Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Montaigne: A Life
WORK NOTES: trans by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://rll.uchicago.edu/faculty/desan * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Desan * https://rll.uchicago.edu/sites/rll.uchicago.edu/files/Desan-CV.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of California, Davis, Ph.D., 1984.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1984–, Howard L. Willett Professor of French and History of Culture, Master of Humanities Division, chair, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Visiting professor, Harvard University, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Université Lyon 3, Université Bordeaux 3, École des Chartes, Centre Supérieur de la Renaissance (Tours), and Collège International de Philosophie (Paris).
AWARDS:Médaille de la ville de Bordeaux, in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Montaigne, for work on Montaigne, 1992; Knight of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, 1994; Médaille de Montaigne, Université de Bordeaux, 1995, for work on Montaigne; Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite, 2004; Prix de l’Académie Française, 2005, for Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne; Ordre des Arts et Lettres, 2011; Grand Prix de l’Académie Française, for “le rayonnement de la langue et littérature française,” 2015; Prix Pierre-Georges Castex de littérature française, Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 2015, for Montaigne: Une biographie politique.
WRITINGS
General editor, Montaigne Studies, 1988–.
SIDELIGHTS
University of Chicago professor Philippe Desan is one of the world’s leading authorities on the life and work of the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne. “Trained as a sociologist in France,” Desan declared in an autobiographical statement found on the University of Chicago Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Web site, “I became interested in the Sociology of Literature and historical approaches to literature when I arrived in California in 1980. My approach to literature is mainly contextual and interdisciplinary. During the last fifteen years my research has focused on Montaigne and the history of ideas in France during the sixteenth century. My work intersects with sociology, history and philosophy.”
Desan’s Montaigne: Une biographie politique (translated under the title Montaigne: A Life) places the author in the context of his times. “Born in 1533 on the family estate near Bordeaux, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne seemed destined for public life,” said Dominic Green in the National Review. “Michel’s great-grandfather, having made a fortune in herrings, bought the Montaigne estate and noble title. Michel’s father was the mayor of Bordeaux. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, came from a merchant dynasty of Sephardic Jewish extraction. He rarely mentions her in the Essais, but his father figures prominently. Montaigne was raised to `live nobly,’ in standing as in thought. `In my youth I studied for ostentation,’ he was to claim in one of his last essays, `later, for recreation, never for gain.’”
Montaigne lived at a time when France was embroiled in the religious warfare of the Reformation, and he saw opportunities in the turmoil of the times. “As the first surviving son, classically educated, a magistrate by profession and then mayor of Bordeaux,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “… Montaigne had unique ambitions of social ascension during the era of smoldering Catholic-Protestant tensions.” “In the 1580s, Montaigne’s political career foundered. In the 1588 edition of the Essais, he extricated himself from the quicksand of religious politics,” Green stated. “The obsolete politician reinvented himself as a private philosopher, a martyr only to his kidney stones…. A new and final Montaigne emerges, the public man who speaks as a private individual.” However, his withdrawal “was only a rich man’s way of getting off the highway before history ran him over,” declared Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. “`Montaigne is supposed to be the best proof of . . . the victory of private judgment over systems or schools of thought,’ Desan writes. `Modern liberal thought discerns in Montaigne the starting point of its history . . . but let us make no mistake: most of the strictly philosophical readings of Montaigne are the expression of a form of (unconscious) ideological appropriation that aims to place the universal subject on a pedestal, to the detriment of its purely historical and political dimension.’”
Desan’s work situates Montaigne in the context of his times. “Desan’s biography is full of fascinating details about Montaigne and his world,” declared Glenn C. Altschuler in the Tulsa World. “Because his family had recently acquired wealth and a title by selling fish and wine, Desan explains, it was especially important for Montaigne to `think and feel confirmed in his nobility’—and for him to have a patron.” “Montaigne’s writing has not been taken out of his time. It exists outside of his time. He is not plucked out to become a false father; he is heard … as a true friend,” Gopnik concluded. “Here was a far-reaching skepticism about authority (either the ancients’ or the actual), a compassion toward suffering, a hatred of cruelty that we now imagine as human instinct, though all experience shows us that it must be inculcated. Montaigne, having no access to the abstract concepts that were later laid on this foundation, gives us deeper access to them, because he was the one who laid it.” In the future, wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “Montaigne will be seen less as an isolated essayist than a product of a specific, now newly vivid world.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of Montaigne: A Life.
National Review, March 6, 2017, Dominic Green, “A New Man,” p. 39.
New Yorker, January 16, 2017, Adam Gopnik, “Montaigne on Trial.”
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of Montaigne, p. 57.
Tulsa World, January 22, 2017, Glenn C. Altschuler, review of Montaigne.
ONLINE
University of Chicago Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Web site, https://rll.uchicago.edu/ (July 20, 2017), author profile.*
Philippe Desan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philippe Desan is Howard L. Willett Professor of French and History of Culture at the University of Chicago. Originally from France, Dr. Desan is among the top Montaigne scholars alive today. He received his PhD from the University of California Davis (1984), and has published widely on several topics pertaining to the literature and culture of the French Renaissance, often in relation to their economic, political and sociological context. At the University of Chicago, he has served as Master of the Humanities Collegiate Division and as Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He is the general editor of the Montaigne Studies. He has been awarded numerous honors for his scholarly work, including being named Knight of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (1994) and awarded the Ordre National du Mérite (2004) and the Ordre des Arts et Lettres (2011). He has also received the Prix de l'Académie Française (for the Dictionnaire de Montaigne) in 2005, the Grand Prix de l'Académie Française for "le rayonnement de la langue et littérature française" in 2015 and the Prix de l'Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques for his "Montaigne. Une biographie politique" in 2015.
