Michel de Montaigne

The French author Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) created a new literary genre, the essay, in which he used self-portrayal as a mirror of humanity in general.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on Feb. 23, 1533, at the family estate called Montaigne in Périgord near Bordeaux. His father, Pierre Eyquem, was a Bordeaux merchant and municipal official whose grandfather was the first nobleman of the line. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes (Lopez), was descended from a line of Spanish Jews, the Marranos, long converted to Catholicism. Michel, their third son, was privately tutored and spoke only Latin until the age of 6. From 1539 until 1546 he studied at the Collège de Guyenne, in Bordeaux, where the Scottish humanist George Buchanan was one of his teachers, as was the less-known French poet and scholar Marc Antoine Muret. Very little is known of Montaigne's life from age 13 to 24, but he may have spent some time in Paris, probably studied law in Toulouse, and certainly indulged in the pleasures of youth.

In 1557 Montaigne obtained the position of councilor in the Bordeaux Parlement, and it was there that he met his closest friend and strongest influence, Étienne de la Boétie. La Boétie and Montaigne shared many interests, especially in classical antiquity, but this friendship was ended by La Boétie's death from dysentery in August 1563. Montaigne was with him through the 9 days of his illness. The loss of his friend was a serious emotional blow that Montaigne later described in his essay "On Friendship." In 1571 Montaigne published his friend's collected works.

Two years after La Boétie's death, after a number of diversionary affairs, Montaigne married Françoise de la Chassaigne, daughter of a cocouncilor in the Bordeaux Parlement. She bore him six daughters, of whom only one survived to adulthood. The marriage was apparently amiable but sometimes cool - Montaigne believed that marriage was of a somewhat lower order than friendship.

In 1568 the elder Montaigne died, thus making Michel lord of Montaigne. Before his death, Pierre Eyquem had persuaded his son to translate into French the Book of Creatures or Natural Theology by the 15th-century Spanish theologian Raymond Sebond. The work was an apologia for the Christian religion based on proofs from the natural world. The translation was published early in 1569 and gave clear indication of Montaigne's ability both as translator and as author in his own right. From his work on this translation Montaigne later developed the longest of his many essays, "The Apology for Raymond Sebond." In this pivotal essay, Montaigne presented his skeptical philosophy of doubt, attacked human knowledge as presumptuous and arrogant, and suggested that self-knowledge could result only from awareness of ignorance.

In April 1570 Montaigne resigned from the Bordeaux Parlement, sold his position to a friend, and as lord of Montaigne formally retired to his country estate, his horses, and his beautiful and isolated third-floor library. He carefully recorded his retirement on his thirty-eighth birthday and soon began work on his Essais. Ten years later (1580) the first edition, containing books I and II, was published in Bordeaux.

Late in 1580 Montaigne began a 15-month trip through Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. He visited many mineral baths and watering spas in hopes of finding relief from a chronic kidney stone condition. His journal of these travels, though not intended for publication, was published in 1774. Toward the end of his trip Montaigne learned of his election in August 1580 to the mayoralty of Bordeaux, an office in which he then spent two 2-year terms. By all accounts he served the city with conscientious distinction during a troubled period, although public service was clearly not his aspiration at that time. He himself obliquely defended his regime in the essay "Of Husbanding Your Will."

At the end of his term of office Montaigne spent the best part of a year revising the first two books of the Essais and preparing book III for inclusion in the 1588 Paris edition, the fifth edition of the work. In 1586 both war and plague reached his district, and he fled with his household in search of peace and healthier air, receiving at best reluctant hospitality from his neighboring squires. When he returned 6 months later, he found the castle pillaged but still habitable.

Montaigne's last years were brightened by his friendship and correspondence with his so-called adoptive daughter, Marie de Gournay (1565-1645), an ardent young admirer who edited the expanded 1595 edition of his works (mainly from annotations made by Montaigne) and, in its preface, defended his memory to posterity. (It was from her edition that John Florio produced the 1603 English-language edition, which was a source for Shakespeare's Tempest and other playwrights' work.)

After 2 years of illness and decline Montaigne died peacefully in his bed while hearing Mass on Sept. 13, 1592. He died a loyal Catholic, but he was always tolerant of other religious views.

