Michel de Montaigne, born on February 28th, 1533, had a rather strange childhood, even by 16th century standards. His father, Pierre Montaigne, was not well educated by Michel de Montaigne’s reckoning, nor by many others. However, Pierre loved books. Though not reading them much, he had a great passion for collecting and inviting authors into his home to entertain them. On the recommendation of one of these guests (and perhaps his own anxieties about his intellectual shortcoming), Montaigne senior had his son grow up surrounded by nothing but classical Latin speakers and placed his son under the care of peasants immediately after birth to be partially raised by and fully nursed by farmers and artisans (Bakewell). The biographer Sarah Bakewell has called this “an almost unprecedented pedagogic experiment” (52). From his earliest memories until he was sent to public school around the age of 6 or 7, Montaigne was under the careful tutelage of a highly trained Latinist. Pierre ordered all the people, including his mother and all the servants, of the house to speak to young Montaigne in only Latin, thus becoming his native tongue.
Later in life, Montaigne’s father had one last strange challenge to place on his son: he requested that Montaigne translate a book he had never read before from Latin into French so he could read it before he died. This was a vast undertaking, but Montaigne translated Raymon Sebond’s Theologia naturalis, sive liber creatutam from its purportedly challenging half-Spanish half-Latin language into their contemporary French (Desan). Montaigne hated this work and disagreed almost whole-heartedly on Sebond’s theories, and this tension would lead to Montaigne’s longest essay, far exceeding all the rest, “An Apology for Raymon Sebond”; though not much of a defense of Sebond, this essay becomes Montaigne’s most philosophical and theological work (Bakewell).
Montaigne’s entire life was engulfed by the internecine religious and civil wars of 16th Century France and sporadic, devastating waves of bubonic plague (Bakewell, Ullrich). The wars and massacres erupting along France were often deadly and gruesome: Sarah Bakewell describes them as “apocalyptic,” and the violence and gruesome nature of the conflicts led the people of France to believe the end was coming imminently. Being an active political figure and member of the upper echelons of society, one would imagine Montaigne’s work and philosophical leaning would be completely saturated with this trauma, but they are actually nowhere to be found (Bakewell). Bakewell attributes this to his Stoic nature, but another explanation as he constantly purports in the Essays, Montaigne is more interested in himself and his inner life than another subject (214). It also helped that the Catholics were the dominant religious group of Montaigne’s time meant that he, being a wealthy and well-connected Catholic, was often never the victim of the violent raids, massacres, dispossession that so many Protestants were subjected to (Bakewell).
Montaigne’s greatest (and really only work) are his Essays, a collection of 107 essays after three editions that each included vast additions and rewrites. This project first started around, it is assumed, 1572 when Montaigne first retired to his estate (Bakewell). The catalyst of the project began earlier though around 1569 when Montaigne had a very near-death experience. He had fallen off his horse, and according to his friends, Montaigne was throwing up blood, in and out of consciousness, and tearing at his skin and clothes. Interestingly, Montaigne will later recall in his Essays he felt only peace. All his life he had been told to fear death, and here it was—yet it was not a painful passage to the afterlife or a sacrificial step to God that had to be taken; it was nothing to fear at all. This realization was the first step on Montaigne’s path to writing his one and only book.
In 1592, at fifty-nine, Montaigne dies in his home after a lodged kidney stone caused a severe infection, something he had dealt with much of his later adult life. Montaigne’s Essays enjoyed great popularity in his life, but in the year 1676, the book was placed on the Church’s index of Forbidden Books and would remain there until 1854 (however, Montaigne always had an underground French following and a very strong English readership) (Bakewell). His work went on to greatly influence many of the most influential writers, both philosophically and creatively, like Shakespeare, Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Virginia Wolf, and many many others (Bakewell).
Works Cited:
Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live, or, a Life of Montaigne: in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Other Press, 2010.
Hamlin, William M. Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Montaigne, Michel de, and M. A. Screech. The Complete Essays. Penguin Books, 1993.
Ullrich Langer. “Montaigne’s political and religious context.” The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pg 9-26.