Bibliography
Naissance de la méthode: Machiavel, La Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1987),
Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance, editor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991),
Les Commerces de Montaigne (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1992),
Penser l'Histoire à la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Paradigme, 1993),
Montaigne, les Cannibales et les Conquistadores (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1994),
Literary Objects: Flaubert (Chicago, 1996),
Montaigne dans tous ses états (Fasano: Schena Editore, 2001),
Reproduction en quadrichromie de l’Exemplaire de Bordeaux des Essais de Montaigne (Chicago: Montaigne Studies, 2002),
L'Imaginaire économique de la Renaissance (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2002),
Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, editor (Paris: H. Champion, 2004, 2007),
Reproduction fac-similé de l’édition de 1582 des Essais de Montaigne (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2005),
Montaigne politique, editor (Paris: H. Champion, 2006),
Portraits à l'essai: iconographie de Montaigne (Paris: H. Champion, 2007).
Montaigne. Les formes du monde et de l'esprit (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008).
Dieu à nostre commerce et société: Montaigne et la théologie, editor (Geneva: Droz, 2008).
Bibliotheca Desaniana. Catalogue Montaigne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2008).
Les Chapitres oubliés des Essais, editor (Paris: H. Champion, 2011).
Reproduction fac-similé de l’édition de 1774 du Journal de voyage de Montaigne (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2014),
Cités humanistes, cités politiques, editor with Denis Crouzet and Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014).
Montaigne. Une biographie politique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014).
Montaigne à l'étranger: voyages avérés, possibles et imaginés, editor (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016).
Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, editor (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016).
Montaigne. A Life" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Philippe Desan
Howard L. Willett Professor in Romance Languages and Literature, History of Culture, and the College; REMS Graduate Adviser
Office:
Wieboldt 410
Office Hours:
Friday 12:00-1:30 and by appointment
Phone Number:
773.834.0354
Email:
p-desan@uchicago.edu
Education:
Ph.D. in French, University of California, Davis (1984).
Program(s): French and Francophone Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (REMS)
Born in France, I was educated in my native country (Political Economy and Sociology) and in the USA (French literature). I have been at the University of Chicago since 1984 and held visiting positions in departments of Literature, History, and Philosophy at Harvard University, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Université Lyon 3, Université Bordeaux 3, École des Chartes, Centre Supérieur de la Renaissance (Tours), and the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris).
Trained as a Sociologist in France, I became interested in the Sociology of Literature and historical approaches to literature when I arrived in California in 1980. My approach to literature is mainly contextual and interdisciplinary. During the last fifteen years my research has focused on Montaigne and the history of ideas in France during the sixteenth century. My work intersects with sociology, history and philosophy. I am the general editor of Montaigne Studies, a journal published at the University of Chicago since 1988.
My teaching interests are Montaigne, Rabelais, sociological and historical approaches to the French Renaissance, Early Modern economic theories, nineteenth-century literature and philosophy, sociology of literature and culture. I also direct the European Civilization Core program at the University of Chicago Center in Paris.
Selected Publications (Books)
Naissance de la méthode: Machiavel, La Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1987).
Literature and Social Practice, co-editor with Priscilla Ferguson and Wendy Griswold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance, editor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).
Les Commerces de Montaigne: le discours économique des Essais (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1992).
Penser l’Histoire à la Renaissance (Caen: Editions Paradigme, collection “L’Atelier de la Renaissance”, 1993).
L’Imaginaire économique de la Renaissance (Mont-de-Marsan: Editions Inter-Universitaires, collection “Littérature et Anthropologie”, 1993). New revised and enlarged edition (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2002).
Montaigne, les Cannibales et les Conquistadores (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1994).
Literary Objects: Flaubert, catalogue of an exhibit at the Smart Museum, Chicago (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 1996).
Montaigne dans tous ses états (Paris-Fasano: Schena, 2001).
Montaigne politique, editor (Paris: H. Champion, 2006).
Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, general editor and author of 91 articles (Paris: H. Champion, 2004, revised and enlarged edition 2007).
Portraits à l’essai: Iconographie de Montaigne (Paris: H. Champion, 2007).
“Dieu à nostre commerce et société”: Montaigne et la théologie, editor (Geneva: Droz, 2008).
Montaigne. Les formes du monde et de l’esprit (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008).
Pensée morale et genres littéraires, co-editor with Jean-Charles Darmon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).
Bibliotheca Desaniana. Catalogue Montaigne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011).
Cités humanistes, cités politiques (1400-1600), co-editor with Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Denis Crouzet (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014).
Montaigne. Une biographie politique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014). English translation: Montaigne. A political Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Scepticisme et pensée morale de Michel de Montaigne à Stanley Cavell, co-editor with Jean-Charles Darmon and Gianni Paganini (Paris: Hermann, 2016).
Le Texte en scène. Littérature, théâtre et théâtralité à la Renaissance, co-editor with Concetta Cavallini (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016).
Montaigne à l'étranger: voyages avérés, possibles et imaginés, editor (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016).
The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, editor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Awards and Honors
Grand Prix de l'Académie française pour le Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises, 2015.
Prix Pierre-Georges Castex de littérature française de l'Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (awarded for Montaigne, Une biographie politique), 2015.
Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, 2011.
Prix de l’Académie Française (awarded for the Dictionnaire de Montaigne), 2005.
Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite, 2004.
Médaille de Montaigne, given by the Université de Bordeaux (awarded for work on Montaigne), 1995.
Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, 1994.
Médaille de la ville de Bordeaux, in commemoration of the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of Montaigne (awarded for work on Montaigne), 1992.
