He may have been diminutive, but he tells us that he had a strong, solid build, and that he conducted himself with flair, often strolling with a stick on which he would lean “in an affected manner.” In later life, he took up his father’s practice of dressing in austere black and white, but as a young man he dressed with stylish ease according to the fashion of the day, with “a cloak worn like a scarf, the hood over one shoulder, a neglected stocking.”
The most vivid picture of the young Montaigne comes from a poem addressed to him by his slightly older friend Étienne de La Boétie. It shows both what was troubling about Montaigne and what made him attractive. La Boétie thought him brilliant and full of promise, but in danger of wasting his talents. He needed guidance from some calmer, wiser mentor—a role in which La Boétie cast himself—but he had a stubborn tendency to reject this guidance when it was offered. He was too susceptible to pretty young women, and too pleased with himself. “My house supplies ample riches, my age ample powers,” La Boétie has Montaigne say complacently in the poem. “And indeed a sweet girl is smiling at me.” La Boétie compares him to a beautiful Alcibiades, blessed by fortune, or a Hercules, capable of heroic things but hesitating too long at the moral crossroads. His greatest charms were also his greatest faults.
By the time this poem was written, Montaigne had already traveled a long way from his schoolboy days; he had entered upon his career in the Bordeaux parlement. Having disappeared from biographical view for some years after finishing his studies at the Collège, he reappeared in the city as a young magistrate.
To embark on such a course, he must have studied law somewhere. He is unlikely to have done this in Bordeaux; more likely cities are Paris and Toulouse. Perhaps he spent time in both. Remarks in the Essays show that he knew Toulouse well, and he also had a lot to say about Paris. He tells us that the city had his heart since childhood—which could mean any stage of his youth, up to around twenty-five. “I love her tenderly,” he says, “even to her warts and her spots.” Paris was the only place where he didn’t mind feeling like a Frenchman rather than a proudly local Gascon. It was a great city in every way: “great in population, great in the felicity of her situation, but above all great and incomparable in variety and diversity of the good things of life.”
Wherever Montaigne acquired his training, it fulfilled its function: it propelled him into the legal and political career that may have been envisaged for him from the start. It then kept him there for thirteen years. This period usually shrinks small in biographies, since it is patchily documented, but they were important years indeed, running from just before Montaigne’s twenty-fourth birthday to just after his thirty-seventh. When he retired to his country life, growing wine and writing in his tower, he had already accumulated a wealth of experience in public service, and this was still fresh in his mind in the early essays. By the time he came to the later ones, even tougher responsibilities had taken over.
Montaigne’s first post was not in Bordeaux, but in another nearby town, Périgueux, northeast of the family estate. Its court had only recently been founded, in 1554, and would almost immediately be abolished, in 1557. The main purpose of it had been to raise money, since public offices were always sold for cash. The abolition ensued because the more powerful Bordeaux parlement objected to Périgueux’s existence, and even more strenuously to the fact that, for some reason, officials there received a higher salary than they did.
Montaigne went to Périgueux in late 1556, and the court survived just long enough to start his career. As things turned out, it even put him on a fast track into Bordeaux politics, for when Périgueux closed many officials were transferred there. Montaigne was among them: his name appears on the list. They were not exactly welcomed, but Bordeaux’s magistrates had no choice in the matter. They made up for it by making life as uncomfortable for the Périgueux men as possible, allotting them a cramped working space and depriving them of the service of court ushers. The resentment is understandable: the Périgueux men were still receiving their higher salaries. These were helpfully cut in August 1561, which in turn made the Périgueux contingent unhappy. Although he was still junior, at twenty-eight, Montaigne was chosen to present their appeal to the court. His speech, reported in the Bordeaux records, marks his first appearance there. No doubt he used his newly honed public speaking tricks—all spontaneity and unrehearsed charm—but it did not work. The parlement ruled against the protesters, and their salaries went down after all.
Despite the unharmonious office politics, life in the Bordeaux parlement must have been more interesting than in Périgueux. It was one of eight key city parlements in France, and, even with its privileges still only partially restored, Bordeaux was among the most powerful. It had responsibility for most local laws and civic administration, and could reject royal edicts or present formal remonstrances to the king whenever he issued a law they did not like—as happened often in these troubled times.
At first, Montaigne’s daily life involved the law more than politics. He worked primarily for the Chambre des Enquêtes, or court of inquiry, where his task was to assess civil cases too complex to be resolved immediately by the judges of the main court, the Grand’chambre. He would study the details, summarize them, and hand his written interpretation to the councillors. It was not up to him to pass judgment, only to sum things up intelligently and lucidly, and capture each party’s point of view. Perhaps this was where he first developed his feeling for the multiplicity of perspectives on every human situation, a feeling that runs like an artery through the Essays.
Thinking of his job in these terms makes sixteenth-century law sound an engrossing pursuit, but it was hampered by extreme pedantry. All legal arguments had to be based on written authorities, and fitted into predefined categories. The facts of each case were often secondary to codes, statutes, documented customs, jurisprudential writings, and above all commentaries and glosses—volumes and volumes of them. Even simple cases required the study of seemingly infinite verbiage, usually by some long-suffering junior such as Montaigne.
