As for scholarship on du Bellay, Pierre Villey’s Les sources italiennes de la “Deffense et illustration de la langue françoise” de Joachim du Bellay (The Italian sources of Joachim du Bellay’s “Defense and Illustration of the French Language”) (Paris: Champion, 1908) remains an exceptionally valuable source on du Bellay’s poetic treatise, and it is very instructive on the importance of the Italian Renaissance in sixteenth-century France. A scholarly work that initiated a series of reflections on the originality as well as the major importance of the Deffence in how French Renaissance writers understood their historical role is Margaret W. Ferguson, “The Exile’s Defense: Du Bellay’s La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 93, no. 2 (1978): 275–89; Ferguson followed up on this with her book Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). Around this time, Thomas M. Greene discussed the place of the Deffence in Renaissance poetic theory: The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). Ignacio Navarrete, “Strategies of Appropriation in Speroni and Du Bellay,” Comparative Literature 41 (1989): 141–54, is a superb demonstration of what du Bellay does with Speroni’s Dialogo delle lengue. In my own recent The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), I consider the Deffence in close connection with du Bellay’s poetry as part of an examination of how English and French national literatures established themselves.
Montaigne
Philosophy before Philosophy
TIMOTHY HAMPTON
“This book is not for you,” says Montaigne to his readers at the outset of his Essays. “It was written for my family and friends. I am not trying to become famous or admired. … Don’t waste your time on such a vain and frivolous subject as this.” Montaigne’s warning that his book is not good for very much is the first of many such pronouncements in the history of French literature, from André Gide’s exhortation in The Fruits of the Earth to “throw my book away,” to Rimbaud’s rejection of poetry for life as a trader in East Africa. Yet Montaigne’s denigration of his book is not a rejection of literature. It betrays his uncertainty about presenting a work that is so closely allied with a single life. Paradoxically, however, the originality of the book derives precisely from the way in which the author places his “vain and frivolous” concerns at the center of human experience. His book is useful because, like its author, it makes no claims to be exceptional.
Montaigne’s Essays are a unique instance in European literature of a work of philosophy that makes no claim to truth, to systematic analysis, to the development of concepts, or to the formulation of conclusions. The book touches on issues of crucial importance to the nature of the self, the limits of knowledge, the ethics of personal and political engagement, and the diversity of customs and cultures. Yet whatever authority it enjoys derives from its depiction of the modest, curious, personality of its author. It stands as the last and perhaps greatest philosophical text of the premodern world, offering a meditation steeped in history and in the observation of everyday life. It precedes the invention of modern philosophy by René Descartes in the 1640s, with all of the developments that flow from the onset of the Cartesian method. Yet at the same time, precisely because of its rootedness in the Renaissance, Montaigne’s work grows in relevance and importance in the postmodern culture that has emerged since the late twentieth century. Following the work of such figures as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, the colors of the Cartesian tradition have begun to fade, and Montaigne grows in brightness. Montaigne is deeply rooted in the classical culture of the early modern era, yet, precisely because of his passion for exploring the limits of that culture, he emerges as a surprisingly modern—even postmodern—author.
We can best locate Montaigne’s work at the intersection of a great intellectual movement and a great political crisis. The intellectual movement is humanism, which was imported from Italy and came to prominence across northern Europe in the early sixteenth century. Steeped in the study of rhetoric and history, obsessed with classical antiquity, humanist culture is devoted to ideals of heroism: military, moral, and intellectual. It blends ideals of virtue and political action with the study of classical languages and training for public service. However the great excitement that accompanied the northward movement of humanism—and which we can read in the generation of Rabelais and Erasmus, fifty years earlier—had begun to wane by the time of Montaigne. The delighted rediscovery of classical authors had given way to an overload of knowledge, which led to a culture of the digest, of the excerpt, and of empty displays of learning for its own sake. Moreover, the political climate had changed. A newly militant Catholic Church, coming off of the reforms of the Council of Trent, was increasingly intolerant of the humanist interest in classical pagan culture, and the Protestantism that had overtaken much of northern Europe had little use for learning that was not theological.
No less important for the Essays than the diminished vitality of humanist intellectual life were the terrible wars between Protestants and Catholics that tore France to pieces for more than three decades, between 1560 and the mid-1590s. The Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century are the greatest political crisis in French history before the French Revolution. They decimated the aristocracy, depriving the nation of leaders, and visited unspeakable horrors on the general population. Treaties, truces, and political councils were powerless to slow the bloodshed, as France became the battleground between an international Protestant movement supported by England and the forces of Catholic reaction, backed by Spain. Theological disagreement became the pretext for aristocratic bloodletting, as powerful provincial families developed their own militias. The culmination was the famous Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, in which the Catholic monarchy countenanced the targeted murder of Protestant leaders in Paris, touching off weeks of violence all across France. This political crisis was intimately linked to the intellectual crisis of humanism, mentioned above. For the failure of humanist moderates to counter political fanaticism was an index of the intellectual crisis of the late sixteenth century in France. It provides the backdrop to Montaigne’s skeptical attitude toward his own culture.