CV; https://rll.uchicago.edu/sites/rll.uchicago.edu/files/Desan-CV.pdf
Philippe Desan, Steven Rendall, Lisa Neal: MONTAIGNE
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Philippe Desan, Steven Rendall, Lisa Neal MONTAIGNE Princeton Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) 39.95 ISBN: 978-0-691-16787-9
Revisiting the public and private life of the extraordinary humanist in light of religious divisions of the 16th century.In this translated work of scholarly minutiae, French Renaissance historian and Montaigne expert Desan (Renaissance Literature and History of Culture/Univ. of Chicago; editor: The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, 2016, etc.) asserts that readers should not ignore Michel de Montaignes life (1533-1592) as a public official, the details of which shed light on his lifelong literary achievement, the Essays. Indeed, Montaignes act of intimate literary introspection invites critics to delve into his biography, beginning with his assumption of the noble name of Montaigne for the first time in his familys history since his wealthy merchant forebears purchased the Montaigne seigniory in Bordeaux a century before. As the first surviving son, classically educated, a magistrate by profession and then mayor of Bordeaux, like his father, Montaigne had unique ambitions of social ascension during the era of smoldering Catholic-Protestant tensions. He served several kings as well as (Protestant) Henry of Navarre, who would become Henri IV, and he conceived of his writing as history and politics, but the essays would change over time to reflect his gradual withdrawal from public life (he never became an ambassador) and adoption of the life of a gentleman author. Desan shows how Montaigne assumed the mtier of a writer from 1588 onward, literally annotating his previous essays by writing in the margins and altogether inventing a new stylewhat Desan terms more of a memoir than essay. Would his life had been remarkable if he had not written the Essays? No. Would he have been so well-known had not a brilliant young admirer, Marie de Gournay, devoted her life to editing and publishing his evolved essays posthumously? Probably not. Desan delves into these questions and much more in a hefty biography that will appeal most to academics.
A dense work to be read in conjunction with the humanists own eloquent writing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Philippe Desan, Steven Rendall, Lisa Neal: MONTAIGNE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181835&it=r&asid=cb75921f5c267529403a87035991da78. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181835
Montaigne: A Life
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Montaigne: A Life
Philippe Desan, trans. from the French by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal. Princeton Univ., $39.95 (816p) ISBN 978-0-691-16787-9
Desan, an expert on French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), takes readers on a detailed yet sweeping journey through the world of one of the Renaissance's most important literary figures. Desan is motivated by what he perceives as an overwhelming scholarly focus on Montaigne's literary innovations, at the expense of sociopolitical context. This is a bold statement that verges on exaggeration. Nonetheless, it makes clear that Desan is as interested in history as biography. In his telling, the Montaigne known to modern writers for popularizing the essay as a genre of expression becomes instead the shrewd politician and statesman familiar to his contemporaries. But Desan does not shy away from Montaigne's development as a writer, delving into the early childhood and later humanist schooling that instilled in him the curiosity that eventually manifested itself in his greatest works. When Montaigne's essays are mentioned in a chapter of their own, the emphasis is not on their contents but rather the tense political climate that surrounded their creation. If this book is read in its entirety--which, at nearly 800 pages, is no small task--then Montaigne will be seen less as an isolated essayist than a product of a specific, now newly vivid world. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Montaigne: A Life." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 57. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352751&it=r&asid=59a1027bfaf032ea8bc01db0abb2d75c. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352751
A new man
Dominic Green
69.4 (Mar. 6, 2017): p39.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Montaigne: A Life, by Philippe Desan (Princeton, 796 pp., $39.95)
THE story of Michel de Montaigne is that rare case, a political life that ends in success. Not, admittedly, the success that Montaigne sought. Nothing succeeded so well for Montaigne as failure. "My world is done for, my form is emptied," he wrote shortly before his death in 1592. "I belong entirely to the past." Montaigne wrote this in the margins of what scholars call the Bordeaux Copy, a print copy of the fifth edition of his Essais. Published in Paris in 1588, the fifth edition was the last to appear in Montaigne's lifetime. The 1588 edition added a third book of 13 chapters and 600 revisions to the two books and 94 chapters of the first edition of 1580. This expanded the text by about a third, and the Essais from one volume to two.
No sooner did the 1588 edition appear than Montaigne started to revise it. The Bordeaux Copy's text is thick with corrections and underlinings, its margins dense with expansions and explanations. The emendations are the work of a man very intent on merging a literary form that will belong to the future--the essay--with its author's image.
That Montaigne is a philosophical stance, not a historical personality. He stands for the Renaissance in France, and the philosopher in the character of Hamlet. He stands at the head of the line of belles-lettres, and head and shoulders above the religious violence that preoccupied his contemporaries. What he stood for in his lifetime seems incidental. This is the desired effect of the Essais in their posthumous form, the sixth edition of 1595. But that is the affect Montaigne's conversational tone conveys, and the result of an editorial process as much autobiographical as literary.
The flyleaf of the Bordeaux Copy carries Montaigne's handwritten instructions for the printer of the next edition. The printed title page omits Montaigne's public offices and titles, even though the inheritance and pursuit of public office defined his life. What remains is our image of Montaigne as the philosopher of private experiences, writing in his private tower, describing instead of prescribing, a conversationalist not an orator.
Philippe Desan's Montaigne: A Life is an elaborate, exhaustive, and frequently brilliant restoration of Montaigne's life to its times. Born in 1533 on the family estate near Bordeaux, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne seemed destined for public life. Michel's great-grandfather, having made a fortune in herrings, bought the Montaigne estate and noble title. Michel's father was the mayor of Bordeaux. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, came from a merchant dynasty of Sephardic Jewish extraction. He rarely mentions her in the Essais, but his father figures prominently.
Montaigne was raised to "live nobly," in standing as in thought. "In my youth I studied for ostentation," he was to claim in one of his last essays, "later, for recreation, never for gain." But ostentation and gain were inseparable. The intellectual currency of humanism was fungible, and was most valuable at the royal court. His father, following Erasmus's advice in De Pueris ("On Boys," 1529), chose Latin as Michel's native tongue. Even the valets and maids had to speak it to him. After that, from the age of six to 13, Michel boarded at the best school in the region, the College of Guyenne, for more Latin, some Greek, and a little French, too.
