French literature

How to live

The life of Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne

How to live

Montaigne par Salvador Dali

Michel de Montaigne was born on February 28, 1533, at the Château de Saint-Michel de Montaigne in the Dordogne. His father took exceptional care with his education: musicians woke him each morning, and Latin—spoken by everyone in the household, servants included—was the first language he learned. Montaigne later studied in Bordeaux. It is unclear how or where he completed his formal training, but at twenty-two he became a magistrate at the Parliament of Bordeaux, a position that brought him to court in Paris and made him a valued diplomat in an age of turmoil.

In Bordeaux, he formed the great friendship of his life with Étienne de La Boétie. La Boétie died four years later, leaving Montaigne inconsolable. Montaigne pursued other loves, even married, but nothing dispelled the sense that, as he said, he “felt only half alive.”

In 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Montaigne withdrew to his estate. Two years later, he began the Essays, a project he would continue—revising, expanding, rethinking—for the remaining twenty years of his life. Alongside his writing, he undertook delicate diplomatic missions, often between Catholic and Protestant factions. After the publication of the first two books of the Essays in 1580, he set out on a seventeen-month journey across Europe. Upon returning home, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne served two terms, one of them overshadowed by a devastating plague that drove him into months of itinerancy as he searched for places willing to shelter him. When he finally came back to his estate, he found it ravaged by war and disease. Montaigne died in his château in 1592, at the age of fifty-nine.

Throne

 

“On the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting only on our ass.”

Essays, III, 13.

Montaigne and his time

It is a mistake to imagine Montaigne as a secluded scholar living quietly among his books—a notion he himself helped foster. He was small in stature but extraordinarily active: capable of riding fifteen hours without dismounting, taking part in military action when needed, seizing pleasure when he could, all while living through one of the most violent periods in French history, when the neighbor who greeted you today might kill you tomorrow.

A man confronting plague and civil war

Montaigne earned a reputation for political tact and steady judgment. Both the king and Henri de Navarre called on him for difficult missions of negotiation and conciliation. He witnessed sieges firsthand and endured the brutality of his time. Fear for his life—combined with a taste for travel—pushed him to wander across Europe for two years.

On his way home, he learned he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He was forty-eight. Re-elected two years later, he governed a city struck by an epidemic that claimed 14,000 lives. Fleeing the plague with his family, he spent six months moving from place to place, often unwelcome. Returning at last, he found his estate devastated.

In reading Montaigne, we shouldn’t be misled by the cool, formal portraits passed down to us; the blood-stained image of Queen Margot nearby gives a far sharper sense of what those years were really like. 

Isabelle Adjani in Queen Margot, Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 film.
François Dubois, massacre de la Saint-Barthélémy (détail)
Historical context: the 16th century
The French language in the 16th century
Tourism

“When I have been abroad and, as a courtesy, people asked whether I wished to be served in the French manner, I laughed and always chose to sit among the most mixed groups of foreigners. I am embarrassed to see our countrymen so possessed by this foolish habit of taking fright at customs different from their own. They feel out of their element the moment they leave their village. Wherever they go, they cling to their own ways and reject foreign ones.”

 

Essays, III, 9.

His place in the literary history

Pierre Bonnard, Table dans le jardin,
Montaigne has fed generations of writers: his Essays must be tasted, savored, and finally digested.

Montaigne is the only writer to have created a literary genre—the essay—through a seminal work that is also its masterpiece. In English, Spanish, German, Polish, and Russian, the genre takes its name directly from Montaigne’s book. In this respect, he is one of the central figures of Western literature.

The question of his influence is more complex. Montaigne wrote a Renaissance French inflected with Gascon—a language concrete, metaphorical, vivid, and richly evocative. Yet French would soon evolve in the opposite direction: in the seventeenth century it was pared down, disciplined, and refined. As beautiful as it is, Montaigne’s language led nowhere in the history of French prose (a loss, perhaps). French is known as “the language of Molière,” not of Montaigne. Yet for centuries the Essays were the bedside book of writers of every kind.

Joy of living

“The fact that such a man has written truly adds to the joy of living on this earth”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The pleasure of reading Montaigne

Montaigne wrote four and a half centuries ago, so his language can feel remote. But once we settle into its rhythm, we are richly rewarded: what vitality, what depth, what precision! Montaigne is an intimate writer—unaffected, concrete, and acutely attentive to how his sentences fall. His lines still ring true today, full of strength and savor. For example:

There is a faint touch of sweetness and delicacy that pleases and soothes us even within melancholy itself. Are there not temperaments that make it their food?

(Essays, II.20, “We Taste Nothing Pure”)

He is as much a philosopher as he is a writer. More unusually, he never forgets that he is a man, not a pure spirit—and a man among other men, not a chosen soul among savages.

Montaigne (affiche collée).
This secret light

 

“We perceive graces only when they are sharp-pointed, puffed up, and swollen with art.
Those that flow from nature and simplicity easily escape a coarse sight like ours. They have a delicate and hidden beauty; it takes a clear and well-purged vision to discern that secret light.”

Essays, III, 12.

Essays : selected gems

Translation done by AI, checked and corrected by Matthieu Binder.

Extraits des Essais de Montaigne (in french)

Aimer, souffrir

Apprécier la différence

Juger, connaître

Eduquer