Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne was a French writer and philosopher of the late Renaissance who invented the essay as a literary form. In his Essays, written over twenty years in the tower of his country house, he examined himself with unusual honesty and, through himself, the uncertainty of human knowledge, the variety of customs and the business of living well. His questioning, sceptical and tolerant voice, set against the cruelty of the French Wars of Religion, influenced writers and philosophers from Shakespeare and Descartes to the present.

Montaigne was born on 28 February 1533 at the Château de Montaigne, in the Périgord region east of Bordeaux, in the south-west of the Kingdom of France. His father, Pierre Eyquem, came from a family of wealthy Bordeaux merchants who had bought the estate and its noble status; his mother, Antoinette de Louppes, was possibly of Spanish-Jewish descent, from a family that had converted to Christianity. Pierre had fought in the Italian wars and returned full of new ideas about education. He sent the baby to live with a peasant family, so that he would feel close to ordinary people, and then arranged for him to be spoken to only in Latin by a German tutor and the household, so that Latin was in effect his first language. He was even woken each morning by music.

At about six he went to the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, one of the best schools in France, and later studied law, probably at Toulouse.

Around 1557 Montaigne became a counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux, the regional high court, where he served for some thirteen years. There he met Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow magistrate and author of a short treatise against tyranny, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Their friendship, which lasted only until La Boétie's death in 1563, was the most important of Montaigne's life. Asked later why they loved each other, he wrote that it was because it was he, and because it was I.

In 1565 he married Françoise de La Chassaigne, from another family of Bordeaux magistrates; of their six daughters only one, Léonor, survived infancy. At his father's request he translated into French the Natural Theology of the fifteenth-century Catalan scholar Raymond Sebond, which tried to prove the truths of Christianity by reason, publishing it in 1569, the year after his father's death.

On his thirty-eighth birthday, in 1571, Montaigne sold his office and retired to his estate, recording in a Latin inscription his wish to spend his remaining days in freedom, calm and leisure. He set up his library of about a thousand books in a round tower and painted quotations from ancient authors on its beams. There he began to write what he called essais, "attempts" or "trials": short pieces on subjects as varied as idleness, smells, cannibals, thumbs, friendship, cruelty, experience and the education of children. The first two books were published in Bordeaux in 1580.

That year he set out on a long journey through eastern France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy, partly in search of spa waters to relieve the painful kidney stones that afflicted him. In Rome the papal censors examined his Essays and asked for some changes, which he largely ignored. While he was away he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He served two terms, from 1581 to 1585, and acted as a go-between for the Catholic king Henry III and the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV, both of whom respected him. In 1588 he published a new edition with a third book, and was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris by supporters of the Catholic League. That year he also met Marie de Gournay, a young admirer who became his literary executor. He went on revising his book until his death at his château on 13 September 1592.

The Essays are, in Montaigne's words, a book whose matter is himself. He wrote not to display a finished doctrine but to follow his own mind as it changed, adding to his texts over the years without correcting earlier thoughts. By describing one ordinary human being in all his inconsistency, he believed, he was describing the human condition.

His longest essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, turns into a sustained attack on human pride in reason. Drawing on the ancient Pyrrhonist sceptics, known through the writings of Sextus Empiricus, he argued that the senses deceive us, that the wisest have always disagreed, and that humans have no good grounds for thinking themselves superior to animals. He adopted the motto "What do I know?" and had a medal struck with a balance in equilibrium. His scepticism ended not in despair but in acceptance of custom and of the Catholic faith, which, he held, rested on grace rather than proof.

In essays such as Of Cannibals he described reports of the Tupinambá people of Brazil and concluded that Europeans called barbarous whatever was not their own custom; their own tortures and religious massacres were far worse than anything done by the so-called savages. This relativism about customs, his hatred of cruelty and his scorn for torture made him an early voice for toleration. In his later essays, such as the last, Of Experience, he turned to accepting life as it comes, including the body, ageing and death, and praised a modest, natural way of living.

Montaigne drew constantly on Latin authors, especially the moralists Seneca and Plutarch, whose works he knew in Jacques Amyot's French translation, and on Lucretius, Cicero and Horace. His early essays echo the Stoic aim of learning to die, and his later ones lean towards the Epicurean enjoyment of life; both traditions belong to Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy. He is a central figure of Renaissance Philosophy.

John Florio's English translation of 1603 was read by William Shakespeare, who borrowed from Of Cannibals for a speech in The Tempest. Francis Bacon took up the essay form in England. René Descartes began his philosophy by trying to answer the kind of doubt Montaigne had raised, and Blaise Pascal wrestled with him throughout the Pensées. The Catholic Church put the Essays on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1676. Later admirers included Voltaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche. His frank, conversational voice shaped the modern essay and the long tradition of writing about the self in the literature of France.