Michel de Montaigne 1533-1592

(Born Michel Eyquem) French essayist, diarist, and translator.

The following entry presents criticism of Montaigne’s works from 1985 to the present.

Known as the father of the literary essay, Montaigne, in his monumental autobiographical work Les essais de Messire Michel Seigneur de Montaigne (1580; The Essays of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne), was the first person to write extensively and candidly about himself. His writings have commanded the attention of scholars and critics for more than four hundred years, and many consider his inquiries into the nature and limitations of human knowledge as relevant today as they were in his own time.

Biographical Information

Born on his family's estate near Bordeaux, Montaigne was the first member of his family to use the noble title “de Montaigne,” a right obtained by his grandfather when he purchased the Montaigne estate in 1477. Montaigne's father was a lawyer, soldier, and devout Catholic; his mother was a member of a Spanish family that had converted from Judaism to Protestantism. As a soldier in Italy, Montaigne's father learned of the latest theories on child rearing and education. These ideas led him to send his infant son to live with a peasant family in order to expose him to people of more humble circumstances than his own. In addition, he insisted that once the boy returned to the family estate, the entire household speak Latin exclusively so that Montaigne's native tongue would be Latin rather than French. Montaigne's formal education consisted of seven years at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, followed by the study of law in Bordeaux and Toulouse. In 1554, Montaigne accepted a legal position in Périgueux, and three years later he became councilor of the Parliament in Bordeaux, where he made the acquaintance of his dearest friend, Étienne de La Boétie, also a councilor. In 1563, La Boétie died at the age of thirty-two; the loss was a devastating experience for Montaigne from which he never recovered. He was involved in the posthumous publication of some of La Boétie's literary works, and their relationship became the subject of one of Montaigne's most celebrated essays, “De l'amité” (“Of Friendship”). Montaigne served in the Bordeaux Parliament until 1570. His duties included a mission to the king's court in Paris in 1561 and a trip to Rouen in the company of the king the following year. In 1565, Montaigne married Françoise de Chassaigne; the couple had six children, all but one of whom died in infancy. In 1568, after the death of his father, Montaigne retired from public life, took up residence at the family estate, and began to concentrate on his literary career. In 1580, his first collection of essays appeared. That same year, suffering from kidney stones, he traveled throughout Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Austria seeking a cure. In 1581, while still in Italy, Montaigne learned he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux, a position his father had once held. He returned to Bordeaux and served as its mayor until 1585. He spent his final years revising his essays and died at home on September 13, 1592.

Major Works

In 1569, Montaigne translated Raimond Sebond's Theologia naturalis and during that same period was involved in arranging for La Boétie's writings to be published. His first collection of Essays (Books I and II) did not appear until 1580, when he was 47 years old. In 1588, he published a revised edition that included a third volume. The Essays consists of 107 chapters of varying lengths—some are as short as a few paragraphs, while others are more than one hundred pages long—and encompasses a wide range of subjects. Montaigne covered everything from the most significant issues involving philosophy, theology, and law, to the most mundane discussions of his daily habits and dietary preferences. Montaigne's only major work after the Essays was the journal he kept during his travels in 1580-81. Although Montaigne had no intention of publishing the work, it was discovered in the late eighteenth century and published as Journal de voyage (1774; The Journal of Montaigne's Travels).

Critical Reception

Montaigne's work, successful in his own time, has continued to interest commentators for more than four centuries. In addition to concentrating on the ideas and opinions offered in Montaigne's writing, critics have long studied his work from a stylistic standpoint, considering him a pioneer of the essay form, specifically the genre of the personal essay. As Joseph Epstein expressed it, Montaigne “put the capital I, the first person, into literature, and while he was at it also invented the essay.” For Epstein, Montaigne was not just the first essayist, he was also the best and continues to remain so. The nature of Montaigne's self-representation within his essays has been studied by a number of critics, among them Hope H. Glidden, who maintains that Montaigne's strategy was to warn his readers “that the man and his words are not one … the face of Montaigne is laid bare but its very openness cannot be taken at face value.” Much of the scholarship on the Essays is devoted to the discovery and acknowledgement of the many ambiguities and apparent contradictions within the text. Earlier critics often considered such contradictions the work's major flaw or, alternately, considered them evidence of Montaigne's evolution as a thinker—the writer had simply changed his mind on various issues as he grew more sophisticated and more knowledgeable. Recently, however, scholars have begun to appreciate differences in Montaigne's position on various subjects and to consider them part of a deliberate textual strategy on the writer's part. Steven Rendall believes that current scholarship, rather than attempting to establish a new interpretation of Montaigne's work that would compete with earlier theories, should posit an interpretation that “attends to and exploits differences—frictions and discontinuities—within the text.” One such “difference” involves Montaigne's views on the public/private split. Jack I. Abecassis contends that in studying Montaigne's views on public necessity versus private liberty, it is necessary to accept as “possible, and indeed desirable, contradictory propositions and practices.” “The aim,” according to Abecassis, “is not to privilege one over the other (e.g. socio-economic determinism over creative freedom), but, on the contrary, to articulate the viability of their ironic coexistence.” Another area of significant critical discussion involves Montaigne's attitude toward women, which is explored by numerous critics, among them Robert D. Cottrell. On the one hand, Montaigne advised women to concentrate on beauty, grace, and charm, rather than intellectual pursuits for which he considered them poorly suited. At the same time, however, according to Cottrell, Montaigne seemed to situate his voice as a writer within a discourse he himself coded as feminine, that is, a discourse devoted to poetry, history, and moral philosophy. Eric MacPhail argues that Montaigne's ambivalent attitude towards the monarchy was echoed in his ideas on friendship, and it is through the process of writing “De l'amité,” that Montaigne was able to discover and formulate his ideas on political power. “In political terms, friendship offered Montaigne a dignified humanist alternative to the rebellion of civil war and the subservience of courtiership,” claims MacPhail. Lisa Neal has explored an apparent inconsistency in Montaigne's theory of language. The last words of a dying person were perceived by Montaigne as “transparent and transmissible,” according to Neal. She reports, however, that this “implies a view of language that seems incompatible with Montaigne's frequently expressed opinion that words are equivocal, ambiguous, and ever open to multiple interpretations.” Timothy Hampton, in his examination of “Des coches,” demonstrates Montaigne's ability to see both sides of the Spanish conquest of the New World and present them to his reader. According to Hampton, “Montaigne places the reader both in the position of the Spaniard and in the imaged position of the New World native, in the place of the one who knows that gunpowder is gunpowder and the one who thinks it is thunder.” Deborah N. Losse has also addressed Montaigne's essays on the New World, suggesting that the central project of his writing, self-discovery, may have precluded any real discovery of the nature and culture of the Indian “other.”