The rest of his education is obscure. Desan is surely right to suppose that Montaigne studied law at Toulouse, where he had relatives on his mother's side, and perhaps in Paris, too. The essay "Of Cripples" implies that Montaigne was in Toulouse in 1560 and attended the trial of the false Martin Guerre, a soldier accused of usurping a fellow soldier's identity.
At the time, the law courts were the forum for the usurpation of the old "nobility of the sword" by the parvenu "nobility of the paper"--families like Montaigne's. In 1556, family connections secured Montaigne a magistracy on a local court at Perigueux. A year later, he joined the parlement, or provincial court, at Bordeaux. His marriage in 1560 to Francoise de La Chassaigne was a treaty between two families. Marriage, Montaigne wrote, was "a bargain," made for "procreation, alliances, wealth." Only one of their six daughters survived infancy. His wife does not appear much in the Essais, either.
Another "paper friendship" shaped Montaigne's political and literary development. Etienne de La Boetie was a little older and a lot more successful as a lawyer. Montaigne knew La Boetie first on paper, through La Boetie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, a founding work of French political philosophy. They were friends for little more than three years, until La Boetie's death, probably from dysentery, in 1563. Montaigne idealized their friendship as a union of souls--"because it was he, because it was I"--but Desan identifies a creeping annexation, on paper, of La Boetie by Montaigne.
Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, defined friendship in relation to utility, pleasure, and virtue, with virtuous friendship the only true friendship. Montaigne, in the late essay "Of the Useful and the Honorable," notes the decline of noble values and the rise of the utility-minded, mercantile bourgeois. Desan detects this drift in Montaigne's relationship to La Boetie. Montaigne, the erudite but unspectacular lawyer, felt pleasure at finding a brilliant companion; he idealized pleasure as a virtue. After La Boetie's death, Montaigne edited his friend's works. In the process, Montaigne reworked a virtuous friendship for its utility. La Boetie became an asset to Montaigne's literary persona and its "commerce" with politics.
In 1568, Montaigne's father died, and he inherited the family estate and title. In February 1571, Montaigne, then 38, retired to the tower of the family chateau with his books and started writing his Essais. In the inscription over the bookshelves in his study, he described himself as "weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments," and as wishing to spend the rest of his life in "freedom, tranquility, and leisure." But the Essais, Desan argues, were intended as an "entrance to politics" during the barbarism of the French Wars of Religion.
Geographically, Desan notes, Montaigne lived "at the heart of the religious discord of his time." Southwestern France contained a substantial minority of Huguenots, as French Protestants were known. In 1571, the year of Montaigne's ostensible retirement to his tower, Charles IX elevated him to the rank of knight of the Order of St. Michael. Charles IX and his successor, Henry III (1574-89), used the Order as a "political tool," to "attract allies" and retain the loyalty of mid-level provincial lords, such as Montaigne, who remained silent about the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572 and about the mass executions of Protestants in Bordeaux that followed.
Montaigne understood that, rather than ancient virtus, modern politics required Machiavelli's virtu, amoral self-interest. One of the chief pleasures of Desan's biography derives from its portrait of Montaigne as apractiqueur, a negotiator exploiting the utility of his friendships amid massacre and famine. Both ambitious and cautious, he secured royalist regional patrons, the Foix-Gurson family, while stepping lightly between Charles IX and his Protestant rival Henry of Navarre. It is, Desan writes, "sometimes very difficult" to determine whether Montaigne acted as a negotiator in a series of civil wars or as a "double agent in the service of a third political force," the FoixGurson family.
The first edition of the Essais offered what Desan calls a "new approach to post-Machiavellian politics." But Henry III, as his sister Margaret of Valois said, was "of such a humor that he was offended not only by effects but also by ideas." In the 1580s, Montaigne's political career foundered. In the 1588 edition of the Essais, he extricated himself from the quicksand of religious politics. The obsolete politician reinvented himself as a private philosopher, a martyr only to his kidney stones.
In a late essay, Montaigne criticized Henry III for lacking "a middle position": The king was "always being carried away from one extreme to the other." Montaigne tacked between the extremes of a fanatical age, but at a cost. Like Henry III, he "affected and studied to make himself known by being unknowable." In his handwritten revisions to the 1588 edition, the political Montaigne disappears. A new and final Montaigne emerges, the public man who speaks as a private individual.
Machiavelli whispers in his prince's ear. Francis Bacon, domesticating Montaigne's essay to English, builds sentences with the balance and force of mathematical formulae. But Bacon, while a better lawyer than Montaigne and a more successful politician, was a worse human being. Montaigne is a conversationalist, a free associator of ideas offering an ideal of friendship. As Philippe Desan shows, this implicitly radical exploration of his inner freedom makes him a perpetual companion, for the same reason that Bacon never was.
Erich Auerbach observed that Montaigne created "a new profession," the man of letters, and "a new social category," the non-specialist "writer" who addressed the mass of the laity, not the fellow specialists of the clergy. Auerbach, noting that the Protestant reformers had earlier addressed themselves to the laity, identified the vernacular version of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) as a forerunner of Montaigne's essayist persona.
Montaigne adopted the literary style of the new religious personality, but not its social forms. Formally and politically, Montaigne remained a Catholic. Yet the Essais do not discuss the theological principles for which Europe's Christians were slaughtering one another. Montaigne contemplates death like an ancient. Death is a philosophical terminus, not the anteroom to heaven or purgatory. In a world of religious war, the only predestination is that all men shall die. Montaigne, like Hamlet, considers what a later age called the "problem of commitment." In this, as in much else, the Essais are "a mirror and critique of their time"--and ours.
Mr. Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, teaches politics at Boston College.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Green, Dominic. "A new man." National Review, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 39+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481519049&it=r&asid=68da8a8eaf6fad5702ca16db703b3d86. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481519049
Book review: 'Montaigne: A Life' By Philippe Desan
By Glenn C. Altschuler Jan 22, 2017 0
Published more than 500 years ago, Michel de Montaigne’s “Essais” (translated as “Attempts”) remains a classic of Western philosophy and literature. These days, “Essays” is acclaimed not only for its insights on a wide array of topics but also for its remarkably modern reliance on the subjective judgment of the author (who famously proclaimed, “I am myself the matter of my book”).