The "Essais"

It is difficult if not impossible to summarize the ideas of Montaigne's Essais. He was not a systematic thinker and defied all attempts to be pinned down to any single point of view. He preferred to show the randomness of his own thought as representative of the self-contradiction to which all men are prone. His characteristic motto was "Que saisje?" ("What do I know?") He was skeptical about the power of human reason, yet argued that each man must first know himself in order to live happily. The Essais constitute Montaigne's own attempt at self-knowledge and self-portrayal - in effect, they are autobiography. Since he argued that "each man bears the complete stamp of the human condition" ("chaque homme porte la forme entière de l'humaine condition"), these autobiographical exercises can also be seen as portraits of mankind in all its diversity. Although he constantly attacked man's presumption, arrogance, and pride, he nonetheless held the highest view of the dignity of man, in keeping with the dignity of nature.

As a skeptic, Montaigne opposed intolerance and fanaticism, believing truth never to be one-sided. He championed individual freedom but held that even repressive laws should be obeyed. He feared violence and anarchy and was suspicious of any radical proposals that might jeopardize the existing order in hopes of childish panaceas. Acceptance and detachment were for him the keys to happiness. In both the form and content of his Essais, Montaigne achieved a remarkable combination of inner tranquility and detachment, together with the independence and freedom of an unfettered mind.

Further Reading

Donald M. Frame wrote the best biography, Montaigne (1965), and has to his credit the excellent translation The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters (1957). His Montaigne's Discovery of Man: The Humanization of a Humanist (1955) is a valuable study of Montaigne's humanism, and he also published Montaigne's Essais: A Study (1969). Frieda S. Brown, Religious and Political Conservatism in the Essais of Montaigne (1963), is a useful study of his political ideas. For a scholarly analysis of Montaigne's philosophical skepticism see Craig B. Brush, Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism (1966).

Additional Sources

Frame, Donald Murdoch, Montaigne: a biography, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984, 1965.

Leschemelle, Pierre, Montaigne, or, The anguished soul, New York: P. Lang, 1994.

Lowndes, M. E. (Mary E.), Michel de Montaigne: a biographical study, Philadelphia: R. West, 1978.

For more information on Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, visit Britannica.com.

Montaigne, Michel de (1533-92). Moralist and author of the Essais, composed during the last 20 years of his life, which have left an indelible impression not only on French but on European culture. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries he was a striking example of a Neostoic author; to the sceptics and libertins of the 17th c. he was their precursor and inspiration; in the following century, Diderot admired him as a philosophe avant la lettre, and Rousseau saw in him the first of the great confessional writers. More recently, Nietzsche praised him as a destructive relativist, and Gide saw in him a proponent of sexual honesty and liberation. One of the peculiar qualities of his Essais is to reflect the intimate preoccupations of their readers; it is thus hardly surprising that for his most modern critics his work is marked by the aesthetics of the fragmentary; that it exemplifies intertextuality (incorporating as it does 1, 264 explicit quotations, as well as countless other allusions); and that Montaigne himself anticipated reader-response theories of interpretation. This protean quality assures the Essais their status as a classic.

Montaigne was born in Gascony of a recently ennobled well-to-do family, and given a solid humanist education at the Collège de Guyenne. He was destined for a career in the law, and after university studies at either Toulouse or Paris he became in 1557 a minor magistrate at the Parlement de Bordeaux, where La Boétie was his colleague and friend. He sold his post in 1570 in order to ‘retire into the bosom of the learned Virgins’. His father had died two years before, leaving him the estate of Montaigne, where he resolved to devote the remainder of his life to reading, contemplation, and writing in the tower of his château, which housed his extensive library and whose exposed beams were inscribed with his favourite quotations.

His retirement was, however, not entirely uneventful; he left it to travel extensively in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy in 1580-1, leaving an interesting Journal de voyage which was discovered and published in 1774. Subsequently he became mayor of nearby Bordeaux (1581-5). Between 1570 and 1588 he was intermittently involved in highlevel diplomatic negotiations on behalf of Henri III and Henri de Navarre, later Henri IV, the heir presumptive to the throne, both of whom conferred honours on him. He died in 1592, of the painful hereditary disease (the kidney stone) of which his father also died. By that time he was a famous author whose works had run through several editions. He published the first two books of Essais at his own expense in Bordeaux in 1580, and had them reprinted in a revised version in 1582; in 1588 an enlarged edition, which included the third book, appeared in Paris; at the time of his death he was working on a much-expanded edition, which came out in 1595, edited by Marie de Gournay, his ‘fille d'alliance’.

