Michel de Montaigne
Updated: Sep 30
At his estate in Périgord, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne worked in a tower library beneath ceiling beams painted with Greek and Latin maxims. The room offered solitude, but the book he wrote there kept returning to life beyond it: law courts, religious violence, friendship, family, travel, and illness. In the Essais, he made his own shifting judgments available for inspection. He wanted to learn how a person thinks when experience does not fit an inherited rule.
Montaigne was born at the family estate on February 28, 1533, and died there on September 13, 1592. His family had prospered in commerce in Bordeaux and acquired noble standing. His father, Pierre Eyquem, arranged an unusual education for him: by Montaigne’s account, a German tutor and members of the household spoke to the child in Latin, so that he learned it as a living language. At six he went to the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, where classical learning became part of his intellectual life. Where, or even whether, he later studied law formally remains uncertain. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Life”
He entered judicial service at the Cour des Aides in Périgueux and then at the Bordeaux parlement, a high court of appeal. There he met the magistrate and writer Étienne de La Boétie. Their friendship was brief: La Boétie died in 1563. Montaigne later gave that loss a place in “Of Friendship,” an essay that treats the bond between them as particular and irreplaceable. He married Françoise de la Chassaigne in 1565. Of their six children, only their daughter Léonor survived infancy. At his father’s request, Montaigne also translated Raymond Sebond’s Natural Theology into French; it appeared in 1569 and later became the occasion for his long “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Life” · University of Tours, Montaigne’s translation of Sebond
Montaigne resigned his judicial office in 1570. An inscription in his tower, dated February 28, 1571, his thirty-eighth birthday, marked his withdrawal from court work and his hope for freedom and leisure. He began writing the Essais around 1572. The date places the project in a France already divided by the Wars of Religion; that year brought the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres. He managed the estate and continued to cultivate ties at court. The tower gave him a place to think while he remained engaged with the world he was trying to understand. University of Tours, tower inscription · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Life”
Books I and II of the Essais appeared in Bordeaux in 1580. A Paris edition in 1588 added Book III and advertised six hundred additions to the first two books. The title comes from a verb meaning to try or test. Montaigne put his judgment to work on questions as large as religious belief and as close at hand as memory, sleep, eating, and bodily pain. He drew on ancient authors, historical anecdotes, other people’s testimony, and the evidence of his own reactions. The self became more prominent as he revised: some earlier chapters began with examples from history and acquired fuller accounts of Montaigne’s own experience later. Through this practice he helped establish the personal essay as a literary form, building on an older tradition of moral reflection. Cambridge University Library, editions of the Essais · Stanford Humanities Center, “Putting Experience First”
That method made the book unusually open to change. In “Of Repentance,” Montaigne observes a person in motion rather than presenting a settled portrait. In “Of Experience,” he moves among law, medical authority, his kidney stones, and his habits at the table. These movements are part of his argument: a general claim has to answer to what happens in a particular life. His writing can be digressive or contradictory because he allows a later judgment to complicate an earlier one. “Of Repentance” · Stanford Humanities Center, “Putting Experience First”
His best-known question, Que sais-je?, means “What do I know?” Around 1576 he had it placed on a personal medal alongside a Greek expression for withholding assent. In the long “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” arguments drawn from ancient skepticism unsettle human claims to secure knowledge, especially claims that reason can measure everything from a position above the world. Montaigne did not suspend every judgment. He weighed competing accounts, acknowledged how easily his own judgment could err, and still made choices in practical and moral life. Scholars continue to disagree about how closely his thought belongs to any one ancient skeptical school. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Montaigne’s Scepticism” · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Skepticism”
Custom was one of the forces he wanted to examine. What people inherit can come to seem natural simply because it is familiar. In “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne uses reports about Indigenous peoples of Brazil and his account of speaking with visitors to France to turn European judgments back upon Europe. He asks readers to consider why Christians who torture living people feel entitled to condemn distant practices as uniquely barbarous. The comparison calls for moral judgment rather than surrendering it: suffering, cruelty, and inequality remain matters to assess. His descriptions also depend on the reports and classical ideals available to a sixteenth-century European writer, limits that a reader should keep in view. “Of Cannibals” · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Montaigne and Relativism”
Montaigne remained a Catholic and served a monarchy at war, even as he criticized cruelty and fanaticism. He maintained relationships across confessional divisions and sometimes acted between the royal court and Henry of Navarre, the Protestant leader who later became Henry IV. His 1588 effort to negotiate peace did not succeed; moderation was a problem of action as well as a theme in his writing. In 1580 and 1581 he traveled through parts of France, Switzerland, the German lands, Austria, and Italy. He sought relief from painful kidney stones at spas and recorded the customs and religious practices he encountered. Historian Philippe Desan has also argued that the journey served political ambitions, including a hoped-for appointment in Rome. Montaigne chronology · University of Chicago on Philippe Desan’s research
While in Italy, Montaigne learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He served two terms, from 1581 to 1585, during continuing religious conflict. When plague reached Bordeaux near the end of his second term, he remained outside the city and drew criticism. A surviving letter from July 31, 1585, shows him nearby, offering to enter if city officials required his presence.
His years as mayor complicate any picture of the Essais as the work of a man who had permanently left public affairs. He wrote as someone who had to navigate competing loyalties and the consequences of judgment in action. University of Tours, letter to the Bordeaux jurats · University of Chicago on Montaigne’s political life
Montaigne kept revising after the 1588 edition. A surviving printed copy, known as the Bordeaux Copy, bears his handwritten corrections, deletions, and long additions. After his death, Marie de Gournay, a writer he called his fille d’alliance, or chosen daughter, prepared the first posthumous edition in 1595 and continued her editorial work. She used an annotated exemplar distinct from the surviving Bordeaux Copy. The differences between the two still raise questions for editors about how to present a book its author never treated as finished. University of Tours, the Bordeaux Copy · University of Tours, the posthumous editions
Later readers found different things in Montaigne. John Florio’s 1603 English translation helped bring the Essais to England; Gonzalo’s imagined commonwealth in Shakespeare’s The Tempest draws closely on “Of Cannibals.” Pascal took seriously the unsettling force of Montaigne’s skepticism while pursuing a religious answer, and Descartes followed a different path in examining what judgment could establish.
Emerson wrote “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic”, and Nietzsche admired Montaigne’s candor and enjoyment of life. The enduring achievement is visible in the marked pages of the Bordeaux Copy: Montaigne made reconsideration itself part of the work, showing what a mind can learn by returning to its own words. Folger Shakespeare Library, The Tempest and Montaigne · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Legacy”