According to Philippe Desan, a professor of Renaissance Literature and History of Culture at the University of Chicago, critics have tended to take Montaigne at his word that he separated his public from his private self in “Essays” and have emphasized its universal qualities. As a result, Desan claims, they have missed the pivotal role played by the social and political context in 16th century France — and of Montaigne’s own career aspirations — on the various editions of “Essays.” A massively researched, monumental, and in many ways magnificent biography, Desan’s “Montaigne” provides a new angle of vision on a literary legend.
In part because the narrative is not consistently chronological, “Montaigne” is, alas, repetitious. Desan tells us six times, for example, that Montaigne was an excellent horseman. He spends too much time documenting the financial difficulties of diplomats. He writes twice (in two successive sentences) that Pope Gregory XIII opposed the appointment of Paul de Foix as ambassador to Rome, and again 30 pages later.
That said, Desan’s biography is full of fascinating details about Montaigne and his world. Because his family had recently acquired wealth and a title by selling fish and wine, Desan explains, it was especially important for Montaigne to “think and feel confirmed in his nobility” — and for him to have a patron, Germain-Gaston de Foix, the marquis of Trans, to help him become “a brilliant gentleman,” an exception to a nobility that preferred the sword to the pen. And Desan follows Montaigne closely as he makes his way in a country wracked by religious wars, serving in parliament; as mayor of Bordeaux; and as a negotiator between the Catholic King Henry III and the Protestant King Henry of Navarre.
When Montaigne’s “Essais” appeared in 1588, expanded by more than a third, Desan demonstrates, it was not the same work it had been in 1580. By then, his political patrons had disappeared, France had a new king, Henry IV (who did not have the support of his people), and Montaigne, who was suffering from kidney stones, felt isolated and marginalized. His literary introspection, Desan emphasizes, resulted from his involuntary retirement.
Ironically, perhaps, in 1588 (and in a posthumous publication of “Essais”), Montaigne’s political “defects,” including his candor, integrity and qualified commitments, became positive human qualities.
“In the present broils of this state,” Montaigne would now write, “my own interest has not made me blind to either the laudable qualities in our adversaries or those that are reproachable in the men I have followed.” Along with his first motto (“I abstain”), this message resonates with many of us who feel overwhelmed by our own “present broils.”
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
A Critic at Large January 16, 2017 Issue
Montaigne on Trial
What do we really know about the philosopher who invented liberalism?
By Adam Gopnik
The essays were not written in isolation in the tower but often dictated on the run.
The essays were not written in isolation in the tower but often dictated on the run.Illustration by Guido Scarabottolo
French writers of the airier, belletristic kind used to enjoy pointing out that Michel de Montaigne, the man who invented the essay, was born Michel Eyquem, in Bordeaux in 1533, and that the family name and estate survive to this day in the name of Château d’Yquem, the greatest of all French sweet wines. The connection feels improbable—as though there were a Falstaff Ale that really dates to Shakespeare’s Stratford—but also apt. Montaigne’s essays can seem like the Yquem of writing: sweet but smart, honeyed but a little acid. And, with wine and writer alike, we often know more about them than we know of them—in the wine’s case because it costs too much money to drink as much as we might desire, in the writer’s because it costs too much time to read as much as we might want.
“Que sais-je?” “What do I know?” was Montaigne’s beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know? And what do we really know about him now? We may vaguely know that he was the first essayist, that he retreated from the world into a tower on the family estate to think and reflect, and that he wrote about cannibals (for them) and about cruelty (against it). He was considered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, no less, to be the first social scientist, and a pioneer of relativism—he thought that those cannibals were just as virtuous as the Europeans they offended, that customs vary equably from place to place. Though some of his aphorisms have stuck, both funny (Doctors “are lucky: the sun shines on their successes and the earth hides their failures”) and profound (“We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn”), he is not really an aphorist. He is, we think, a philosopher, and somehow accounted the father of modern liberalism, though he was aristocratic in self-presentation. We think of him, above all, as we do of Thomas More: a nice guy, an ideal intellect. S. N. Behrman, the American playwright and diarist, began but never finished a heroic play about Montaigne called “The Many Men,” which might have sealed him as the man for all seasons before the other guy got there.
Philippe Desan, in “Montaigne: A Life” (Princeton; translated from the French by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal), his immense new biography, dryly insists that our “Château d’Yquem” Montaigne, Montaigne the befuddled philosopher and sweet-sharp humanist, is an invention, untrue to the original. Our Montaigne was invented only in the early nineteenth century. The Eyquem family, in their day, made no wine at all. They made their fortune in salted fish—and Desan’s project is to give us a salty rather than a sweet Montaigne, to take the Château d’Yquem out of his life and put the herring back in. Montaigne, to Desan’s dauntingly erudite but sometimes jaundiced eye, was an arriviste rather than an aristocrat, who withdrew into that tower out of fear as much as out of wisdom, having ridden political waves and been knocked down by them in a time, in France, of unimaginable massacre and counter-massacre between Protestants and Catholics. His motto was safety first, not solitude forever. That new form, the essay, is made as much from things that Montaigne prudently chose not to look at or evasively pretended not to know as from an avid, honest appetite for experience. We confuse him with the truly engagé Enlightenment and Romantic writers who came long afterward, as they came to confuse his briny Bordeaux with their winey one.
