Michel de Montaigne
Based on Wikipedia: Michel de Montaigne
The Man Who Invented the Personal Essay
Imagine being so famous for one thing that you essentially create an entire literary genre—and then having your contemporaries dismiss it as self-indulgent rambling. That was Michel de Montaigne's fate during his lifetime. The French nobleman who lived from 1533 to 1592 is now considered one of the most significant philosophers of the Renaissance, the writer who popularized the essay as we know it. But in his own time? People thought he talked about himself too much.
"I am myself the matter of my book," Montaigne declared. His readers found this appalling. Proper writers were supposed to tackle grand philosophical themes or chronicle the deeds of great men—not spend pages describing their own kidney stones or their difficulty remembering things. But that declaration, which seemed so unseemly to sixteenth-century readers, turned out to be revolutionary. Montaigne understood something that took the literary world centuries to fully appreciate: the most universal truths often emerge from the most personal observations.
His signature question was "Que sçay-je?"—What do I know?—rendered in the Middle French of his era. It wasn't rhetorical hand-wringing. It was a genuine program of inquiry, a commitment to examining everything he thought he knew with radical honesty.
An Unusual Education
Montaigne came from money. His great-grandfather Ramon Felipe Eyquem had made a fortune selling herring and used the profits to buy an estate in 1477, transforming the family from successful merchants into the Lords of Montaigne. By the time Michel was born in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France, the Eyquems were established aristocracy. His father Pierre had served as mayor of Bordeaux and fought as a soldier in Italy.
The family's origins were more complex than their noble titles suggested. Montaigne's father's family likely had Marrano roots—this term referred to Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under duress, while sometimes maintaining Jewish practices in secret. His mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, came from a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family in Zaragoza that had converted to Catholicism. She later became Protestant. This background of religious conversion and adaptation would prove relevant to Montaigne's later role as a mediator between Catholic and Protestant factions during France's devastating religious wars.
Curiously, though Montaigne's mother outlived him and lived nearby for most of his life, he mentioned her only twice in all his essays. His father, by contrast, appears constantly—probably because Pierre Eyquem designed one of the strangest educational experiments in Renaissance Europe, and Michel was the subject.
The plan began at birth. The elder Montaigne, influenced by his humanist friends, had his infant son sent to live with a peasant family in a small cottage for three years. The reasoning was that this would "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help." This wasn't the typical approach of the French aristocracy, who generally preferred their children as far from peasants as possible.
After this Spartan beginning, Montaigne returned to the family château for phase two: total Latin immersion. His father hired a German tutor named Horstanus who spoke no French, ensuring that all of Michel's intellectual instruction would occur in Latin. But Pierre didn't stop there. He hired only servants who could speak Latin and ordered everyone in the household—including himself and his wife—to address the boy exclusively in that language. The entire household essentially learned Latin alongside young Michel, using whatever vocabulary the tutor taught him.
The result was that Montaigne grew up speaking ancient Latin as his first language, French as his second. This wasn't accomplished through drills and discipline, either. Pierre Eyquem believed in what his son would later describe as "liberty and delight." Every morning, a musician would wake Michel by playing an instrument. A zither player accompanied him and his tutor throughout the day, playing tunes to ward off boredom. The goal was to make learning feel like play.
By modern standards, this sounds like a peculiar recipe for producing a neurotic aristocrat completely unprepared for real life. Instead, it produced one of history's most grounded and self-aware writers. At around age six, Montaigne was sent to the prestigious College of Guienne in Bordeaux, where he studied under George Buchanan, considered the greatest Latin scholar of the age. He mastered the entire curriculum by thirteen.
Friendship and Loss
After completing his education, Montaigne entered the legal profession, eventually becoming a councillor at the Parliament of Bordeaux—a high court, not a legislative body in the modern sense. It was respectable work for a man of his station, but what really marked this period of his life was a friendship.
Montaigne was twenty-five when he met Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow member of the Parliament who was three years his senior. La Boétie was already accomplished in ways Montaigne was not—orphaned young, married, entrusted with delicate political missions. He had written a famous work called "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude," an essay examining why people submit to tyranny. Montaigne had originally planned to include it in his own Essays, but backed off when Protestant activists began citing it as an attack on the Catholic monarchy. Even in friendship, Montaigne displayed the careful political navigation that would define his career.
Their friendship became legendary, at least to Montaigne. He described it in one of his most famous passages: "If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I."
