(The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal ...)
The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature and provide an engaging insight into a wise Renaissance mind, continuing to give pleasure and enlightenment to modern readers.
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Ethnicity:
Michel de Montaigne's mother was descended from a line of Spanish Jews, the Marranos, long converted to Catholicism.
Montaigne was born on February 28, 1533, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, near Bordeaux, France; the third son of Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, and Antoinette de Louppes (Lopez).
Montaigne's education began in early childhood and was managed by tutors. His father, ambitious for his son's education, permitted him to hear and speak only Latin until he was six. 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. He then began to study law at the University of Toulouse in 1546.
Michel de Montaigne began his career in the legal system of Toulouse. He was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux and, in 1557, he obtained the position of a counselor in the Bordeaux Parlement. While a member, Montaigne journeyed to Paris on a mission to the king's court in 1561, and he accompanied the king to Rouen in 1562 after the king's troops had captured the city from Huguenot forces during the fighting now known as the French Wars of Religion. In Rouen, Montaigne observed Brazilian natives, an experience that motivated him to write his celebrated philosophical piece “On Cannibals.”
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 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 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. He 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. After 2 years of illness and decline Montaigne died peacefully in his bed while hearing Mass on September 13, 1592.
Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism. He was very popular for his smooth capability to combine serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography. In both the form and content of his large volume work Essais, Montaigne achieved a remarkable combination of inner tranquility and detachment, together with the independence and freedom of an unfettered mind. For the social historian, his Essais and Travel Journey are invaluable sources for glimpses of daily life in sixteenth-century Europe.
(The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal ...)
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Montaigne argued that neither God's existence nor the immortality of the soul could ever be proved, and that the determination of such ultimate questions relied solely on faith. Montaigne has thus been seen as a skeptical nonbeliever, whose questioning of religious truths ushered in the secular-oriented Enlightenment.
Others, however, consider Montaigne a champion of the Catholic Counter Reformation, for his writings attacked the ability of reason and rational thought to address religious concerns, and thus, in a real sense, attacked the justification of Martin Luther's arguments. Nonetheless, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne died a loyal Catholic, who was also tolerant of other religious views.
During the 1570s Montaigne tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a compromise between the Catholics and Henri of Navarre, the Huguenot leader, in an attempt to bring the Wars of Religion to a close. As mayor he always fulfilled his military obligations to guard the city against the Huguenots, and he fought against the raiding parties and minor bands of mercenaries who frequently attacked the city.
Montaigne's thoughts and ideas covered topics such as thought, motivation, fear, happiness, child education, experience, and human action. Though constantly attacked man's presumption, arrogance, and pride, he 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 his massive volume Essais, de Montaigne established a system of thought that stressed how completely relative personal experience was, and how transitory most scientific and moral “truths” actually were. Truth, for him, emerged from one's culture, upbringing, time, and natural prejudices. Thus, a child born Catholic believes in the truth of Catholicism; a Muslim child believes in the truth of Islam.
Quotations:
"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."
'The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness."
"On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom."
"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself."
"I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself."
"I quote others only in order the better to express myself."
"When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind."
"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."
"If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways."
"Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own."
"If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I."
"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it."
"There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent."
"I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind."
Montaigne had a direct influence on Western writers, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer, Isaac Asimov, and possibly, on the later works of William Shakespeare.
Quotes from others about the person
"Montaigne speaks of an “Abecedarian” ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it. The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their A-B-C’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books." - Mortimer Adler
"He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary." - Sarah Bakewell
"The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain "—that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain"—that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him." - Ambrose Bierce
"This great French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays, which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, as Hallam observes, the Frenchman’s literary importance largely results from the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of the essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and the circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of intellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he has found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder at the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was, without being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. His book was different from all others which were at that date in the world. It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It told its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer’s opinion was about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of new light on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayist uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public property. He took the world into his confidence in all subjects. His essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the writer’s mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large variety of operating influences." - William Carew Hazlitt
"Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most truthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a book.
Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design. He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But he desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be remembered by, something which should tell what kind of a man he was — what he felt, thought, suffered — and he succeeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond his expectations.
It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on, throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost unique position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would be read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, and who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same." - William Carew Hazlitt
In 1565 Montaigne married Françoise de la Chassaigne, daughter of a co-councilor 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.
Pierre Eyquem, Lord of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time and had also been the mayor of Bordeaux.
Françoise de la Cassaigne was the daughter and niece of wealthy merchants of Toulouse and Bordeaux.
Léonor Montaigne married François de la Tour and later Charles de Gamaches.
Ramon Felipe Eyquem made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the Château de Montaigne estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne.
Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie (November 1, 1530 – August 18, 1563) was a French judge, writer and "a founder of modern political philosophy in France". He was Michel’s closest friend and his strongest influence. 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.
George Buchanan (February 1506 – September 28, 1582) was a Scottish historian and humanist scholar.
Marie de Gournay was an ardent young admirer of Montaigne and edited the expanded 1595 edition of his works (mainly from annotations made by Montaigne) and, in its preface, defended his memory to posterity.