The idea of a salty rather than a sweet Montaigne follows the contemporary academic rule that all sweet things must be salted—all funny writers shown to be secretly sad, all philosophical reflection shown to be power politics of another kind. Desan has many crudely reductive theories—the most insistent being that Montaigne wrote essays about the world right now because he was covering up the truth that in the past his family were merchants, not lords—but he is a master of the micro-history of sixteenth-century Bordeaux. He lists all the other recipients of the royal necklace that Montaigne was proud to receive in midlife, signifying his elevation to the knightly Order of St. Michael, and no one, we feel assured, will have to go back and inspect those records again. At the same time, Desan suffers some from the curse of the archives, which is to believe that the archives are the place where art is born, instead of where it goes to be buried. The point of the necklaces, for him, is to show that Montaigne rose from a background of bribes and payoffs; he doesn’t see that we care about the necklaces only because one hung on Montaigne.
He establishes convincingly, though, that the Eyquem family had long been in trade—and was quite possibly Jewish in origin on Montaigne’s mother’s side—and that Montaigne’s persistent tone of lordly amusement was self-consciously willed rather than inherited. The family imported herring and woad in large enough quantities to buy an existing estate and win a kind of ersatz ennoblement. That act of ennoblement fooled nobody—the old aristocrats knew the difference and so did your bourgeois neighbors—but it gave you license to start acting aristocratic, which, if continued long enough, began to blend seamlessly with the real thing. “Most of these new nobles preferred to stress their way of living in retirement on their lands, free from any visible commercial activity,” Desan writes. “Family history is usually not mentioned, to the advantage of the present and everyday preoccupations.” The merchant Eyquems, under Michel’s father, Pierre, became noble “Montaignes,” able to use a single name in signature. The son’s retreat to the château and the tower was, on this slightly cynical view, simply another way of advertising and so accelerating the family’s elevation.
But, we learn, the Montaignes, father and son, being the virtuous bourgeois they really were, played an active role in that parlement that the family had bought its way into. Here we begin to enter a more fertile vineyard of implication. The bureaucracies of justice and politics in which Montaigne found himself are, as Desan describes them, instantly familiar to anyone who knows the equivalent in contemporary France. They combined, then as now, a wild bureaucratic adherence to punctilio and procedure with entanglements of cohort and clan that could shortcut the procedure in a moment. Montaigne had to learn to master this system while recognizing its essential mutability or, if you prefer, hypocrisy. The forms had to be followed, even when there was no doubt that the fix was in.
This sense of doubleness—that what is presented as moral logic is usually mere self-sustained ritual—became essential to Montaigne’s view of the world. (Lawyers to this day seem particularly sensitive to the play between form and fact, which makes them good novelists.) “There is but little relation between our actions that are in perpetual mutation and the fixed and immutable laws,” a chagrined Montaigne wrote later. “I believe it were better to have none at all than so infinite a number as we have.” His most emphatic—if perhaps apocryphal—remark on the subject is still applicable. He is reputed to have said that, having seen the law at work, if someone accused him of stealing the towers of Notre-Dame cathedral he would flee the country rather than stand trial.
Montaigne was witnessing the beginning of the parallel paper universe of the French bureaucratic state, where euphemism allows interest, and sometimes evil, to take its course. But in his time these daily tediums were laid over the violently shifting tectonic plates of religious warfare. The struggles between Catholic and Protestant in mid-sixteenth-century France killed more than a million people, either directly or by disease. By the time the wars swept through Bordeaux, the issues had long since been swamped by simple tribalism, of the kind that has afflicted Christianity since the Arian controversy. It was a question not of two sides warring over beliefs but of two sides for whom the war had become the beliefs.
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“Saddle up.”
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As the battles between those faithful to Henry of Navarre and those opposed to him went on in ever more intricate and absurd factional dances, Montaigne’s place within them was as treacherous as everyone else’s. Smart people got killed, and often. It was dangerous not only because your side might lose but because there were so many factions to keep track of. Early on, he wrote, cautiously, that it was a mistake to look to the fortunes of war for proof of the rightness of either side’s cause: “Our belief hath other sufficient foundations, and need not be authorized by events.” But events were in the saddle.
The first stirrings of Montaigne’s deflecting, double-sided literary style appear in his 1571 eulogy for his closest friend, the philosopher Étienne de La Boétie. Though the eulogy is modelled on classical stoic death scenes reaching back to Plato’s Phaedo, its originality lies in Montaigne’s honest reporting of the comic absurdities of his friend’s passing, and of his own emotional ambivalence at his death. La Boétie, suffering from some kind of ill-defined infection, is shown to be less than admirably resigned. The delirium of his final hours led him to believe that he was back in court, declaiming: “The whole chamber”—that is, his bedroom—“was filled with cries and tears, which did not, however, interrupt in the slightest the series of his speeches, which were rather long.” La Boétie implored Montaigne to guarantee his “place”—meaning, presumably, his social position—to which Montaigne replied, in a black, punning moment out of a Samuel Beckett play, that “since he breathed and spoke, and had a body, he consequently had his place.”
Montaigne’s friendship with La Boétie helped convince him that religious belief is purely customary—that what we believe is what we are told to believe, but that our beliefs are still a duty to our social hierarchy. “Voluntary servitude” is the course that La Boétie recommends: obedience to the state or Church, with the inner understanding that this is a course we’ve chosen from social prudence, not from personal conviction. “We are Christians by the same title as we are either Périgordins or Germans” was Montaigne’s most forceful statement on this point.
Desan scolds both Montaigne and his friend—there is a lot of scolding of subject by author in this book—for thereby recommending or even inventing “the cornerstone of modern liberalism: individual freedom detached from any political or social action.” To say this, though, is surely to underestimate the originality of the position, or its audacity in its time. The assertion of individual freedom is a form of political action. As subsequent generations of intellectuals caught in violent irrational wars or under repressive governments have also learned, learning not to think foolishly is the first step toward sanity. (Live not by the lie, Solzhenitsyn urged his countrymen. Montaigne’s is the same idea, in a warmer climate with better wine.) Your mind belongs to you. Recognizing that everything is customary was not customary. Your body and your allegiance may indeed be given, prudently, to the state. But no one can make your mind follow suit: only a fool fools himself. The first step in dealing with the madness of the political world is not to let it make you crazy. “God keep me from being an honest man, according to the description I daily see made of honor,” Montaigne wrote.
