Jean Louis De Lolme’s The Constitution of England, which first appeared in French in 1771, was a major contribution to eighteenth-century constitutional theory and enjoyed wide currency in and beyond the eras of the American and French Revolutions. Its authority and judgment were invoked in parliamentary debate and in partisan political polemic. John Adams, the American revolutionary leader, constitutional advocate, and later president, praised the work as “the best defence of the political balance of three powers that ever was written.”1 EvenDeLolme’s contemporarycritics were forced to acknowledge “a work which has been honored with the public approbation and which certainly possesses great merit.”.
