Michel de Montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on February 28, 1533, at the château of Montaigne in the village now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, in the Périgord region east of Bordeaux ^[1]. His family's wealth was recent. His great-grandfather, a prosperous herring and wine merchant named Ramon Eyquem, had purchased the estate in 1477, and the family gradually shed its commercial origins for the status of minor nobility. His father, Pierre Eyquem, fought in the Italian wars under Francis I and later served as mayor of Bordeaux. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, descended from a family of Spanish merchants, possibly of converso Jewish origin, a point still debated by scholars ^[2].

Pierre Eyquem held advanced ideas about education and applied them to his eldest surviving son with remarkable thoroughness. The infant Michel was placed with a peasant family in a nearby village so that he would know ordinary life from the start. Back at the château, his father arranged for the boy to hear only Latin. A German tutor who spoke no French addressed him exclusively in the ancient language, and the entire household, servants included, was instructed to use whatever Latin they could manage in his presence ^[1]. Montaigne later recalled that he learned Latin as a native tongue before he could speak French properly.

At about six years old he entered the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, then among the most respected schools in France, where the humanist George Buchanan was among his teachers ^[3]. He found the discipline of formal schooling far less agreeable than his father's gentle experiment, but he read Ovid and the Latin poets eagerly. The details of his subsequent legal training are uncertain; he probably studied law at Toulouse or Paris, preparation for the magistrate's career his family expected ^[2].

Around 1554 Montaigne began his public career in the Cour des Aides of Périgueux, a tax court, and when that body was absorbed into the Parlement of Bordeaux in 1557 he became a magistrate there ^[1]. He spent thirteen years as a counselor in the Bordeaux parlement, work he found tedious and often absurd. The experience left him permanently skeptical of legal reasoning, and the Essais would later mock the endless glosses and interpretations that lawyers piled onto simple matters.

The decisive event of these years was personal rather than professional. In the parlement he met Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow magistrate three years his senior and the author of a treatise against voluntary servitude. The two formed a friendship of extraordinary intensity, and when La Boétie died of illness in 1563, at the age of thirty two, Montaigne was devastated ^[4]. He later wrote that their bond defied explanation except to say that it was because he was he, and because I was I. The loss haunted him for decades, and many readers see the Essais themselves as a substitute for the conversation death had cut short.

His father set him one more task before dying in 1568: the translation of the Theologia naturalis of Raymond Sebond, a fifteenth century Catalan theologian. Montaigne published his French version in 1569, and the work later prompted the longest chapter in the Essais, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, his fullest statement of philosophical skepticism ^[3]. In 1570 he sold his magistracy, and in 1571, at thirty eight, he formally retired to the family estate he had inherited. He had a Latin inscription painted in his library announcing his withdrawal from public affairs to the bosom of the learned virgins, meaning the Muses, where he hoped to pass what remained of his life in freedom and tranquility ^[2].

The tower library at Montaigne became the workshop for one of the most original books in European literature. Its circular walls held roughly a thousand volumes, and its wooden beams were carved with quotations from Sextus Empiricus, Ecclesiastes, and other favorite texts ^[1]. There, beginning in the early 1570s, Montaigne composed short prose pieces he called essais, from the French verb essayer, to try or to test. The word had never before named a literary genre. He was not writing treatises or sermons but attempts, trials of his own judgment on whatever subject caught his attention: idleness, liars, smells, cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, the custom of wearing clothes.

The first edition of the Essais, in two books containing ninety four chapters, appeared at Bordeaux in 1580 ^[3]. A much enlarged edition of 1588 added a third book and hundreds of insertions to the earlier chapters, and Montaigne continued annotating a copy of that edition until his death. The posthumous text of 1595, prepared by his editor Marie de Gournay, incorporated those final additions ^[4]. This habit of layered revision means the book preserves three strata of his thinking, and modern editions mark the layers so readers can watch his mind change.

What made the project revolutionary was its subject. I am myself the matter of my book, Montaigne told readers in his preface, warning them it was no reasonable use of their leisure ^[1]. No earlier writer had examined his own habits, appetites, kidney stones, memory lapses, and contradictions with such sustained attention, or argued that this ordinary self was worth studying. The famous chapter on cannibals used reports from Brazil to argue that so called savages might be less barbarous than Europeans who tortured and burned one another over doctrine, an early landmark of cultural relativism ^[5]. In the Apology for Raymond Sebond he revived ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism, cataloguing the weakness of human reason and adopting the question Que sais-je, What do I know, as his personal motto, which he had struck on a medal along with a set of balanced scales ^[3]. Among Michel de Montaigne achievements, the invention of the essay and the naturalization of skeptical doubt in modern prose rank highest; the form he created still carries his name in nearly every language.