Desan also scolds Montaigne, vis-à-vis La Boétie, on a literary point, complaining that Montaigne, having first been inspired to literary effort by a friend, allows the idea of friendship to dissipate in his later essays, which entail no friend but the reader. The essay becomes an impersonal form of intimacy, betraying a fear of passionate commitment and political engagement. But each written form creates its own reader. A sonnet is addressed to an indifferent object of passion; even if the actual lover warms up, the sonneteer can’t become too easily complacent—a dark lady suddenly sunny produces no one’s idea of a poem. So, too, an essay is always addressed to an intimate unknown. E. B. White, a modern Montaigne, who got there through Thoreau, was deeply attached to his wife, Katharine. But she makes few if any appearances in his essays (though she’s there, hypochondriacally, all over his letters). He wasn’t neglecting her—it’s just that if the essays were even implicitly addressed to a particular intimate they would become too specific. The illusion of confiding in the reader alone is what essayists play on. You’re my best friend, Montaigne, like every subsequent essayist of his type, implies to his readers. By dramatizing an isolation that can be cured only by an unknown reader, the confidences come to belong to all.
Montaigne made several attempts at his essais—the French word means, simply, “tries,” in the sense of experimental effort, though the English word “sketches” comes closer—and the bulk of the work of writing was done in the seven years following La Boétie’s death. Far from being rendered in elegant isolation, we now know, the essays were written while Montaigne took part in Bordeaux politics, travelled to Italy (where the book was briefly confiscated by Church authorities, and he was subjected to a withering examination and a warning), and, eventually, became the mayor of Bordeaux. When Montaigne tells us that his library is where “I pass the greatest part of my live days and wear out most hours of the days,” he was being poetical. The pieces were, it now seems, far more often dictated on the run than written in that tower, dictation being the era’s more aristocratic, less artisanal method of composition. (They still occasionally bear dictation’s marks of run-on breathlessness.)
Montaigne’s “Essais,” in any of their stages—they went through three editions in his lifetime—are one of those classic books that benefit from being read irresponsibly. Sit down to read them thoroughly step by step, even in the great contemporary English translation, of 1603, by John Florio (whose renderings I’ve mostly been using), and you will be disappointed, since the “argument” of the essays is often less than fully baked, and the constant flow of classical tags and quotations is tedious. Open more or less at random, though, and dip in, and you will be stunned by the sudden epiphanies, the utterly modern sentences: “Super-celestial opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I have ever seen to be of singular accord,” he writes, giving as an example a philosopher who always pisses as he runs.
Montaigne accepts, as no other writer had, that our inner lives are double, that all emotions are mixed, and that all conclusions are inconclusive. “In sadness there is some alloy of pleasure,” he writes in the essay called, tellingly, “We Taste Nothing Purely.” “There is some shadow of delicacy and quaintness which smileth and fawneth upon us, even in the lap of melancholy. . . . Painters are of opinion that the motions and wrinkles in the face which serve to weep serve also to laugh. Verily, before one or other be determined to express which, behold the pictures success; you are in doubt toward which one inclineth. And the extremity of laughing intermingles itself with tears.” Having two emotions at once is better than having one emotion repeatedly.
By giving life to this truth, Montaigne animates for the first time an inner human whose contradictions are identical with his conscience. “If I speak diversely of myself, it is because I look diversely upon myself,” he writes, in “On the Inconstancy of Our Actions.” In the writer’s soul, he maintained,
all contrarieties are found . . . according to some turn or removing, and in some fashion or other. Shame-faced, bashful, insolent, chaste, luxurious, peevish, prattling, silent, fond, doting, laborious, nice, delicate, ingenious, slow, dull, forward, humorous, debonair, wise, ignorant, false in words, true speaking, both liberal, covetous, and prodigal. All these I perceive in some measure or other to be in mine, according as I stir or turn myself. . . . We are all framed of flaps and patches, and of so shapeless and diverse a contexture, that every piece and every moment playeth his part.
Lists are the giveaways of writing. What we list is what we love, as with Homer and his ships, or Whitman and his Manhattan trades, or Twain and steamboats. That beautiful and startlingly modern list of mixed emotions suggests a delectation of diversities—he likes not knowing what he feels or who he is, enjoys having “wise” and “ignorant,” insulated by nothing but a comma, anchored together in one soul’s harbor. They bang hulls inside our heads.
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“I wasn’t nervously hovered around enough as a child.”
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Although those epigrammatic sentences can be arresting—“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which a man knoweth least”—Montaigne doesn’t think epigrammatically. What makes him astonishing is a sort of “show all work” ethic that forced thought as it really is, mixed in motive and meanings, onto the page. He seems wise, more than smart or shrewd—wise without being smart or shrewd. He can be embarrassing, as he was often thought to be in his time, in a way that recalls less a polished columnist than a great diarist, like James Boswell or Kenneth Tynan, incapable of being guarded, the way shrewder people are. When he writes about the joys of having sex with cripples, we feel uneasy, nervous, and then enlightened. Whatever he’s telling, he’s telling it, as Howard Cosell used to say, like it is.
Desan, writing only about the French Montaigne, avoids the question that, for an English speaker, is essential: the great question of Montaigne’s relationship to Shakespeare. Although Florio’s 1603 effort was the first English rendering of Montaigne’s essays to appear in book form, they had certainly been circulating in manuscript before that. In an introduction to a new edition of the Florio, Stephen Greenblatt tantalizes us with the suggestion that the relation exists, and shows how richly it can be teased out—and then responsibly retreats from too much assertion with too little positive evidence, willing to mark it down to the common spirit of the time.