Like his contemporaries Shakespeare and Cervantes, Montaigne is a transitional figure, looking back ironically and with some melancholy on the classical culture of the Renaissance, even as he shapes the emergence of modern literature and thought. He works from inside the heroic culture of humanism while exposing its limitations. Just as Don Quixote undermines heroic ideals through his adoration of knights of chivalry, and just as Hamlet compares his own hesitations to the decisiveness of classical heroes, so Montaigne is steeped in the ideals of humanism, even as his own exploration of his limitations casts an ironic glance on the heroic figures and forms that shape him. His work gives the first voice to the common experience of a world in which classical heroes and values have lost their unimpeachable authority. Montaigne is often pigeonholed by intellectual history as a “skeptic.” But he is much more than that. He is the first of the moderns. He invents a literary personality that discovers value and dignity in its own capacity to doubt himself. This makes him the most accessible and relevant of early French writers.
In the letter to the reader that opens his book, Montaigne describes the Essays as a self-portrait. If he lived in the New World, he says, where people go without clothes, “I can assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.” The book is not an autobiography in the conventional sense of the word. There is no chronology, and very little happens. It consists of 107 chapters on diverse topics, divided into three books. Some of the chapters bear titles suggesting conventional moral themes, such as the essay “Of Moderation.” Others are startlingly new, such as “Of Cannibals,” which deals with the recent encounters between French settlers and the cultures of Brazil. Still others seem deliberately trivial, such as the very brief
essay on thumbs. Some essays barely treat of the topic announced in the title, and certain themes unexpectedly pop up in dramatically different contexts across the book. However, the variety in subject, tone, and size of the different essays (from one page to more than two hundred) is precisely the point. For these pieces give us a picture of Montaigne’s response to a whole range of themes and situations. The variety of topics makes the Essays not merely a book about philosophy or politics or history, but a book about Montaigne. And because he treats so many different topics, the literary creation “Montaigne” who binds the “vain and frivolous” book together emerges as a figure who is both appealingly modest and endlessly fascinating.
Montaigne began to write in response to two deaths. The first was the death of his father, Pierre Eyquem, in 1568. Pierre had been a devoted admirer of Renaissance humanism, and, in particular, of Erasmus of Rotterdam. He took pains to provide Montaigne with a splendid humanist education. The young boy was taught Latin even before he learned French, thus making him a native speaker of the language of the classics—a kind of “classical Roman” dropped down in the middle of early modern France. His first love, he tells us, was poetry (Virgil, Horace, and especially Ovid). But he was deeply steeped in moral philosophy (Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, whom he read in a French translation, knowing no Greek) and in classical history (Livy and Polybius). Among his own contemporaries, he read widely in history in French, Italian, and Latin—Guicciardini’s History of Italy, Commynes’s histories of France, accounts of travel and exploration such as Jean de Léry’s 1578 History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, the political thought of Bodin and Machiavelli, the poetry of Petrarch, du Bellay, and Ronsard. He rarely quotes the Bible or the Church Fathers, drawing instead from Roman and Greek civilization. Aristotle interests him little, and his reading of Plato is biographical rather than philosophical—he is interested in the personality and habits of Socrates. This education destined him, as a member of a recently ennobled family, for a life of public service. The ideals of heroism, of military virtue, and of the exercise of rhetoric in the political world were the cornerstones of his education. The humanist culture that gained popularity among the Renaissance elite aimed to turn the notoriously illiterate and rough French nobility into a cadre of sophisticated and learned men of letters, equipped to serve the monarchy in a newly unified country with imperial ambitions. This was the education that Rabelais had imagined in the 1530s, in Pantagruel and Gargantua, and the education enjoyed by Ronsard and du Bellay, the poets who reinvented French letters at midcentury. However Montaigne’s education left him with both a strong sense of obligation to “the best father who ever was,” and a clear sense of inadequacy at his own modest success, lack of ambition, and generally lazy nature. His acceptance of these diverse features of his personality is one of his most affecting features.
Some years later, after Montaigne had begun a somewhat indifferent career as a jurist, his father asked him to translate into French a treatise on natural religion by the Spanish philosopher Raymond Sebondus. Montaigne’s longest essay, “The Apology for Raymond Sebond,” comes out of this undertaking. It reflects his engagement with the skeptical tradition that informs many of the essays. It displays his interest in the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus—recently coming back into vogue—for whom the goal of philosophy was to reach a state of absolute uncertainty, or atarxia. It is in the “Apology” that Montaigne despairs of the possibility of humans knowing anything. Instead of promoting an ideal of mastering many fields of knowledge—yet another ideal of humanism—Montaigne notes that knowledge and human perception are inevitably marked by error and illusion. In response to this situation, he offers the question that remains his most famous line, “What do I know?” (Que sçay-je?) This question, which is often taken by commentators as an expression of confusion or extreme doubt, is, in fact, a call to clear the decks of grandiose claims to truth, in favor of a modest but endless program of self-exploration and personal growth.