This bare outline of his life does not reveal the intense and exciting intellectual journey on which he embarked when he retired in 1570, and which ended only at his death. He may have intended only to read and meditate; but he soon began to write, and scholars have been able to establish with some certainty the order in which he wrote the Essais. Why he began to write is not altogether clear, even though he offers various reasons. An important factor might well be the death of his closest friend, the moralist Étienne de la Boétie, in 1563; it has been plausibly suggested that the Essais are a one-sided continuation of their conversations together. Another factor could be the existence of loosely organized books of gleanings from the ancients, which offered Montaigne a model for arranging by theme and subject the notes he himself made from his reading. In giving his work the novel title ‘Essais’, which suggests ‘experiments’ or ‘trials’, Montaigne may well be alluding to aspects of this work of compilation and reflection. It is the very reverse of a confident or assertive title. Nor did Montaigne claim to be writing for the benefit of anyone other than his intimates and immediate family; indeed, the prologue of 1580 tells the casual reader that he would do better not to bother with the book at all.

The subjects which most interest him initially are those closest to his own preoccupations and to those of his contemporaries. Montaigne belonged to the post- Reformation generation for whom the schism in the Church was an irreversible fact and a burning personal issue: some of his own siblings had become Protestants, although he was to remain a staunch Catholic. The optimistic era of humanist learning was past: but attention was still paid to the principal topics of humanist concern: education, war, moral philosophy, history, politics, and the higher disciplines of law and medicine. Montaigne's early interests revolve around human inconsistency, ambition, and above all pain and death in this broad context. His reading and writing are designed to console him and strengthen him against what he perceives as future threats: death from a painful disease, social disorder, religious uncertainty, personal perplexity. This is often said to be his Neostoic phase, characterized by his essays on philosophizing as learning to die (1, 20) and solitude (1, 40), in which the wise man is said to withdraw from public life and even social contact and to make himself master of his own happiness by steeling himself against misfortune. But even in this phase, Montaigne's penchant for paradox and issues of doubt is clear, and his awareness of the bewildering diversity of human character and experience is explicit (1, 23; 1, 31).

A major development in his writings—sometimes called the ‘sceptical crisis’—occurred in the middle years of the 1570s when Montaigne had a medal struck with the device ‘Que sçay-je?’ It is sometimes connected with the incident he records in the chapter on practice (II, 6), in which the experience of falling off a horse and apparently drifting towards death makes him realize that his policy of steeling himself against future misfortune is misplaced. But it may have much more to do with his defence of Raymond Sebond (Sabunde), which he was apparently commissioned to write by Marguerite de Valois, the Catholic wife of Henri de Navarre. Montaigne had translated the 15th-c. Sebond's Theologia naturalis in 1569 at the behest of his father; it is a work which purports to prove God's existence by rational means, and which describes man's preeminence in God's creation. Montaigne's ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’ (11, 12)—an apologia presumably against Protestant critiques—is a thoroughgoing though unsystematic exercise in Pyrrhonism. It constitutes a withering sceptical attack on all forms of dogmatic philosophy and on all of man's intellectual pretensions. Man is shown to be no higher than the animals; his reason, weak and faulty; his senses, through which he acquires all knowledge, fallible and untrustworthy; and his moral convictions, lacking secure rational bases. Diversity and difference, not similarity and consensus, are shown to be ubiquitous; and the whole universe, in continual, incommensurable flux. Man, his faculty for judging and reasoning, and the objects of his perception are perpetually changing and unstable. Not only Sebond's adversaries, but arguably Sebond himself was demolished by this radical sceptical critique.

But it did not produce despair in Montaigne: instead, in his later Essais, he began cautiously to search for new bases for human enquiry. Ancient moral philosophies had failed to come up with a way of achieving happiness which was generally applicable; it was clear, therefore, that everyone had to search for their own answers by beginning their enquiries with that which they knew best: themselves. Personal anecdotes had been related by Montaigne from the very beginning of his writing; but they did not amount to fully fledged self-study. Self-study requires a method, however; Montaigne's was a unique form of non-self-indulgent introspection. This had to be honest, and unconstrained by convention; it had to be unselective; it had to take into account the fundamental mutability of man. As a practice, it led to self-portrayal: the recording of facts and opinion about the self in an infinitely extendable list. Because man changes constantly, the self-portrait cannot be revised, only augmented. In Book 3 of the Essais, and in the additions inserted in the first two books, the results of this method unfold. Montaigne records his most intimate sexual and gastronomic practices, as well as his most lofty thoughts; he leaves contradictions and inconsistencies in his text as a proof of its veracity; his arguments and discussions are rarely sustained for more than a paragraph or two (indeed, the titles of the Essais seldom indicate adequately their contents, and sometimes, playfully, have nothing to do with them whatsoever); he records his judgements on other people and other subjects as evidence about himself as much as about these people or subjects.