That phrase appeared in his posthumous 1595 edition. Scholars have traced its evolution in his manuscripts—first he wrote "because it was he," then later, in different ink, added "because it was I." Even his most spontaneous-sounding lines were carefully revised.
Montaigne considered their bond exceptional, the kind of friendship that "only occurs once every three centuries." Whether this was literally true or simply how it felt doesn't matter much. What matters is that La Boétie died in 1563, only four years after they met. He was thirty-two, probably killed by plague or tuberculosis. Montaigne was at his bedside during three days of agony, watching his friend face death with what he described as extraordinary courage.
The loss devastated him. Scholars like Donald M. Frame have suggested that the Essays themselves emerged from this grief—that Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate" after losing La Boétie drove him to create a new form, with the reader taking the place of the dead friend. It's a compelling theory. The Essays certainly read like one end of a conversation, with Montaigne constantly anticipating objections, backtracking, reconsidering, as if responding to an invisible interlocutor.
Retreat to the Tower
In 1565, Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne, probably in an arranged match. She came from a wealthy merchant family. They had six daughters together, but only one survived infancy: Léonor, who would go on to marry twice and have children of her own. Montaigne wrote remarkably little about his wife—we know almost nothing about their relationship, which has led to centuries of speculation. He did note that Léonor reached the age of six "without having been punished," thanks largely to "the indulgence of her mother."
His father died in 1568. A year before, Pierre had asked his son to translate a book by the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond, called "Theologia naturalis" or "Natural Theology." Montaigne completed and published the translation, his first significant literary work. He also published the writings of his dead friend La Boétie. Then, in 1570, he made a decision that would change literary history.
He quit.
Montaigne inherited the family estate and became the Lord of Montaigne—but more importantly, he retired from public life entirely. Around this time, he'd been seriously injured in a riding accident when another horseman collided with him at full speed, throwing him from his mount and briefly knocking him unconscious. His recovery took weeks or months. This brush with death seems to have clarified his priorities.
He retreated to the tower of the château, which he called his "citadel," and isolated himself from social and family matters. His library there contained around fifteen hundred volumes. On his thirty-eighth birthday, as he began this period of self-imposed seclusion, he had an inscription placed on the crown of his bookshelves:
In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out.
Montaigne was wrong about how much life remained—he had another twenty-one years—but he was right that this retirement would define him. In that tower, surrounded by his books, he began writing the Essays.
What Made the Essays Different
The word "essay" comes from the French "essai," meaning "attempt" or "trial." Montaigne chose it deliberately. He wasn't producing finished treatises or definitive arguments. He was trying things out, testing ideas, exploring his own reactions. This approach was genuinely new.
His subjects ranged wildly: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, fear, idleness, liars, smells, the custom of wearing clothes. He would begin with a topic and then meander through classical references, personal anecdotes, and sudden digressions that sometimes seemed to lose the thread entirely before circling back. His contemporaries found this annoying. They wanted systematic arguments, not rambling confessions about kidney stones.
But that rambling quality was precisely the point. Montaigne was trying to capture something that systematic philosophy couldn't: the actual texture of human thought, with all its contradictions and reversals. He described his own poor memory not as a confession of weakness but as data. He noted his ability to solve problems while acknowledging his inconsistencies. He found that the most basic feature of human nature was its "great variety and volatility."
This might sound obvious now, but it was radical in the sixteenth century. The dominant intellectual tradition, inherited from medieval scholasticism, emphasized fixed categories and eternal truths. Montaigne was suggesting that the self was more fluid than fixed, more process than product. You didn't discover who you were by consulting authorities. You discovered it by paying close attention to your own experience—and being honest about what you found.
Public Life Returns
The seclusion didn't last. By 1578, Montaigne had begun suffering from painful kidney stones, a condition inherited from his father's family. True to his character, he refused doctors and drugs, preferring to observe and record his symptoms rather than treat them. From 1580 to 1581, he traveled through France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, partly seeking relief at various mineral springs.
The journey also served as a pilgrimage. At the Holy House of Loreto, he donated a silver relief depicting himself, his wife, and their daughter kneeling before the Madonna. He maintained a travel journal recording regional customs and personal episodes—including detailed descriptions of the kidney stones he managed to pass. This journal wasn't published until 1774, nearly two hundred years after his death, when it was discovered in a trunk in his tower.
