Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), commonly known as just Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant writers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularising the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous writers of Western literature; his Essais contain some of the most influential essays ever written.
During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired as a statesman more 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; moreover, his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognised as embodying the spirit of critical thought and open inquiry that began to emerge around that time. He is best known for his sceptical remark, "What do I know?" ("Que sçay-je?" in Middle French; "Que sais-je?" in modern French).
Family, childhood and education
Montaigne was born in the Guyenne (Aquitaine) region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, near Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy. His great-grandfather Ramon Felipe Eyquem had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477, thereby becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was the mayor of Bordeaux and later a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time.
Although there were several families having the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his father's family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins, while his mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism. His maternal grandfather, Pedro López, from Zaragoza, came from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family that had converted to Catholicism. His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France.
Although Montaigne's mother lived nearby for much of his life – and even outlived him – she is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, is often reflected on and discussed in the essays.
Montaigne's education began in early childhood and followed a pedagogical plan that his father had developed, refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived for three years in the sole company of a peasant family; according to the elder Montaigne, this was to "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help". After these first spartan years, Montaigne was returned to the château.
Another pedagogical objective was for Latin to become Montaigne's first language. His intellectual education was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus, who did not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin, and they also were given strict orders always to speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words that he employed; thus they acquired a knowledge of the language that Montaigne's tutor taught him. His Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was acquainted with Greek through a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises with solitary meditation, rather than more traditional books.
The atmosphere of his upbringing engendered in Montaigne a spirit of "liberty and delight" that he would later describe as making him "relish...duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint". His father instructed a musician to wake him every morning, playing one instrument or another; an epinettier (a player of a type of zither) was a constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing tunes to alleviate boredom and tiredness.
Around 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a highly-regarded boarding school in Bordeaux, the College of Guienne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan; there Montaigne mastered the entire curriculum by the age of thirteen. He finished the first phase of his studies at the College in 1546. He then began to study law and entered a career in the local legal system. (His alma mater remains unknown, since little is certain about his activities from 1546 to 1557.)
Montaigne was a councillor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux, and in 1557 he was appointed councillor of the Parlement in Bordeaux, a high court. From 1561 to 1563, he was a courtier at the court of Charles IX, and he was 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 Saint Michael.
Friendship with Étienne de La Boétie
While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, Montaigne became a close friend of the humanist poet Étienne de La Boétie. La Boétie was three years older than Montaigne and was already entrusted with important political responsibilities, including the pacification of Guyenne during the unrest of 1561. His best-known work is Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Montaigne had initially intended to include it in the Essays, but refrained when Protestant circles began interpreting the work as an attack on the Catholic monarchy.
Montaigne and La Boétie's friendship became legendary. In the first edition of the Essays, Montaigne wrote:
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because it was he, because it was I.
This famous phrase appeared in the posthumous 1595 edition known as the "Bordeaux Copy." Montaigne had added it in the margins of his personal 1588 edition—first "because it was he," then in different ink, "because it was I."
Although sociable and surrounded by many friends, Montaigne considered this friendship exceptional—one that only occurs "once every three centuries":
Our souls mingled and blended with each other so completely that they effaced the seam that had joined them.