The conclusions of this enquiry are, if anything, yet more surprising for their day. Man is seen as a corporeal more than a rational being. He is an amalgam of vice and virtue, in which the two elements are inseparable. He is irreducibly individual, but every man ‘porte la forme entière de l'humaine condition’ (111, 2). All men share the same nature, but their social, political, and (implicitly) religious institutions are relative to specific societies, political systems, and religions. This relativistic attitude leads to a plea for toleration and the expression of horror at unjustifiable repression in the name of law, religion, or ‘reason’: the chapters which deal with the burning of witches and the Spanish treatment of Amerindians (1, 31; III, 6; III, II) are especially eloquent condemnations of intolerance. But Montaigne himself derives political and religious conformism from his relativistic and sceptical stance.

The Essais accumulated additions (with few amendments) over the period of their composition; one can only imagine that, had Montaigne lived longer, they would have continued to do so, because he tells us that he has discovered an inexhaustible vein of rich material to exploit. As his confidence in his enterprise grows, so the Essais become more complex, more paradoxical, more playful, more idiosyncratic in expression. Indeed, one of their most remarkable features is their style.

By adding to his own essays Montaigne becomes an alien reader of his own writing, and offers many penetrating insights into the reading process itself. Towards the end of Book 3 the Essais become a celebration of reading and writing, of human conversation and friendship, of living life to the full, which contrasts with the stiffly Neostoic attitudes expressed in the first period. Experience, not Seneca or Cato, has taught him the best way of managing pain; he is able to rejoice in the legitimate pleasures of life, and the very last quotation in his Essais has a distinctly pagan, hedonistic ring to it. But to suggest that this is the conclusion of such a multifaceted and complex work would be wrong. Just as scepticism is present from the beginning, so also is a certain sort of Stoicism present at the end. Plausible it may be to see a development in the Essais from one philosophical stance to another: but it is more plausible to see them all as expressions of the complex personality of an author whose investigation into human nature marks a turning-point in man's enquiry into man.

[Ian Maclean]

Bibliography

• R. A. Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne (1972)
• P. Burke, Montaigne (1981)
• I. Maclean and I. McFarlane, Montaigne (1982)

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-92) French essayist. The father-figure of scepticism in France and modern Europe, Montaigne was born near Bordeaux. He followed a sporadic career in public life before retiring in 1571, although he continued to play a role in politics on behalf of the Protestant Henri de Navarre, and was mayor of Bordeaux in 1581. As befits someone involved in the civil and religious unrest of the time, Montaigne had no very high opinion of the faculties and achievements of mankind. His attitude found ample confirmation in the work of Sextus Empiricus, whose motto, ‘Que sais-je’ (‘What do I know?’), Montaigne adopted for himself. His fame rests on his Essais (1580, trs. as Essays, 1603, and possibly known to Shakespeare) which reveal an engaging, humane, shrewd, and self-conscious philosophical personality. His most famous philosophical essay, the ‘Apology for Raimond Sebond’, is a masterly compendium of sceptical arguments, and had an immense influence on the following generation of French philosophers (see Descartes, Foucher, Gassendi, Mersenne). In the ‘Apology’ Sebond, an otherwise minor theologian who undertook to show how Catholic belief can be established by the light of reason, is defended by the backhanded device of admitting that his reasons for his beliefs are bad, but showing that they are no worse than other human reason for belief. Montaigne can be interpreted both as a forerunner of Kant, confining reason to make room for faith, and as an Enlightenment figure before his time.

Montaigne, Michel De (1533–1592), French essayist. Montaigne was born at his family's château, which is still in existence, near Bordeaux, on 28 February 1533. The château de Montaigne and the title had been bought in 1477 by his great-grandfather Ramon Eyquem, who had made his fortune trading in wine and salt fish. Pierre, Montaigne's father, was the first of his family to "live nobly," that is, give up commerce, and Montaigne himself was the first to follow the aristocratic practice of adopting the name of the estate as his own. Pierre had married, in 1528, Antoinette de Louppes (Lopez), from a family of converso Spanish Jews, and Michel was the eldest of their surviving children.

Montaigne's father took a great interest in the new humanist learning, and thus had Michel raised in the company of a tutor who spoke only Latin to him, so that Latin, rather than French, was his first language. Montaigne spoke fondly of this part of his childhood, but less fondly of his years at the Collège de Guyenne, whose harsh discipline he detested, although he admitted to having had a few excellent teachers. He went on to study law, in preparation for a career of public service. By the late 1550s he was a member of the Parlement of Bordeaux, a position he retained until 1570. It was there, around 1558, that he met Étienne de la Boétie, who became his greatest friend, and whose premature death in 1563 was the defining moment in Montaigne's personal life. In 1565, Montaigne married Françoise de la Chassaigne; around this time, he also began to translate, at his father's request, the Theologia naturalis of Raymond Sebon (d. 1436), which described a path to faith through rigorous self-examination. He finished the translation in time to present it to his father before the latter's death in 1568, and it was printed in 1569.

