18th-Century's Changing Times

Montesquieu, My Thoughts (Mes Pensées), §761, tr. Henry C. Clark:

That spirit of glory and valor is being lost little by little among us. Philosophy has gained ground. The former ideas of heroism and the chivalric romances have been lost. Civil offices are filled by men who have wealth, and military offices are discredited by men who have nothing. In short, it is almost everywhere a matter of indifference for one’s fortunes to belong to one master or another, whereas in the past a defeat or your city’s capture was linked to destruction—it was a question of being sold into slavery, of losing one’s city, one’s gods, one’s wife, and one’s children. The establishment of commerce in public funds; the immense gifts of princes, which enable an enormous number of people to live in idleness and obtain esteem by their very idleness, that is, by their charm; indifference toward the afterlife, which entails flabbiness in this life, and makes us unfeeling and incapable of anything that takes effort; fewer occasions to distinguish ourselves; a certain methodical way of taking cities and engaging in battle—being merely a question of making a breach and surrendering once it is made; all of war consisting more in the technique than in the personal qualities of those who fight it—at each siege, the number of soldiers to be sacrificed is known in advance; the nobility no longer fight as a corps.