Michel de Montaigne

During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired as a statesman more than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style, rather than as an innovation; moreover, his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognised as embodying the spirit of critical thought and open inquiry that began to emerge around that time. He is best known for his sceptical remark, "What do I know?" ("Que sçay-je?" in Middle French; "Que sais-je?" in modern French).

Biography

Family, childhood and education

Montaigne was born in the Guyenne (Aquitaine) region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, near Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy. His great-grandfather Ramon Felipe Eyquem had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477, thereby becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was the mayor of Bordeaux and later a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time.

Although there were several families having the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his father's family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins, while his mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism. His maternal grandfather, Pedro López, from Zaragoza, came from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family that had converted to Catholicism. His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France.

Although Montaigne's mother lived nearby for much of his life – and even outlived him – she is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, is often reflected on and discussed in the essays.

Montaigne's education began in early childhood and followed a pedagogical plan that his father had developed, refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived for three years in the sole company of a peasant family; according to the elder Montaigne, this was to "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help". After these first spartan years, Montaigne was returned to the château.

Another pedagogical objective was for Latin to become Montaigne's first language. His intellectual education was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus, who did not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin, and they also were given strict orders always to speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words that he employed; thus they acquired a knowledge of the language that Montaigne's tutor taught him. His Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was acquainted with Greek through a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises with solitary meditation, rather than more traditional books.

The atmosphere of his upbringing engendered in Montaigne a spirit of "liberty and delight" that he would later describe as making him "relish...duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint". His father instructed a musician to wake him every morning, playing one instrument or another; an epinettier (a player of a type of zither) was a constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing tunes to alleviate boredom and tiredness.

Around 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a highly-regarded boarding school in Bordeaux, the College of Guienne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan; there Montaigne mastered the entire curriculum by the age of thirteen. He finished the first phase of his studies at the College in 1546. He then began to study law and entered a career in the local legal system. (His alma mater remains unknown, since little is certain about his activities from 1546 to 1557.)

Career

Montaigne was a councillor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux, and in 1557 he was appointed councillor of the Parlement in Bordeaux, a high court. From 1561 to 1563, he was a courtier at the court of Charles IX, and he was with the king at the siege of Rouen (1562). He was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of Saint Michael.

Friendship with Étienne de La Boétie

While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, Montaigne became a close friend of the humanist poet Étienne de La Boétie. La Boétie was three years older than Montaigne and was already entrusted with important political responsibilities, including the pacification of Guyenne during the unrest of 1561. His best-known work is Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Montaigne had initially intended to include it in the Essays, but refrained when Protestant circles began interpreting the work as an attack on the Catholic monarchy.

Montaigne and La Boétie's friendship became legendary. In the first edition of the Essays, Montaigne wrote:

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because it was he, because it was I.

This famous phrase appeared in the posthumous 1595 edition known as the "Bordeaux Copy." Montaigne had added it in the margins of his personal 1588 edition—first "because it was he," then in different ink, "because it was I."

Although sociable and surrounded by many friends, Montaigne considered this friendship exceptional—one that only occurs "once every three centuries":

Our souls mingled and blended with each other so completely that they effaced the seam that had joined them.

Montaigne's admiration for La Boétie's intellectual greatness was matched by deep cultural affinities and a shared ideological harmony, especially in the context of the French Wars of Religion.

The greatest man I have known... for the natural goodness and capacity of his soul and for a well-born upbringing, was Étienne de La Boétie. It was truly a full soul, and of a beautiful composition in every respect; a classical soul, which would have produced great achievements if fate had allowed it. For it had enriched those fine natural gifts with study and learning.

But just four years after their meeting, La Boétie died—likely of plague or tuberculosis—in 1563. During his three days of agony, he displayed a strength of soul that deeply moved Montaigne. Montaigne first described this in a letter to his father, then in a Discourse published in 1571 as a postface to La Boétie's collected works.

There is no action or thought in which I do not miss him. I was already so habituated and accustomed to being second everywhere, that it seems to me I am no longer whole.

Donald M. Frame, in the introduction to his book The Complete Essays of Montaigne, suggested that Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate" after losing La Boétie led him to begin the Essais as a new "means of communication", in which "the reader takes the place of the dead friend".

Montaigne then sought to perpetuate his friend's memory—first by publishing his writings addressed to prominent figures, and then by continuing their dialogue internally, a dialogue that would ultimately become the Essays.

