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Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) |
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French courtier and author of Essais (1572-80, 1588), which established a new literary form. Montaigne has remained the greatest exponent of the essay, a short piece that discusses the author's personal thoughts about a particular subject. His successors have followed him in the use of the self as subject, the replacement of logical thought by free association, and the use of essay as "a literary device for saying almost everything about anything" (Aldous Huxley). It has been said, that Montaigne was the first blogger. "Reader, thou hast here an honest book ; it doth at the outset forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end : I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of me. Had my intention been to seek the world’s favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties : I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice : for it is myself I paint. " (in Essays of Montaigne.Vol. I, translated by Charles Cotton, edited by William Carew Hazlitt, Reeves and Turner, 1877, p. lxxi) Montaigne was born at his family estate in Chãteau de Montaigne, near Bordeaux, in southwest France. His grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, had bought the estate of Montaigne in 1477, and thus gained the right to its name. Montaigne's father, a lawyer, had served as a soldier in Italy and adopted advanced views about education, which benefited his son. He had married Antoniette de Lopez, who came from a Spanish Jewish family converted to Protestantism. As a baby Montaigne was sent to live with a peasant family so that his earliest memories would be of humble surroundings. He was brought up to speak Latin before French. After receiving his early education at the Collège de Guyenne
in
Bordeaux, he then studied law at Bordeaux and Toulouse. He was a
counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueaux, in 1557 he was
appointed councilor of the Bordeaux Parliament, and from 1561 to 1563
he was at the court of Charles IX. When his friend, the humanist
scholar and poet Étienne de La Boétie
died in 1563 at the age of thirty-three, Montaigne suffered the most
severe
emotional experience of his life. Thereafter he never had a close
relationship. La Boétie died of dysentry. Montaigne planned to publish
his controversial work, a treatise against tyranny entitled Discours de la servitude volontaire, in the first book of Essais,
immediately after the essay on friendship (De l'amitié). In this piece
Montaigne said that "women are in truth not normally capable of
responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that
holy bond of friendship". (The Complete Essays, translated and edited with an Introduction and Notes by M.A. Screech, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 228) On the other
hand, "that alternative licence of the Greeks is rightly abhorrent to our manners". (Ibid., p. 229) In 1565 Montaigne married Françoise de la Chassaigne, with whom he had one daughter; four other children died in infancy. After his father's death in 1568, he retired to the family Chãteau in 1570. He lived there the life of a country gentleman, and completed in the following years the first books of his Essais, which reflected his wide interests and learning. Montaigne's first book of collected essays was published when he was 47. He argued that the beliefs of different cultures should be respected, and covered in his texts a huge range of subjects, including how to converse properly, how to endure pain, how to prepare for death, how to read well, how to bring up children, and how to deal with the sexual urge. Even his cat did not escape his watchful attention: "When I play
with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?" (Ibid, p. 478)
Montaignes's voice is skeptical and sincere;
"And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book ; it is not
reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolou
and so vain." (Ibid., p. 53) Occasionally he
made incursions into the world of affairs. As a moderate Roman Catholic
and advocacy of toleration, he acted as one of the intermediaries
between Henry of Navarre (1589 – assassinated 1610) and the court
party. However, in 1588 he was arrested by the members of the
Protestant League, but released after a few hours in the Bastille.
