Montaigne: Selected Essays

The Introduction is divided into eight sections.

The first section, “Two Thinkers for Our Time,” points out how modern Montaigne’s ideas are, in regard to their open-mindedness and humanism.

The second section, “Montaigne and His Time,” is a brief bio of Montaigne. He is born in 1533 at the chateau of a well-off Catholic family near Bordeaux in southwest France. It is a time of religious strife; his mother is Jewish, and though he is not close to her, the family is religiously tolerant, and this affects his outlook. His father’s love of the classics and egalitarian views inspire Montaigne. From birth, he is taught Latin, which helps him later at school and at law college. He becomes a judge and councillor, where he masters the art of debating both sides of an issue. He marries at 30, but his deepest relationship is with a fellow magistrate, Étienne de la Boétie, whose style of thought greatly affects Montaigne.

At his father’s insistence, Montaigne translates and publishes Raymond Sebond’s The Book of Creatures, which takes the radical position that Christian truths are revealed in nature better than in scripture. Two of Montaigne’s favorite people, his father and La Boétie, die during the 1560s. In 1571, he retires from the tax court to focus on essays, interrupted now and then by political duties, including the mayoralty of Bordeaux and several diplomatic missions to mediate religious disputes. The first version of his essays is published in 1580. He befriends and counsels Henry of Navarre, who later becomes King of France. Montaigne’s last great friend, Marie de Gournay, becomes the editor of the posthumous edition of his essays. Montaigne dies in 1592.

The third section, “Montaigne the Essayist,” describes Montaigne’s thought processes. His favorite ideas seem to come out of nowhere. He refers constantly to the classic writings of ancient Greece and Rome, but he does not simply parrot them: his beliefs are based on self-analysis, and many received truths are merely jumping-off places for further thought. The translators note four recurring themes: the lessons of Nature, the limits of reason, the effect of language, and the search for one’s true self.

The fourth section is “Étienne de la Boétie and His Time.” Like Montaigne, La Boétie is a lawyer, translator, and humanist; his public service involves efforts to increase freedom of worship. After his sudden death from illness in 1563, many of his works are published by Montaigne.

The fifth section, “Montaigne and La Boétie,” explains how Montaigne’s ideas are deeply affected by La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which addresses the possibility of rejecting arbitrary authority. Montaigne deeply misses La Boétie’s conversation and friendship, and his own essays are an attempt, of sorts, at continuing that relationship.

The sixth section, “Montaigne, La Boétie, and the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” points out that the essay is originally written as a college exercise, that it is later appropriated by rebels as a call to arms, that La Boétie is in fact much more conservative than his essay implies, and that Montaigne must keep the essay at arm’s length for political reasons.

The seventh section, “La Boétie and the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” outlines the main argument of La Boétie’s essay: that a tyrant rules by the consent of an intimidated citizenry, and that his rule will end if the subjects withdraw their consent. The essay becomes well known and influences thought leaders from French revolutionaries to Thoreau, Emerson, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.

The eighth section, “Saying No to a Friend,” explains how friendship, and its lack thereof, in a tyrannical government, are central to the thesis of “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” and how La Boétie’s early death takes from Montaigne a friendship he regards as sacred. True friends are honest, even if that is painful, and this requires being true to oneself; without honesty, it is hard to say no to anyone, friend or tyrant.

Montaigne tells the reader that “[t]his is an honest book” that reveals the author as he is, that “I am myself the subject of my book,” and that it is probably too “frivolous and futile a topic” to bother with (3).

When we offend, says Montaigne, one way to “soften the hearts” of our adversary is “submission”; an opposite way that also works is to be brave and steadfast. Montaigne recalls several conquerors who were moved to leniency by the valor of their vanquished opponents. He notes that those who are “easygoing, good-natured, and softhearted” are more likely to respond to pleas for mercy, while “a strong, unswerving soul that holds a manly, tenacious vigor” (5) may show leniency to those who stand up to him honorably. Montaigne then cites several examples where valor earned no pity or relief for the losers: “Certainly man is a remarkably vain, variable, and elusive subject” (6).