In 1570, Montaigne sold his parliamentary office, and officially retired from public service, out of (he said) a desire to devote the remainder of his days to study, writing, and contemplation. His "retirement" was, however, not complete. Himself a moderate Catholic, he was trusted by both Catholics and Protestants, and often played an important role in negotiations between them in France's Wars of Religion, work for which he was honored by both sides. He was at the same time working on the Essais, whose first edition, in two books, was published in 1580. In the same year, he embarked on a leisurely trip through central Europe to Italy, visiting various spas in search of relief from the kidney stones that had begun to plague him two years earlier. This trip resulted in the Journal de voyage, not rediscovered and published until 1774. While still in Italy, Montaigne was informed that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He was initially reluctant to accept the office, and it was only at King Henry III's insistence that he returned home in late 1581 to take up his none-too-onerous duties. Two years later he was elected to a second term as mayor, which kept him busy dealing with the Catholic League and working to reconcile Henry III and the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre (later King Henry IV).

He continued work on the Essais during this time, revising and adding to the essays of the first two books while writing the thirteen essays of the third book. In 1588 he went to Paris on a diplomatic mission, also bringing the new three-book version of the Essais to the printer. On this trip he met an enthusiastic reader, Marie de Gournay, who would become his literary executor. Montaigne kept working on the Essais up to the time of his death (13 September 1592), making notes, revisions, and extensive additions in the margins of his own copy of the 1588 edition. This book, the exemplaire de Bordeaux (Bordeaux copy), became the basis of the posthumous 1595 edition, whose publication was overseen by Marie de Gournay, and of most subsequent editions as well.

Montaigne has been credited with inventing in the Essais both the essay form and the modern notion of the self. In fact, neither claim is strictly true. Montaigne's earliest essays are in fact closely modeled on (even, sometimes, translations of) the moral essays of classical authors like Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch. Later essays, while ranging farther afield, always remain in dialogue with their classical models. Likewise, the notion of an approach to philosophical wisdom through autobiography has a long history in the Western tradition, from Augustine on. Montaigne's real innovation is to combine essay and self-examination into a genuinely unique result: the literary representation of the self as constantly evolving process. He intends, he tells us, to offer an entirely unvarnished self-portrait, including everything, no matter how trivial, and hiding nothing, no matter how embarrassing. Montaigne's self-deprecatory attitude is, of course, partly ironic, since the inclusiveness of his project allows him to claim for it an exemplarity on a par with, or surpassing, that of his classical predecessors. And it is indeed inclusive; the Essais cover an astounding range of topics, from the deepest theological and philosophical questions to codpieces, motion sickness, and the drinking habits of Germans. Some essays are miniatures, a paragraph or two of comment on some classical topic, while others, especially those of the third book, are extended and complex, weaving together multiple themes (the Apologie de Raymond Sebon, a critique of Sebon running to nearly two hundred pages, is in a class by itself).

In the midst of such diversity, a few major themes, or rather sets of questions, unite the Essais. First, a radical skepticism, given its fullest expression in the Apologie but pervading the entire collection, through which Montaigne constantly calls into question his society's most fundamental assumptions. Second, a critical fascination with Stoic philosophy, influenced both by his readings in classical authors and his experiences in the Wars of Religion. Third, a kind of pragmatic Epicureanism, likewise conditioned by his readings (especially of Lucretius) and by his own experience of the limits of Stoicism. From all of these emerges, finally, a spirit of humility and tolerance, to which Montaigne is led by a thorough contemplation of human imperfection, including his own. Montaigne's style and language are as diverse as his subjects. Now discursively Latinate, now colloquial and blunt, his voice adapts constantly to his topic and mood. He is therefore a deceptively difficult author. The reader is sometimes lulled into complacency by the apparent ease and simplicity of Montaigne's style, only to find that the thought being expressed is far more complex than it had seemed. The Essais are Montaigne's running conversation with antiquity, with his own society, with the reader, and with himself; digressive, polyphonic, sometimes contradictory, often ironic, always generous and humane, they show us one of the finest minds of the Renaissance at work.

Montaigne's impact on his contemporaries was immediate and substantial, and he has occupied a central place in Western literature ever since. John Locke and the philosophes owed much to him, as did Shakespeare and Francis Bacon. Blaise Pascal rightly recognized in him a formidable opponent; the heart of the Pensées is therefore a critical dialogue with Montaigne. Many have applauded Montaigne's skeptical critique of both reason and religion, while others have found him a dangerous freethinker, but none have failed to recognize the necessity—and the pleasure—of conversing with this most engaging of authors. He has inspired some of the best literary criticism of the last half-century and continues to be a major presence in literature, as well as in political and moral philosophy.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Complete Works. Translated by Donald M. Frame. New York, 2003.

——. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne. Edited by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier. 3rd ed. Paris, 1978. First edition 1924.

——. Journal de Voyage. Edited by François Rigolot. Paris, 1992.

Secondary Sources

Compagnon, Antoine. Nous, Michel de Montaigne. Paris, 1980.

Cottrell, Robert D. Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne's Essais. Columbus, Ohio, 1981.

Defaux, Gérard, ed. Montaigne: Essays in Reading. Yale French Studies 64. New Haven, 1983.

Friedrich, Hugo. Montaigne. Translated by Dawn Eng. Edited by Philippe Desan. Berkeley, 1991. Original German edition 1949.

Hoffmann, George. Montaigne's Career. Oxford and New York, 1998.

Mc Gowan, Margaret M. Montaigne's Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais. London, 1974.

Quint, David. Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais. Princeton, 1998.

Regosin, Richard L. The Matter of My Book: Montaigne's Essais as the Book of the Self. Berkeley, 1977.

Rigolot, François. Les métamorphoses de Montaigne. Paris, 1988.

Sayce, R. A. The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration. London, 1972.

Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Motion. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, 1985.

Tournon, André. Montaigne: la glose et l'essai. Rev. ed. Paris, 2000. Originally published Lyon, 1983.

—DAVID M. POSNER

Quotes:

"Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face."

"Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous."

"There are some defeats more triumphant than victories."

"Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages."

"But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature."

"We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void."

See more famous quotes by Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

For the Parisian street named after him, see Avenue Montaigne.

Michel de Montaigne

Western Philosophers Renaissance philosophy
Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Thomas de Leu.
Full name	Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Born	February 28, 1533
Died	September 13, 1592
School/tradition	Renaissance Humanism
Influenced by Sextus Empiricus, Seneca, Plutarch, Cato
Influenced William Shakespeare, René Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gore Vidal

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]) (February 28, 1533–September 13, 1592) was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes^[1] and autobiography — and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, including Blaise Pascal, René Descartes^[2], Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Isaac Asimov, Eric Hoffer^[3], and perhaps William Shakespeare (see section "Related Writers and Influence" below).

In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman 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, and his declaration that, 'I am myself the matter of my book', was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, 'Que sais-je?' ('What do I know?'). Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly — his own judgment — makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal story-telling.

Contents 1 Life 2 Essais 3 Related writers and influence 4 Quotes 5 References 6 Secondary Literature: Criticism 7 External links

Life

Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, not far from Bordeaux. The family was very rich; his grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477. His father, Pierre Eyquem, was a French Roman Catholic soldier in Italy for a time, and developed some very progressive views on education there; he had also been the mayor of Bordeaux. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes de Villanueva, was a descendant of a Spanish Jewish convert to Catholicism ^[4]. Although she lived a great part of Montaigne's life near him, and even survived him, she is only mentioned twice in his work. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, played a prominent role in his life and works.

From the moment of his birth, Montaigne's education followed a pedagogical plan sketched out by his father and refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, 'in order to', according to the elder Montaigne, 'draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help.'^{[citation needed]} After these first spartan years spent amongst the lowest social class, Montaigne was brought back to the Château. The objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus who couldn't speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin and they also were given strict orders to always speak to the boy in Latin or when he was in their presence. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he himself employed, and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than books. Music was played from the moment of Montaigne's awakening. An épinettier (playing a zither original to the French region of Vosges) constantly accompanied Montaigne and his tutor, playing a tune any time the boy became bored or tired. When he wasn't in the mood for music, he could do whatever he wished: play games, sleep, be alone - most important of all was that the boy wouldn't be obliged to anything, but that, at the same time, he would have everything in order to take advantage of his freedom.

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Around the year 1539, he was sent to study at a prestigious boarding school in Bordeaux, the Collège de Guyenne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. Afterwards he studied law in Toulouse and entered a career in the legal system. He was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux and, in 1557, he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux (a high court). From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX; he was present 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 St. Michael, something to which he aspired from his youth. While serving at the Bordeaux Parliament, he became very close friends with the humanist poet Étienne de la Boétie, whose death in 1563 deeply affected Montaigne. It has been argued that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate," that, after losing Étienne, he began the Essais as his "means of communication;" and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend." ^[5]

At the age of 33, Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne, in 1565, not quite of his own free will, and his wife bore him six daughters, but only the second-born survived childhood.

