Birth and a Latin childhood
Born at the château de Montaigne in Périgord, he learned Latin as his first language from a German tutor.
Renaissance humanism · scepticism · 1533–1592
Michel de Montaigne
Paint not being, but passage.
Montaigne (Périgord) · Bordeaux · Rome
Biography
The thread of a life.
Michel de Montaigne was a magistrate, mayor of Bordeaux and country gentleman who, after retiring to his library in 1571, invented a new form of writing: the essay. Testing his judgment on books, customs, friendship, illness and death, he made himself the subject of his book and drew from ancient scepticism and moral philosophy a sustained inquiry into the limits of human knowledge.
Parlement and friendship
As a councillor in the Parlement of Bordeaux he befriended Étienne de La Boétie, who died in 1563.
Retirement to the library
Having sold his office, he withdrew to his estate and marked his retirement with a Latin inscription.
First edition and journey
The first two books of the Essays appeared in Bordeaux before his journey through Switzerland, Germany and Italy.
Mayor of Bordeaux
Elected while abroad and re-elected in 1583, he served two terms during the Wars of Religion.
Third book and last additions
The Paris edition of 1588 added Book III; he kept annotating his copy until his death in 1592.
Understanding a life in depth
01A Latin childhood and a magistrate’s career
Michel Eyquem was born on 28 February 1533 at the château de Montaigne in Périgord, into a wealthy family of Bordeaux merchants that had recently entered the nobility. His father Pierre Eyquem, later mayor of Bordeaux, had him taught Latin as his first language by a German tutor before sending him to the Collège de Guyenne. After legal studies he sat as a councillor, first at Périgueux and from 1557 in the Parlement of Bordeaux. There he formed his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 he described in a long letter and whose memory runs through the Essays. In 1565 he married Françoise de La Chassaigne; of their six daughters only Léonor survived childhood.
02Retirement and the first Essays
After his father’s death in 1568 Montaigne published his translation of Sebond’s Natural Theology, inherited the estate and its name, and in 1570 sold his office. A Latin inscription dated 1571 records his retirement to the library in the tower of his château, a room whose beams he later had covered with sentences from Scripture and ancient authors. In the same years he edited La Boétie’s works and received the collar of the Order of Saint Michael. Writing amid the Wars of Religion, he began around 1572 a series of short chapters on readings and examples, which slowly became a record of his own judgment. The first two books appeared in Bordeaux in 1580.
03Travel, the mayoralty and civil war
In June 1580 Montaigne set out on a journey of seventeen months through Switzerland, Germany and Italy, partly in search of relief from his kidney stones. In Rome the papal censors returned his Essays with remarks that did not amount to a condemnation, and he received Roman citizenship. At the baths near Lucca he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he held the office from 1581 to 1585, being re-elected in 1583. As a moderate Catholic trusted both by Henry of Navarre and by the royal court, he acted as a go-between in the conflicts with the League. The Paris edition of 1588 added a third book, and that summer supporters of the League briefly held him in the Bastille.
04Last additions and a divided legacy
In 1588 Montaigne met Marie de Gournay, who became his “adopted daughter” and later his editor. Until his death at the château on 13 September 1592 he filled the margins of a copy of the 1588 edition with additions; that volume is now known as the Bordeaux Copy. Gournay’s edition of 1595 rests on another revised copy, and the relation between the two texts is still discussed. Read by Charron, Pascal and Descartes, translated into English by John Florio in 1603 and echoed by Shakespeare, the Essays were placed on the Index by Rome in 1676. Interpreters still disagree whether he should be read as a sceptic, a fideist Catholic, a Stoic, an Epicurean or a free thinker, and whether his views changed over time.
The Essays gave European prose a new form and a model of candid self-examination. Pascal argued with them, Descartes reworked their doubt, Shakespeare drew on them, Bacon adopted their name, and Rousseau, Emerson and Nietzsche admired them. Debate continues over his scepticism, his religion, his politics of moderation and his judgments on women and on the peoples of the Americas.
Sources & reference points