The second death that shaped Montaigne was the death of his best friend, Etienne de La Boétie, a brilliant humanist writer whom he met at the parliament in Toulouse in 1557. A political philosopher and poet in both French and Latin, La Boétie was from Sarlat, not far from Montaigne’s own ancestral home, in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. Given the generally illiterate and violent tenor of sixteenth-century life in France, the companionship of a fellow reader and thinker from his own region must have been an exceptional source of pleasure for Montaigne. Moreover, it placed Montaigne and his friend in a long literary tradition of male friendship, going back to Seneca’s friendship with Lucilius, something that must have added delight to Montaigne’s cultivation of their relationship. When La Boétie died suddenly, at the age of thirty-three, Montaigne was devastated. La Boétie had been his soulmate. As he notes movingly in the essay “Of Friendship,” if anyone asked why he loved La Boétie, he would reply simply, “because it was he, because it was I.” Moreover, to add insult to personal loss (and bind personal experience to political crisis) La Boétie’s early philosophical exercise, Of Voluntary Servitude, in which he meditates on the curious fact that the masses of people allow themselves to be ruled by a single monarch, was taken up and published by Protestant militants as a justification for regicide. Demoralized and frustrated, Montaigne abandoned his legal career and, in February 1571, at the height of the Wars of Religion, inscribed on the wall of his study a Latin phrase announcing that he was retiring from court and public activities to dedicate his life “in calm and freedom from all cares” to preparation for death. The posture of idleness and retirement informs the freedom of reflection that is at the heart of the Essays. Yet Montaigne did not “retire” in any monastic sense; he simply turned his back on the pursuit of a career involving power and prestige. He dedicated himself to writing and published a first edition of the Essays in 1580. Then he made a journey to Rome, chronicling his impressions in a Travel Journal (discovered in the eighteenth century) that offers important information about Italian customs during the late Renaissance and recounts his efforts to keep the Essays off of the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books. Over time, Montaigne’s disinclination for public life became a strength. He served two terms as the mayor of Bordeaux at a time of extreme tension between Protestants and Catholics. And his eminence as a writer so enhanced his reputation as an honest political broker that he was able to serve as a negotiator and adviser for both Catholics and Protestants (including Henri of Navarre, the future King Henri IV) in the religious wars. Thus the Essays are both personal and deeply public, since they register the encounter between a specific personality and the customs, events, and personalities that make up his political and cultural world.
Central to any reading of Montaigne’s book should be an appreciation for the form of the “essay”—that new literary genre that he seems to have invented. The French word essayer means “to try out,” or “to test.” It connotes both the act of tasting and the practice of weighing things (as in our English notion of an “assayer,” who weighs precious metals). Thus an essay is manifestly not a treatise or a systematic exposition of a philosophical problem. It draws in many ways on the tradition of the familiar letter, which Montaigne knew from the writings of Cicero, Seneca, and Erasmus. Indeed, Montaigne points out at one point that, had La Boétie not died, he would have put his energy into an exchange of letters. Thus, in a sense, the Essays are a set of letters with no correspondent.
The essay is a mongrel literary form, closely allied with commentary or gloss. Its point of departure is not subjective inspiration or transcendent experience, but the detritus of culture—well-worn topics, clichés, old ideas that it seeks to examine anew. Montaigne’s essays are thus best understood as exercises in combining bits of cultural information, rather than as the confessions of a fixed interior “self” desperate for expression. Montaigne works by the logic of juxtaposition; he piles up quotations from classical writers, usually cited in the original Latin, anecdotes f
rom his wide reading in ancient and modern history, pithy moral sayings (often used ironically), and his observations about both the material he has gathered and about his own habits and moods. These essays have no “thesis,” and it is often difficult to discern a unifying thread or idea. Instead, we are treated to the spectacle of the essayist “trying out” (essaying, testing) his own opinions and thoughts against the events around him and the received ideas of his culture. The purpose is to test the limits of both—to see how his own opinions compare to what history and society teaches us, and to pass judgment on both himself and the world around him.
This means that the essay might be thought of as a kind of space, inside which the humanist culture that Montaigne inherited is broken up and recombined. Thus, for example, in the delightful essay “Of Idleness,” one of the briefest and earliest of his compositions, Montaigne considers the notion that a retirement from active life should lead to a quiet mind. His own experience, he points out, has been precisely the opposite; the less he has to do, the more his mind races from topic to topic. He evokes a series of metaphors about fertility and excess and weaves them around a set of Latin phrases from classical literature—Horace, Lucan, Martial—that all mention the problem of dispersal and of excessive busyness. Read in their contexts, these quotations have nothing to do with each other: one is from a scene of war in epic, another from a poem about what makes good poetry, a third from a satirical epigram. Yet when they are placed together in the space of Montaigne’s page, they suddenly begin to speak to each other. They become a set of surfaces against which he bounces his own ideas. Through a technique that prefigures the collage and paste-up poetics of the twentieth century, new meaning is created, and old ideas take on new form.
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