Following the petition of his father, Montaigne started to work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond's Theologia naturalis, which he published a year after his father's death in 1568 (In 1595, Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for its declaration that the Bible is the only source of revealed truth). After this he inherited his estate, the Château de Montaigne, to which he moved back in 1570. Another literary accomplishment was Montaigne's posthumous edition of his friend Boétie's works.

In 1571, he retired from public life to the Tower of the Château, his so-called "citadel", where he almost totally isolated himself from every social and family affair. Locked up in his library, which boasted a collection of some 1,500 works, he began work on his Essais ("Essays"), first published in 1580. On the day of his 38th birthday, as he entered this almost ten-year period of self-imposed reclusion, he had the following inscription crown the bookshelves of his working 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, tranquillity, and leisure.’^[6]

Michel de Montaigne

During this time of the Wars of Religion in France, Montaigne, himself a Roman Catholic, acted as a moderating force, respected both by the Catholic King Henry III and the Protestant Henry of Navarre.

In 1578, Montaigne, whose health had always been excellent, started suffering from painful kidney stones, a sickness he had inherited from his father's family. From 1580 to 1581, Montaigne traveled in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, partly in search of a cure. He kept a detailed journal recording various episodes and regional differences. It was published much later, in 1774, under the title Travel Journal.

While in Rome in 1581, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he returned and served until 1585, again moderating between Catholics and Protestants. The plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his term.

Montaigne continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of Essais. In 1588 he wrote its third book and also met the writer Marie de Gournay, who admired his work and later edited and published it. King Henry III was assassinated in 1589, and Montaigne then helped to keep Bordeaux loyal to Henry of Navarre, who would go on to become King Henry IV.

Montaigne died, at the age of 59, in 1592 at the Château de Montaigne and was buried nearby. Later his remains were moved to the church of Saint Antoine at Bordeaux. The church no longer exists: it became the Convent des Feuillants, which has also disappeared. The Bordeaux Tourist Office says that Montaigne is buried at the Musée Aquitaine, Faculté des Lettres, Université Bordeaux 3 Michel de Montaigne, Pessac. His heart is preserved in the parish church of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne.

The humanities branch of the University of Bordeaux is named after him: Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3.

Michel de Montaigne

Essais

Main article: Essais

His fame rests on the Essais, a collection of a large number of short subjective treatments of various topics published in 1580, inspired by his studies in the classics, especially Plutarch. Montaigne's stated goal is to describe man, and especially himself, with utter frankness.

Inspired by his consideration of the lives and ideals of the leading figures of his age, he finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for man's pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for his timely death. He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts of his time, reflecting a spirit of scepticism (believing that humans are not able to attain true certainty). The longest of his essays, Apology for Raymond Sebond, contains his famous motto, "What do I know?"

Montaigne considered marriage necessary for the raising of children, but disliked strong feelings of passionate love because he saw them as detrimental to freedom. In education, he favored concrete examples and experience over the teaching of abstract knowledge that has to be accepted uncritically. His essay "On the Education of Children" is dedicated to Diana of Foix.

The Essais exercised important influence on both French and English literature, in thought and style.

Related writers and influence

Thinkers exploring similar ideas include Erasmus, Thomas More, and Guillaume Budé, who all worked about fifty years before Montaigne. His influence on Shakespeare, through John Florio's translation, was especially evident in "Hamlet" and "King Lear," both in language and in the scepticism present in both plays.

Since Edward Capell first made the suggestion in 1780, some scholars believe that Shakespeare was familiar with Montaigne's essays. ^[7] John Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essais became available for Shakespeare in English in 1603.^[8]

Much of Blaise Pascal's scepticism in his Pensées was a result of reading Montaigne, whose influence is also seen in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson.^{[citation needed]} In"Schopenhauer as Educator", Friedrich Nietzsche was moved to judge of Montaigne: "That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth".

The American philosopher Eric Hoffer employed Montaigne both stylistically and in thought. In Hoffer's memoir, Truth Imagined, he said of Montaigne, "He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts." The Welsh novelist John Cowper Powys expressed his admiration for Montaigne's philosophy in his books Suspended Judgements (1916) and The Pleasures of Literature (1938). Judith N. Shklar introduces her book Ordinary Vices (1984), "It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day. That is what Montaigne did and that is why he is the hero of this book. In spirit he is on every one of its pages..."

Quotes

• Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.
• Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.^[9]
• If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.
• When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?^[10]
• Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.
• The continuous work of our life is to build death.
• If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
• Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.
• I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.
• Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them.
• Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
• Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
• The clatter of arms drowns the voice of law.
• No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
• Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known."
• Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
• I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.
• No man is a hero to his own valet.