It was the commentaries Montaigne hated most, as he did secondary literature of any kind:
It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.
Rabelais had satirized the mountain of documents that piled up around every case: his character Judge Bridlegoose spent hours reading and pondering before making his final decisions by tossing dice, a method he found as reliable as any other. Many authors also attacked the widespread corruption among lawyers. In general, justice was recognized as being so unjust that, as Montaigne complained, ordinary people avoided it rather than seeking it out. He cited a local incident in which a group of peasants found a man lying stabbed and bleeding on a path. He begged them to give him water and help him to his feet, but they ran off, not daring to touch him in case they were held responsible for the attack. Montaigne had the job of talking to them after they were tracked down. “What could I say to them?” he wrote. They were right to be afraid. In another case he mentions, a gang of killers confessed to a murder for which someone had already been tried and was about to be executed. Surely this ought to mean a stay of execution? No, decided the court: that would set a dangerous precedent for overturning judgments.
Montaigne was not the only one to call for legal reform in the sixteenth century. Many of his criticisms echoed those being put forward at the same time by France’s enlightened chancellor, Michel de L’Hôpital, in a campaign which resulted in real improvements. Some of Montaigne’s other arguments were more original and far-reaching. For him, the greatest problem with the law was that it did not take account of a fundamental fact about the human condition: people are fallible. A final verdict was always expected, yet by definition it was often impossible to reach one that had any certainty. Evidence was often faulty or inadequate, and, to complicate matters, judges made personal mistak
es. No judge could honestly think all his decisions perfect: they followed inclinations more than evidence, and it often made a difference how well they had digested their lunch. This was natural and thus unavoidable, but at least a wise judge could become conscious of his fallibility and take it into account. He could learn to slow down: to treat his initial responses with caution and think things through more carefully. The one good thing about the law was that it made human failings so obvious: a good philosophical lesson.
If lawyers were error-prone, so too were the laws they made, since they were human products. Again, that was a fact that could only be acknowledged and accommodated rather than changed. This sideways step into self-doubt, self-awareness, and acknowledgement of imperfection became a distinctive mark of Montaigne’s thought on all subjects, not just the law. It does not seem a great stretch to trace its initial spark to those early years of experience in Bordeaux.
When not in court, Montaigne’s job involved another field of activity calculated to bring home to anyone how limited and unreliable human affairs are: politics. He was often sent on errands to other cities, including several to Paris, a week or so’s journey away, where he had to liaise with the Paris parlement and sometimes with the royal court. The latter, in particular, was an education in human nature.
The first court Montaigne got to know was that of Henri II. He must have met the king in person, for he complained that Henri “could never call by his right name a gentleman from this part of Gascony”—presumably himself, this being a time when he still went under the regional name of Eyquem. Henri II was nothing like his brilliant father François I, from whom he had inherited the throne in 1547. He lacked François’s political insight and relied heavily on advisers, including an aging mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and a powerful wife, Catherine de’ Medici. Henri II’s weakness was partly to blame for France’s later problems, as rival factions sensed an opportunity and began a power struggle that would dominate the country for decades. The competition centered on three families: the Guises, the Montmorencys, and the Bourbons. Their private ambitions mixed poisonously with religious tensions already building up in France, as in much of Europe.
In matters of religion, Henri II was more repressive than François, who had cracked down on heresy only after an aggressive Protestant propaganda campaign in 1534. The French Reformist leader John Calvin fled to Geneva and made it a sort of revolutionary headquarters in exile. It was Calvinism, rather than the milder-mannered Lutheranism of the early Reformation, that now became the main form of Protestantism in France. It represented a real threat to royal and Church authority.
Calvinism is a minority religion today, but its ideology remains impressively powerful. It takes as its starting point a principle known as “total depravity,” which asserts that humans have no virtues of their own and are dependent on God’s grace for everything, including their salvation and even the decision to convert to Calvinism. Little personal responsibility is required, for everything is preordained, and no compromise is possible. The only possible attitude to such a God is one of perfect submission. In exchange, God grants His followers invincible strength: you give up your personal will, but receive the entire weight of God’s universe behind you. This does not mean that you can sit back and do nothing. While Lutherans tend to stay aloof from worldly affairs, living according to their private conscience, Calvinists are supposed to engage with politics, and work to bring about God’s will on earth. In the sixteenth century, accordingly, Calvinists were trained in Switzerland in a special academy, and sent to France armed with arguments and forbidden publications to convert the natives and destabilize the state. At some point in the 1550s, the name “Huguenot” became attached to Calvin’s followers both inside and outside the country. The word probably derived from an earlier branch of exiled Reformists, the “Eidgenossen” or “confederates.” It stuck: French Protestants used it of themselves, and their enemies used it of them too.