Just as a plot of land, left to itself, sprouts a wild assortment of weeds, so a mind without guidance will “plunge every which way, wildly, into the vacant field of the imagination” (10). Similarly, a soul with no purpose will lose its way. Montaigne learns this when he retires to a life of contemplation and writing, only to find that his mind “gives rise to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters inside [him], one after the other, with no order or purpose” that he journals them “in the hope that with passing time [he] can make [his] mind feel shame for itself” (10).

Happiness seems to be every philosophy’s goal: “Even in virtue, no matter what they say, the ultimate goal we aim at is pleasure” (11). Virtue provides more happiness than power, and “one of virtue’s principal blessings is disdain for death” (12), as this frees us from anxiety and lets us enjoy life more fully.

Most people fear death and try to find ways to avoid thinking about it. We tell ourselves we will live a long time, but Montaigne lists many examples of sudden death among prominent and successful men, often by mere accident. His own brother “got hit by a ball just above the right ear, with no sign of a bruise or wound, while playing tennis” and “five or six hours later he died of apoplexy caused by the blow” (15).

Montaigne suggests, instead, that we focus on death and “rid it of its strangeness, get to know it, become accustomed to it” (17). Montaigne says goodbye ahead of time to the people and things in his life; meanwhile, he lives fully and expects to die while hard at work: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages” (19).

If death is quick, “we have no time to fear it” (21); if it comes slowly, the pain reduces our desire for life. This tempers our fear of death: “I had a much greater horror of illness when I was healthy than I did when I fell ill […] I hope it will turn out to be the same with death” (21). Harder to confront than our end is the loss of our youth, “a harder death than the complete death of a life that languishes, or the death of old age” (21).

When we have no fear of death, we are freed from many petty worries. Montaigne asks, “Is it right to fear something so brief for so long?” (23) Besides, “[h]ow absurd to grieve over passing from grief into freedom from it!” (22). If you have lived fully, you can push back as from a banquet, and if you have somehow missed out, why struggle to hold onto something that was of no use to you? Nature would tell us that “if you have lived one day, you have seen it all” (24).

Death will be just as long for the short-lived as for the long-lived, and death comes to everything, thus equalizing us all. Nature says, “If you did not have death, you would curse me incessantly for depriving you of it” (27). Montaigne suggests that “what frightens us more than death itself are those appalling visages and trappings that we surround it with” (27).

The imagination, claims Montaigne, is so powerful that it can cause people to become sick, to change appearance, to see things that aren’t there, and sometimes to die. He laments that “[t]he sight of others’ distress physically distresses me […] I catch the disease I am studying and settle it within me” (29).

One person he knows develops a horror of failure and thus fails continuously: “He found some relief for this fantasy through another fantasy: by owning up to this weakness himself and confessing to it beforehand, he relieved the tension in his mind” (31) and is cured.

First-night jitters in sex can lead to disaster: “having begun badly, this misadventure makes a man feverish and embarrassed, and endures into later occasions” (33). A count who fears witchcraft against him on his wedding night asks for help from Montaigne, who invents an elaborate ritual that he insists the count must perform; the count’s mind thus relieved, all goes well. 

Montaigne points out that many parts of the body also fail us at inconvenient moments: “We do not command our hair to stand on end or our skin to tingle with desire or fear. Our hand often goes where we do not send it. Our tongue is paralyzed, our voice catches—each at its own time” (34). Even the need to fart can happen at inopportune moments. Worst of all is the will, which often disobeys reason and good sense. As in a court of law, we sometimes accuse one part of ourselves of misdeeds that are in fact urged on by other parts.

Montaigne posits that mere suggestion can cure people of disease: “Why do doctors work on their patient’s credence beforehand, with so many false promises of a cure, if not so the imagination’s power may replace their nostrums?” (35). Montaigne cites people who can harm or kill with a look, and a cat that caused a bird to die merely by staring at it.

Whether true or false, these stories Montaigne finds interesting and useful, and he relays them as he hears them: “I have refrained from daring to alter even the slightest, most trivial incidents” (37).