• The only thing certain is nothing is certain.

References

1. ^ His anecdotes however are 'casual' only in appearance. Montaigne writes that: 'Neither my anecdotes nor my quotations are always employed simply as examples, for authority, or for ornament . .They often carry, off the subject under discussion, the seed of a richer and more daring matter, and they resonate obliquely with a more delicate tone,' Michel de Montagne, Essais Pléiade, Paris (ed.A.Thibaudet) 1937, Bk.1,ch.40 p.252 (tr.Charles Rosen)
2. ^ Buckley, Michael J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism, Yale UP, 1990, p. 69.
3. ^ from Truth Imagined, memoir by Eric Hoffer.
4. ^ http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0014_0_14134.html
5. ^ Frame, Donald (translator). The Complete Essays of Montaigne. 1943. p.v.
6. ^ As cited by Richard L. Regosin, ‘Montaigne and His Readers', in Denis Hollier (ed.)A New History of French Literature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London 1995, pp.248-252, p.249. The Latin original runs: 'An. Christi 1571 aet. 38, pridie cal. mart., die suo natali, Mich. Montanus, servitii aulici et munerum publicorum jamdudum pertaesus, dum se integer in doctarum virginum recessit sinus, ubi quietus et omnium securus (quan)tillum in tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii: si modo fata sinunt exigat istas sedes et dulces latebras, avitasque, libertati suae, tranquillitatique, et otio consecravit.'as cited in Helmut Pfeiffer, 'Das Ich als Haushalt:Montaignes ökonomische Politik’, in Rudolf Behrens,Roland Galle (eds.) Historische Anthropologie und Literatur:Romanistische Beträge zu einem neuen Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft, Königshausen und Neumann, Würzburg, 1995 pp.69-90 p.75
7. ^ Olivier, T. Shakespeare and Montaigne: A Tendency of Thought. Theoria 54. May 1980, 43-59.
8. ^ Collington, Philip D. "Self-Discovery in Montaigne's "Of Solitarinesse" and King Lear. Comparative Drama Volume 35 Nos. 3,4. Fall/Winter 2001-2.
9. ^ Essais, I, 31. In French: "Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n'est pas de son usage.".
10. ^ "An Apology for Raymond Sebond."

Secondary Literature: Criticism

• The Cambridge companion to Montaigne / Ullrich Langer., 2005
• Montaigne and ethics / Patrick Henry., 2002
• Reading Montaigne / Dikka Berven., 1995
• Montaigne : a collection of essays : a five volume anthology of scholarly articles / Dikka Berven., 1995
• Approaches to teaching Montaigne's Essays / Patrick Henry., 1994
• Michel de Montaigne's essays (Modern Critical Interpretations) / Harold Bloom., 1987
• Michel de Montaigne (Modern Critical Views) / Harold Bloom., 1987
• Montaigne : essays in memory of Richard Sayce / I.D. McFarlane., 1982
• Montaigne and his age / Keith Cameron., 1981
• Montaigne in Motion / Jean Starobinski, 2009, University of Chicago Press.
• Columbia Montaigne Conference papers / Donald Frame., 1981
• Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity/Stephen Toulmin ., 1990
• Screech M. A. , The Complete Essays 1987, 1991, 2003

External links

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• Works by Michel de Montaigne at Project Gutenberg
• Essays by Montaigne at Quotidiana.org
• The Montaigne Medal [1]
• The Charles Cotton translation of some of Montaigne's essays:
  • plain text version by Project Gutenberg
  • HTML version at the University of Adelaide
  • searchable HTML version at Oregon State University
• The complete, searchable text of the Villey-Saulnier edition from the ARFTL project at the University of Chicago (French)
• Timeline and links
• The Montaigne Studies Journal at the University of Chicago
• Entry Montaigne in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Marc Foglia
• A German resource: http://www.michel-montaigne.de
• Société des Amis de Montaigne (French)
• Tras los pasos de Montaigne (Spanish)
• Biographie et citations de Montaigne (French)
• Biography, Analysis (French)
• Background and digital facsimile of 1595 volume at the Gordon Collection of the University of Virginia
• "Montaigne on Self-esteem" - Documentary about Montaigne and his philosophy.
• "soliloquia.ch: Michel de Montaigne - Bio and LES ESSAIS d'après l'édition de 1595"
• Photos of his chateau, his personal belongings, and a memorial The photograph described as 'Montaigne's grave' is actually a memorial outside the parish church at St Michel de Montaigne, where his heart is preserved.

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