Michel de Montaigne Overview

The essay did not always exist. Nor was the idea of recording one's personal introspections, whether in private diary or public form, always valued. It took centuries of evolution, from Seneca's philosophical epistles to the Christian confessional and beyond, before twentieth-century... [more]

The essay did not always exist. Nor was the idea of recording one's personal introspections, whether in private diary or public form, always valued. It took centuries of evolution, from Seneca's philosophical epistles to the Christian confessional and beyond, before twentieth-century students would be asked to write down "What I Did Last Summer." The essays assigned in today's classrooms, however, are a scandalously deformed version of the elegant and expressive literary form that was finally invented by Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. When Montaigne was born in 1533, the rosy bloom of the Renaissance was already beginning to fade from Europe's cheek. A fourth-generation nobleman, he held a seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux during the outbreak of France's civil wars of religion, a series of horrific conflicts that very nearly destroyed the nation's unity. Montaigne himself abstained from siding with any faction, and acquired such a reputation for fairness, intelligence, and good temper that all three disputing monarchs (Henri III, Henri IV, and Catherine de Medicis) called on him to settle their differences. By his own accounts Montaigne did not care for political life, but performed what he considered his public duty as a nobleman with grace and energy. It was while he was in Parliament (at the mere age of 24) that Montaigne met his dearest friend, Etienne de la Boetie. Though la Boetie died just a few years later, Montaigne wrote a Platonic account of their friendship as the most perfect and spiritual bond. At 38 Montaigne retired from public service and began what was to be his life's true work, the "Essais," or "Attempts." Though interrupted by wars, a breakout of the plague, and various forced forays into politics, Montaigne completed three books of the essays before his death at 59. Though the Greek and Roman classics were as familiar to him as his own chateau, Montaigne did not rely on them as the fulcrum of his thought. His point of departure -- and of origin, and of return -- was the only thing he truly knew he knew: himself. From the sanctuary of his tower-library, Montaigne looked in at his own mind, body, and soul, and thence out at the wide, wild world. His explorations of tradition, individuality, freedom, love and marriage (entirely separate matters), education, gender, the racism engendered by contact with New World peoples, and the pervasive inevitability of death -- all were treated with a vivid honesty, perspicacity, and innate enthusiasm that has never been matched. Montaigne's recurring topic was human nature; for him, the human creature was weak, foolish, arrogant in its tiny portion of knowledge, "a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating thing." Yet despite his skepticism and poor opinion of the species, Montaigne's joie de vivre was a bright light that few shadows have the power to suppress. The young woman who was to be his literary executor, Marie de Gournay, actually fainted with excitement when she first read the "Essais." Later fans, perhaps less fervent, testify by their very names to Montaigne's genius: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Flaubert, Lord Byron, Woolf, Eliot, Barthes. [show less]