Well, essayists can go where scholars dare not tread—a key lesson to take from Montaigne—and this essayist finds it impossible to imagine that Shakespeare had not absorbed Montaigne fully, and decisively, right around 1600. It is evident not in the ideas alone but in a delighted placement of opposites in close relation, even more apparent in Shakespeare’s prose than in his verse. Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation of ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen-sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting. Hamlet says:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
And the balancing of opposites, the rhythm of assertion and counter-assertion, the sudden questioning turns, all of it seems irresistibly like Florio’s Montaigne, notably in the springy, self-surprised beat:
How often do we pester our spirits with anger or sadness by such shadows and entangle ourselves into fantastical passions which alter both our mind and body? What astonished, flearing, and confused mumps and mows doth this dotage stir up in our visages! What skippings and agitations of members and voice!
It’s not merely in the steady (and modern) use of exclamation points but in the sudden turns and reversals, without the mucilage of extended argument—the turn-on-a-dime movements, the interjections, the tone of a man talking to himself and being startled by what his self says back. The alteration in the inner lives of Shakespeare’s characters around 1600, as evident in “As You Like It” as in “Hamlet,” bears his mark—as in Jaques’s speech on the seven ages of man, which very much resembles Montaigne’s insistence that life-living is role-playing. (“We must play our parts duly, but as the part of a borrowed personage.”)
Indeed, the Frenchman Jaques, even more than Hamlet, and from the same year, is Montaignean man. In this case, a specific relation seems to exist between Montaigne’s great essay “On Cruelty” and the scene in “As You Like It” where Jaques is reported brooding on the death of a deer. Montaigne’s point is that when it comes to cruelty we should subordinate all other “reasoning”—stoic, of degree and dependency—to the essential fact of the stag’s suffering. We can reason our way past another creature’s pain, but, as we do so, such “reason” becomes the indicted evil. Jaques feels the same way. “We are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what’s worse / To fright the animals and kill them up,” he says, while “weeping and commenting upon the sobbing deer.” We are meant to find Jaques’s double occupation of weeping and commenting, feeling and keeping track of his feelings, mildly comic—Shakespeare being always convinced, in his English way, that the French are hypersensitive and overintellectual. But Jaques is not a ridiculous figure. He is conscience speaking through contradiction.
It was in the midst of all this that Montaigne was elevated to mayor of Bordeaux—an achievement, Desan shows, that was rather like getting appointed police commissioner under Tammany Hall. He wasn’t much of a mayor, although it was under his administration that the first protection and “control” of Bordeaux’s cru bourgeois was attempted, wine having crept up to become the city’s most important export, more important even than the salt fish that the family fortune had been built on. (It was a sign of the middle-class affluence that sped along in spite of the wars of faith.) His one attempted intervention in the religious conflict led to his being arrested and held in the Bastille, for a few hours, by extremist Catholics in Paris. He was released only after convincing the jailers of his Catholic bona fides. Fanaticism always seems foolish until it locks you up.
After his mayoralty, combining, as it did, the trivial and the terrifying, Montaigne moved away from political action, and Desan, in the end, is hard on his politics. “Montaigne’s humanism, as it was conceptualized starting in 1585, implies a renunciation of politics,” he declares, and elsewhere he sees in Montaigne a sort of false dawn of liberalism. Montaigne’s retreat was only a rich man’s way of getting off the highway before history ran him over. “Montaigne is supposed to be the best proof of . . . the victory of private judgment over systems or schools of thought,” Desan writes. “Modern liberal thought discerns in Montaigne the starting point of its history . . . but let us make no mistake: most of the strictly philosophical readings of Montaigne are the expression of a form of (unconscious) ideological appropriation that aims to place the universal subject on a pedestal, to the detriment of its purely historical and political dimension.”
This view is deaf to the overtones of Montaigne’s self-removal. To be against violence, frightened of fanaticism, acutely conscious of the customary nature of our most devout attachments—without this foundation in realism, political action always pivots toward puritanical self-righteousness. It is not that Montaigne is placed on a pedestal; it’s that we look up at him only to find that he is already down here with us. His houses are built on sand, rock being too hard for people, who are bound to fall. His moral heroism lies in his resilience in retreat, which allows him to remind us of our capacity to persevere. His essays insist that an honest relation to experience is the first principle of action. As a practical matter, this has been most actively inspirational at times of greatest stress. The German author Stefan Zweig, in flight from Nazism, turned first of all to Montaigne, writing, “Montaigne helps us answer this one question: ‘How to stay free? How to preserve our inborn clear-mindedness in front of all the threats and dangers of fanaticism, how to preserve the humanity of our hearts among the upsurge of bestiality?’ ”
Montaigne is present now in the things he feels and the way he sounds, and that is like a complete human being. He’s funny, he’s touching, he’s strange, he’s inconclusive. Ironic self-mockery, muted egotism, a knowledge of one’s own absurdity that doesn’t diminish the importance of one’s witness, a determinedly anti-heroic stance that remains clearly ethical—all these effects and sounds of the essayist are first heard here. We imitate the sound without even knowing its source. Good critics and scholars can teach us how to listen. Only writers show us how to speak—even when they tell us that it is best to whisper.
Montaigne’s writing has not been taken out of his time. It exists outside of his time. He is not plucked out to become a false father; he is heard, long past his time, as a true friend. He is an emotional, not a contractual, liberal. He didn’t give a damn about democracy, or free speech, or even property rights. Equality before the law he saw as impossible—not even aristocrats could get it. But he had a rich foundational impulse toward the emotions that make a decent relation between man and state possible. Here was a far-reaching skepticism about authority (either the ancients’ or the actual), a compassion toward suffering, a hatred of cruelty that we now imagine as human instinct, though all experience shows us that it must be inculcated. Montaigne, having no access to the abstract concepts that were later laid on this foundation, gives us deeper access to them, because he was the one who laid it. The liberalism that came after humanism may be what keeps his memory alive and draws us to him. The humanism that has to exist before liberalism can even begin is what Montaigne is there to show us still. ♦