During this journey he met Marie Le Jars de Goyrnay, a young woman, "who loved me with a more than fatherly love". (Ibid., p. 689) Montaigne was flattered by her admiration of his work, and called her,
perhaps somewhat ironically, his fille d'alliance. "She is the only person in the world I have regard for," Montaigne said. (Ibid., p. 689) From 1578 Montaigne had suffered from kidney stones. This led him in search of curative waters. In 1580 he set out on travels through Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, meeting Torquato Tasso at Ferrara. At the beginning of May 1581, he spent some time at Bagno della Villa, recording in his journal his daily routines, baths and medicines he took, and what he had for dinner. In 1581 Montaigne was elected mayor of Bordeaux. He was still in Italy and on the occasion Henry III (1551 – assassinated 1589) wrote to him: "Inasmuch as I hold in great esteem your fidelity and zealous devotion to my service, it has been a pleasure to me to learn that you have been chosen mayor of my town of Bordeaux. I have had the agreeable duty of confirming the selection, and I did so the more willingly, seeing that it was made during your distant absence; wherefore it is my desire, and I require and command you expressly that you proceed without delay to enter on the duties to which you have received so legitimate a call. And so you will act in a manner very agreeable to me, while the contrary will displease me greatly." ('Biographical Introduction', in Selected Essays, edited by William Carew Hazlitt, translated by Charles Cotton, Dover, 2011, p. xv) Montaigne served for four years, he absented himself from his duties only at a time of plague. In 1588 he accompanied Henry III to Rouen and spent the last years in revising his writings. Montaigne died on September 13, 1592, at Château Montaigne. He was buried near his own house. A few years his remains were removed to the church of a Commandery of St. Antoine at Bordeaux. The practical and self-centered world-view of the Renaissance was
manifested in the autobiographical writings of Cellini and Montaigne,
the historical analyses of Machiavelli, and Leonardo's drawing of the
Vitruvian man. Montaigne was the first to use the term "essay" to
describe the literary form to which he had devoted himself. Essais
had great influence not only in France, but also in England, where
Montaigne's works were imitated by Francis Bacon, who used the new term
in his Essays and Counsels, Civil and Moral
(1596). Shakespeare drew on Montaigne's essay 'Of Cannibals' (1603), translated by John Florio, in The Tempest (1610-1611). The Papal Office in Vatican placed Essays on the Index of prohibited books in 1676; the
ban was lifted in 1854. When he playfully argued that penis has its own
rebellious nature, stronger than human will, he stepped on the toes of
the Catholic Church. "We are right to note the licence and disobedience of this
member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not
want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need
it; it imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly
and proudly refuses all out incitements, both mental and manual." (The Complete Essays, 1991, p. 115) In
'Sur des vers de Virgile' (On Some Verses of Virgil) Montaigne
complains of the scripteur's small penis. Montaigne's early biographers reproached him for his immorality. Self-knowledge was Montaigne's aim in life: "No description is more difficult than the desribing of oneself ; and none, certainly, is more useful." (Ibid., p. 424) But he admitted that it is easier to judge others than to judge himself. Moreoever: "By portraying myself for others I have portrayed my own self within me in clearer colours that I possessed at first." (Ibid., p. 691) Montaigne gives room for dialogue, addressing his thoughts to a potential reader, and combining the form of a letter with the form of a dialogue with an ideal friend. No real models existed for Montaigne's essays. His only early noteworthy publication had been a work of translation. There is a profound affinity between Lucretius, an Epicurean materialist and the writer of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), and Montaigne, who owned a copy of the book and filled it with his notes. However, Montagne was not so much interested in the underlying pattern or order behind nature but the nature of human psyche. Later the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) developed Montaigne's unsystematic thoughts into their logical conclusion in his famous "Cogito; ergo sum" (Je pense, donc je suis; I think, therefore I am). "Montaigne's scepticism is no one-sided negation," said Egon Friedell, "but an all-round affirmation. He knows too much to be able to lay down anything positive ; he cannot take up any one standpoint because he might adopt them all ; his power of thought is too pervative to suffer the restrictions of a system." (A Cultural History of The Modern Age: Volume 1 by Egon Friedell, translated from the German by Charles Francis Atkinson, Alfred A. Knopf, 1930, p. 317) For further reading: Les Sources et l'évolution des Essais de Montaigne by Pierre Villey (1933, 2 vols.); Michel de Montaigne: A Concise Bibliography by Samuel A. Tannenbaum (1942); Le Style de Montaigne by Floyd Gray (1958); Montaigne by Albert Thibaudet (1963); Montaigne: A Biography by Donald M. Frame (1965); Montaigne: Essays by Frank Bowman (1965); The Essays of Montaigne by Richard A. Sayce (1972); Montaigne by Peter Burke (1981); Montaigne and Melancholy by M.A. Screech (1983); A Descriptive Bibliography of Montaigne's Essais, 1580-1700 by Richard A. Sayce (1983); Montaigne by Hugo Friedrich (1991, original German edition 1949); Michel de Montaigne by Madeleine Lazard (1992); Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism by Zahi Zalloua (2005); Montaigne and the Art of Free-thinking by Richard Scholar (2010); Montaigne and the Life of Freedom by Felicity Green (2012); Unsettling Montaigne: Poetics, Ethics and Affect in the Essais and Other Writings by Elizabeth Guild (2014); The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, edited by Philippe Desan (2016); Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics by Douglas I. Thompson (2018); Montaigne: Life Without Law by Pierre Manent; translated by Paul Seaton (2020); Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction by William M. Hamlin (2020); The Power of Distraction: Diversion and Reverie from Montaigne to Proust by Alessandra Aloisi (2023); A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe by Lina Bolzoni; translated by Sylvia Greenup (2023); L'égoïsme vertueux: Montaigne et la formation de l'esprit libéral by Thierry Gontier (2023) Selected works:
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