Marriage

Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, probably in an arranged marriage. She was the daughter and niece of wealthy merchants in Toulouse and Bordeaux. The couple had six daughters, but only the second-born, Léonor, survived infancy. He wrote very little about the relationship with his wife, and little is known about their marriage. Of his daughter Léonor, he wrote: "All my children die at nurse; but Léonore, our only daughter, who has escaped this misfortune, has reached the age of six and more, without having been punished, the indulgence of her mother aiding, except in words, and those very gentle ones." His daughter married François de la Tour and later Charles de Gamaches. She had a daughter with each husband.

Writing

After a request from his father, Montaigne began work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond's book Theologia naturalis ("Natural Theology"), which he published a year after his father's death in 1568. In 1595, Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("Index of Forbidden Books"), because of its declaration that the Bible is not the only source of revealed truth. Montaigne also published a posthumous edition of the works of his friend Boétie.

In 1570, he moved back to the family estate, the Château de Montaigne, which he had inherited. He thus became the Lord of Montaigne. Around this time, he was seriously injured in a riding accident on the château grounds, when one of his mounted companions collided with him at full speed, throwing Montaigne from his horse and briefly knocking him unconscious. His recovery took weeks or months, and this close brush with death apparently affected him greatly, as he discussed it at length in writings during the following years. Soon after the accident, he relinquished his magistracy in Bordeaux; his first child was born (and died a few months later); and by 1571, he had completely retired from public life to the tower of the château – his so-called "citadel" – where he almost fully isolated himself from all social and family matters. Sealed in his library, which contained a collection of some 1,500 volumes, he began work on the writings that would later be compiled into his Essais ("Essays"), first published in 1580. On the day of his 38th birthday, as he began this almost ten-year period of self-imposed seclusion, he had the following inscription placed on the crown of the bookshelves in his work chamber:

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.

Travels

During the Wars of Religion in France, Montaigne, a Roman Catholic, acted as a moderating force; he was respected both by the Catholic King Henry III and the Protestant Henry of Navarre, who later converted to Catholicism.

In 1578, Montaigne, whose health had always been excellent, began to suffer from painful kidney stones, a tendency he had inherited from his father's family. Throughout this illness, he avoided doctors and drugs. From 1580 to 1581, Montaigne traveled in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy – partly in search of a cure – establishing himself at the commune of Bagni di Lucca in Italy, where he visited the springs. His journey was also a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, to which he donated a silver relief, considering himself fortunate that it would be hung on a wall in the shrine; the relief depicted his wife, their daughter, and him kneeling before the Madonna. He maintained a journal in which he recorded regional differences and customs, in addition to a variety of personal episodes, including the dimensions of the kidney stones that he succeeded in expelling. This journal was published nearly two hundred years later, in 1774, after its discovery in a trunk displayed in his tower.

During a visit to the Vatican that Montaigne described in his journal, the Essais were examined by Sisto Fabri, who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. After Fabri examined the Essais, the text was returned to Montaigne on 20 March 1581. Montaigne had apologised for references to the pagan concept of fortuna, as well as for writing favorably about Julian the Apostate and heretical poets; Montaigne was released to follow his own conscience in making alterations to the text.

Later career

While in the city of Lucca in 1581, Montaigne learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux, like his father before him. He therefore returned to the city and served in this office. He was re-elected in 1583 and served until 1585, again moderating between Catholics and Protestants. The bubonic plague pandemic broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term in office, in 1585. In 1586, the plague and the French Wars of Religion prompted him to leave his château for two years.

Montaigne continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of the Essais. In 1588, he wrote its third book; he also met Marie de Gournay, an author who admired his work, and who later edited and published it. Montaigne later referred to her as his adopted daughter.

When King Henry III was assassinated in 1589, Montaigne was anxious to promote a compromise that would end the bloodshed, despite his aversion to the cause of the Reformation; he therefore supported Henry of Navarre, who would later become King Henry IV. Montaigne's position associated him with the politiques, the establishment movement that prioritised peace, national unity, and royal authority over religious allegiance.

Death

Montaigne died in 1592 at the age of 59, at the Château de Montaigne, from a peritonsillar abscess. In his case, the disease "brought about paralysis of the tongue", especially difficult for a person who once said that "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice." Remaining in possession of all his other faculties, he requested a Mass, and he died during the celebration of that Mass.

Montaigne was buried near the château. His remains were later moved to the church of Saint Antoine at Bordeaux. This church no longer exists – it became the Convent des Feuillants, which has since disappeared as well.