‘They call it the decadence of Montesquieu’. It was thus that Voltaire, writing (in English) to Thieriot in 1734, announced the publication of the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. The majority of contemporary commentators agreed with Voltaire that the Considérations did not do justice to Montesquieu's reputation as an innovative thinker, established by the Lettres persanes. The brief, lapidary work of just twenty-three short chapters was judged to be inadequate as a history of Rome. From the eighteenth century onwards the coherence of the text has also regularly been called into question. Shackleton for instance finds that its historical focus is dissipated by the author's inclusion of ‘observations which refer to many things other than his immediate subject matter’. However, a revisionist view of the text has recently been put forward by Paul Rahe, who re-embeds the work in its historical context and claims that the subject matter of the Considérations has been consistently misunderstood by critics. The seemingly digressive ‘observations’ to which Shackleton refers include a wide range of comments on eighteenth-century European history and politics. As his travel journals show, Montesquieu had developed a keen interest in relations between the European states, notably England and France, during his Grand Tour (1728–31). Rahe maintains that the Considérations were written in response to shifts in the balance of power on the continent in the 1730s. He makes a convincing case for reading the work in the light of Montesquieu's Réflexions sur la Monarchie universelle en Europe (c. 1733–4), originally intended for publication alongside his analysis of Roman history. The Réflexions address the possibility of one European nation achieving cultural and military supremacy or ‘universal monarchy’ on the continent. This ambition had been pursued by Louis XIV in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but was thwarted by the English victory in the War of the Spanish Succession.