In 1565 Montaigne married Françoise de La Chassaigne, the daughter of another Bordeaux parlement family. He wrote about marriage with dry detachment, remarking that he was dragged to it by custom rather than choice, though the union proved stable and lasted until his death ^[2]. The couple had six children, all daughters, and only one, Léonor, survived infancy. Montaigne recorded these losses with a composure that startles modern readers, though the essays on sorrow and on the affection of fathers suggest more feeling than he cared to display.

His household reflected the strange contradictions of his class and era. He was a Catholic landowner loyal to the Church, yet his brothers and sisters included Protestants, and he kept friendships across the confessional divide during the wars of religion that repeatedly reached his region ^[4]. He described himself as a poor manager of the estate, happier on horseback than reviewing accounts, and he claimed to be so absent minded that he could not reliably remember the names of his own servants.

Two relationships beyond his marriage marked his later life. Marie de Gournay, a young woman from Picardy who admired the Essais passionately, met him in Paris in 1588 and became what he called his covenant daughter, his fille d'alliance. She defended and edited his work after his death and became a notable writer on women's education in her own right ^[4]. His actual daughter Léonor married in 1590, and Montaigne, who claimed to have little talent for grandfatherly duties, still followed her fortunes closely in his final years.

Retirement never fully held him. In 1580 and 1581 Montaigne traveled for seventeen months through France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, partly seeking relief at mineral baths from the kidney stones that tormented him from his mid forties onward ^[5]. The travel journal he kept, never intended for publication and only discovered and printed in 1774, records his curiosity about local customs, religious practices, and plumbing with the same appetite for particulars that fills the Essais. In Rome the papal censors reviewed his book and returned it with only mild suggestions, and the city granted him honorary Roman citizenship, an honor that delighted him ^[3].

While still in Italy he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He tried to decline, but King Henry III insisted, and Montaigne served two terms, from 1581 to 1585, the same office his father had held ^[1]. The post demanded delicate negotiation between the Catholic establishment, the royal court, and the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, whose base lay nearby. Montaigne earned a reputation as an honest broker trusted by both sides, and Navarre visited him at the château. His second term ended under a shadow: plague struck Bordeaux in 1585, and Montaigne, whose term was expiring, handed over his office from outside the stricken city rather than enter it, a decision critics have debated ever since ^[2].

The last years were harried. Plague drove his household from the estate for months in 1586 and 1587. In 1588, traveling to Paris to publish the expanded Essais, he was robbed on the road and later briefly imprisoned in the Bastille by the Catholic League, gaining release through the intervention of Catherine de' Medici ^[4]. He attended the Estates General at Blois that year and continued to correspond with Henry of Navarre, who became King Henry IV in 1589. Montaigne declined the new king's invitation to court, pleading age and ill health. He died at the château on September 13, 1592, at fifty nine, reportedly while Mass was being said in his chamber; some contemporary accounts give September 12, the date most modern references retain ^[1]. Quinsy, an inflammation of the throat, had by the end taken from this most talkative of writers the power of speech.

Few books have traveled as well as the Essais. John Florio's English translation of 1603 was read closely by Shakespeare, and scholars have long noted that Gonzalo's speech on an ideal commonwealth in The Tempest follows Montaigne's chapter on cannibals almost line by line ^[5]. Francis Bacon borrowed the word essay for his own very different collection in 1597. In France, Pascal and Descartes both wrestled with Montaigne's skepticism, Pascal calling his self portrait foolish while absorbing whole arguments from it. The Catholic Church placed the Essais on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1676, where the work remained for nearly two centuries, a measure of how unsettling its tolerant doubt still seemed ^[3].

Later centuries kept finding new uses for him. Emerson devoted one of his Representative Men lectures to Montaigne as the archetypal skeptic. Nietzsche wrote that the existence of such a man truly augmented the joy of living on this earth ^[4]. Virginia Woolf judged him nearly alone among writers in the art of telling the truth about oneself. Twentieth century existentialists, personal essayists, bloggers, and memoirists all work in a form he tried first, and modern popular studies such as Sarah Bakewell's How to Live have carried his questions to wide new audiences ^[4].

The essential Michel de Montaigne facts endure in the landscape too: his tower at Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne still stands and is open to visitors, its beams still carved with his chosen maxims, though the main château burned in 1885 and was rebuilt ^[2]. In 2018 his presumed remains, long housed at the Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux, became the object of renewed archaeological study ^[6]. Any Michel de Montaigne biography returns in the end to his own stated purpose: not to teach, but to describe one particular, changeable, ordinary man honestly, and by doing so to hold up a mirror in which every reader since has found some part of the human condition.