, four years after the publication of the first volume of the French Encyclopedia, the year before the Seven Years' War, five years before George III came to the throne, and seven years before Rousseau preached to the world, in the first chapter of his Social Contract, that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. His birthplace was the Chateau of La Brède, a thirteenth-century castle some ten miles from Bordeaux. Thus he was a countryman of Montaigne,.