During a visit to the Vatican, the Essays were examined by papal authorities. Montaigne apologized for references to "fortuna"—the pagan concept of chance or fate—and for writing favorably about the emperor Julian the Apostate, who had tried to reverse Constantine's Christianization of Rome. But he was released to follow his own conscience in making changes. The Catholic Church's censors were apparently more lenient than his literary critics.
While still traveling in Italy, word reached him that he'd been elected mayor of Bordeaux, the same position his father had held. He returned to serve, and was re-elected in 1583, holding office until 1585. Throughout his terms, France was tearing itself apart in religious civil war, and Montaigne positioned himself as a moderator between Catholics and Protestants.
This wasn't merely diplomatic caution. Montaigne genuinely believed that peace mattered more than doctrinal purity. He was a Roman Catholic who maintained friendships across religious lines. The Catholic King Henry the Third respected him. So did the Protestant Henry of Navarre, who would eventually convert to Catholicism and become Henry the Fourth, reportedly saying that "Paris is worth a Mass." Montaigne belonged to a faction called the politiques—people who prioritized national unity and civil peace over religious allegiance. In an age of massacre and holy war, this made him almost radical.
The bubonic plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term, and the wars of religion prompted him to abandon his château for two years. But he kept writing. In 1588, he produced the third book of Essays and met Marie de Gournay, an author who admired his work and would later edit and publish it. He called her his adopted daughter.
The End
When King Henry the Third was assassinated in 1589, Montaigne threw his support behind Henry of Navarre despite his personal aversion to Protestantism. He wanted the bloodshed to end more than he wanted his side to win. This was consistent with everything he'd written about the limits of human certainty and the dangers of fanaticism.
He died in 1592, at fifty-nine, from a peritonsillar abscess—an infection of the tissue around the tonsils that spread and caused paralysis of his tongue. For a man who had written that "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation" and that he would "rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice," this was a particularly cruel end.
He retained all his other faculties. He requested a Mass and died during its celebration, presumably unable to speak the responses but following along in silence. He was buried near the château, though his remains were later moved to a church in Bordeaux that no longer exists.
Why He Matters
The connection between Montaigne and the Substack article about Europeans consuming Egyptian mummies while calling others "cannibals" might not be immediately obvious. But Montaigne wrote one of history's most famous essays on exactly this kind of moral hypocrisy.
His essay "On Cannibals," published in 1580, examined reports of indigenous peoples in Brazil who practiced ritual cannibalism. Where most European writers used these accounts to demonstrate the savagery of non-Christian peoples, Montaigne drew a different conclusion. He argued that the supposedly civilized Europeans had no grounds for moral superiority. After all, Europeans tortured each other alive during the Wars of Religion, burning people at the stake and stretching them on the rack. How was this better than eating the dead?
"I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts," Montaigne wrote, "but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own."
This wasn't cultural relativism in the modern sense—Montaigne didn't think all practices were equally valid. It was something more challenging: a demand for consistency. If you're going to judge others, you have to apply the same standards to yourself. And when you do that honestly, Montaigne suggested, you often find that your own culture's practices are at least as disturbing as those of the people you're condemning.
The consumption of mummy powder as medicine—a practice that lasted for centuries in Europe—is a perfect example of the phenomenon Montaigne identified. Europeans literally ate the remains of Egyptian dead while congratulating themselves on their superiority to "savage" peoples. The cognitive dissonance is almost too perfect.
Montaigne's method for cutting through such self-deception was simple but demanding: honest self-examination. "What do I know?" wasn't just a philosophical motto. It was a practice. You started by admitting your own ignorance and bias, then tried to see yourself as clearly as you saw others.
This approach made him seem wishy-washy to people who wanted certainty. But Montaigne understood that certainty was often the problem, not the solution. The people burning each other alive during the Wars of Religion were absolutely certain they were right. The people condemning "cannibals" while consuming mummy powder were absolutely certain of their own civilization.
Against all that certainty, Montaigne offered doubt—not paralyzing doubt, but liberating doubt. The doubt that lets you reconsider, change your mind, admit you were wrong. The doubt that makes conversation possible, because you're genuinely curious about what the other person thinks.
"I am myself the matter of my book." His contemporaries found this embarrassing. We might find it essential. In an age of ideological warfare and moral posturing, Montaigne's willingness to examine himself before judging others feels less like Renaissance humanism and more like something we still need to learn.