CathInfo.com

... anybody know some of the criticisms against Montesquieu? like he was an indifferentist heretic and so forth?

ex falso sequitur quodlibet, etc.

I haven't had time to read up on his "Spirit of the Laws", et cetera, and whether he was Freemason, et cetera. If anybody's doctoral enough to add something, thanks.

Under this fictitious guise the writer goes on to describe or rather satirize French, and especially Parisian manners between 1710 and 1720. The king, the absolute monarchy, the Parliament, the Academy, the University, are all very transparently ridiculed; but it was the Catholic religion, its dogmas, its practices, its ministers from pope to monks that came in for his bitterest raillery. Because of its ideal of celibacy, the Catholic Church is accused of being a cause of depopulation, and because of its teaching concerning this world's goods, it is charged with weakening the prosperity of the nation, while its intolerant proselytism is a source of disturbance to the state. On the other hand Protestantism is held up as more favourable to material progress. Coming ostensibly from Mohammedans these criticisms may have seemed less shocking to thoughtless minds, but they were none the less one of the first and rudest attacks directed against the Church during the eighteenth century. In them, he showed himself as incapable of understanding the Church's dogmas as he was of appreciating her services to society.

"Lettres Persanes" (Amsterdam, 1721), so named because it pretended to be a correspondence between two Persian gentlemen travelling in Europe, and their friends in Asia, who sent them the gossip of the seraglio.