In the early days, the Catholic Church had responded to the Protestant threat by trying to reform itself. Montaigne thus grew up within a church committed to soul-searching and self-questioning, activities religious institutions do not often embrace with much fervor. But while this was going on, more militant forces gained strength. The Jesuit order, founded by Ignacio López de Loyola in 1534, set itself to fighting a battle of ideas against the enemy. A fiercer, less intellectual movement, arising in France from the 1550s, was loosely grouped under the name of the “Leagues.” Their aim was not to outwit the heretics by fancy argument but to wipe them from the face of the earth by force. They and their Calvinist counterparts faced each other without a shred of compromise in their hearts, as fanatical mirror images. Leaguists opposed any French king who made feeble attempts at tolerance of Protestantism; this opposition became stronger as the decades went on.
Henri II was easily swayed by Leaguist pressure, so he introduced tough heresy laws and even a new chamber of the Paris parlement devoted to trying religious crimes. From July 1557, blasphemy against the saints, the publication of banned books, and illegal preaching were all punishable by death. Between such moves, however, Henri reversed gear and tried to soothe Huguenot sensibilities by allowing limited Protestant worship in certain areas, or reducing the heresy penalties again. Each time he did this, the Catholic lobby protested, so he accelerated forward into repression. He moved back and forth, satisfying no one.
During these years, other problems troubled France, including runaway inflation, which injured the poor more than anyone and benefited the landed gentry, who received higher rents and responded by buying more and more property—as happened with several generations of Montaigne’s family. For less fortunate classes, the economic crisis fed extremism. Humanity had brought this misery on the world with its sins, so it must appease God by following the one true Church. But which was the true Church?
It was from this religious, economic, and political anguish that the civil wars would arise—wars which dominated France through most of the rest of the century, from 1562, when Montaigne was twenty-nine, to 1598, well after his death. Before the 1560s, military adventures in Italy and elsewhere had provided an outlet for France’s tensions. But in April 1559 the treaty of Câteau Cambrésis ended several of the foreign wars at a blow. By removing distractions and filling the country with unemployed ex-soldiers amid an economic depression, this peace almost immediately brought about the outbreak of a much worse war.
The first bad omen occurred during jousting tournaments held to celebrate two dynastic marriages linked to the peace treaty. The king, who loved tournaments, took a leading role. In one encounter, an opponent accidentally knocked his visor off with the remains of a broken lance. Splinters of wood pierced the king’s face just above one eye. He was carried away; after several days in bed, he seemed to recover, but a splinter had entered his brain. He developed a fever on the fourth day, and on July 10, 1559, he died.
Protestants interpreted the death as God’s way of saying that Henri II had been wrong to repress their religion. But Henri’s death would make things worse for them rather than better. The throne now passed successively to three of his sons: François II, Charles IX, and Henri III. The first two were minors, succeeding at fifteen and ten years old, respectively. All were weak, all were dominated by their mother Catherine de’ Medici, and all were inept at handling the religious conflict. François II died of tuberculosis almost immediately, in 1560. Charles took over, and would reign until 1574. During the early years, his mother ruled as regent. She tried to achieve a balance between religious and political factions, but had little success.
The situation at the beginning of the 1560s, the decade during which Montaigne developed his career in Bordeaux, was thus marked by a weak throne, greedy rivalries, economic hardship, and rising religious tensions. In December 1560, in a speech expressing a feeling widespread at the time, the chancellor Michel de L’Hôpital said, “It is folly to hope for peace, repose, and friendship among people of differ
ent faiths.” Even if desirable, it would be an impossible ideal. The only path to political unity was religious unity. As a Spanish theologian remarked, no republic could be well governed if “everyone considers his own God to be the only true God … and everyone else to be blind and deluded.” Most Catholics would have considered this too self-evident to be worth mentioning. Even Protestants tended to impose unity whenever they got their own state to manage. Un roi, une foi, une loi, went the saying: one king, one faith, one law. Hatred of anyone who ventured to suggest a middle ground was practically the only thing on which everyone else could agree.
L’Hôpital and his allies did not promote tolerance or “diversity,” in any modern sense. But he did think it better to lure stray sheep back by making the Catholic Church more appealing, rather than driving them back with threats. Under his influence, the heresy laws were relaxed somewhat at the beginning of the 1560s. An edict of January 1562 allowed Protestants to worship openly outside towns, and privately within town walls. As with earlier compromises, this satisfied no one. Catholics felt betrayed, while Protestants were encouraged to feel they should demand more. Some months earlier, the Venetian ambassador had written of a “great fear” spreading through the kingdom; this had now grown into a sense of imminent disaster.
The trigger came on March 1, 1562, at the town of Vassy, or Wassy, in the Champagne area of the northeast. Five hundred Protestants gathered to worship in a barn in the town, which was illegal, for such assemblies were allowed only outside the walls. The duc de Guise, a radical Catholic leader, was passing through the area with a group of his soldiers and heard about the meeting. He marched to the barn. According to survivors’ accounts, he allowed his men to storm in shouting, “Kill them all!”
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