Montaigne as The Apprehensive Humanist

The religious wars, which had broken out a year and a half before La Boetie’s death, were to involve Montaigne deeply and to form the somber background of the last half of his life. There were intervals of comparative peace, some of them rather long. But they were never better than armed truces, for no settlement could satisfy both sides, and during most of them, sporadic violence continued in one part of France or another. The Protestants were never comparable in numbers to the Catholics; but these were sharply divided, with the government generally holding to a policy at first of tolerance, then of moderation, while the extremists opposed all concessions. 

After three lasting each year or two, the Reformists reached their highest peak of influence when their leader Coligny came to court in 1570 and gained greater favour with King Charles IX. But the Catholics grew alarmed as Coligny pressed for armed intervention in the Protestant Netherlands against Catholic Spain. When thousands of Protestants flocked to Paris for the marriage of Henry of Navarre, tension rose. When a hired assassin wounded Coligny, it became explosive. Threats flew back and forth, and the king was finally persuaded by his mother, his brother, and others to order the terrible Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, so Coligny and thousands of other Protestants were killed. Navarre was forced to adjure his Protestantism and remain at court, almost a prisoner until his party regained its strength.

In these first ten years of war, and later too, southwest France was a center of trouble. Bearn and parts of Gascony and Guyenne were deeply Protestant, and nearly everywhere opinion was divided. In the region around the court of Navarre at Nerac, there were always Protestant soldiers, and often armies. Catholic Bordeaux, sixty or seventy miles to the northwest, was in a state of almost constant alarm. Most members of the Parliament favored a sterner policy than the government usually did; those who did not were often in hot water with their colleagues. In one period of a year and a half (March, 1569-August, 1570), the court condemned over 1,200 people to death in absentia, to be sure. Again and again, it assigned its members to actual police duties for the preservation of law and order.

Montaigne had taken from the first the position of determining loyalism that he never changed. We have noted already his anger at the more compromising Lagebaston soon after La Boetie’s death and his willing oath of fidelity in Paris the year before. In October of that same year (1562) he was with the king’s army at the siege of Protestant Rouen; it was there that he met his Brazilian cannibal. And in December 1567, he wrote from his chateau a letter to his friend Belot to be read in Parlement, warning them of the passage of Protestant troops. All his actions suggest that, Like La Boetie, he regarded the Reformists as primary rebels against their country and their king.

Meanwhile, after a diversionary sowing of wild oats, Montaigne married, settled down, inherited his father’s estate, translated long theological treaties, requested and was refused more meaningful employment in the Parliament, resigned his position there, published La Boetie’s works, retired to his manor, and started to write his Essays.

He married Francoise de la Chssaigne, daughter of a conservative president of the Parliament (September 25, 1565), at his father’s urging and without enthusiasm, as a social obligation. He would have avoided marrying. Wisdom herself, he says, if she had wanted him. The domestic economy was not his dish, nor building, which his father had enjoyed. What he wanted of his home were freedom and peace, and apparently, he did not always get them. For all their children, the marriage lacked intimacy and warmth, and Montaigne's remarks about it are generally caustic. It has even been argued plausibly that his wife was unfaithful to him, and with his brother at that. With the possible exception of the early years, the marriage seems to have gone best when each partner had the most privacy.

Montaigne’s translation is interesting in many ways. In 1546 or earlier his father had a visit from Pierre Bunel, one of his admired humanists, who left with him, as an antidote for the Lutheranism that he saw spreading in France, the Latin “Book of Creatures, or Natural Theology” of the fifteenth-century Spaniard Raymond Sebond. Sometime before the death of Adrianus Turnebus in 1565 Montainge himself had shown an interest in the book by asking him about it. Though Pierre de Montainge knew Latin, and though there was already a French translation and also an adaptation, he asked his son to translate it, which he did. The book appeared in 1569; the dedication to Montainge’s father is dated from Paris, June 18, 1568-the day his father died.

A thousand pages of the “Natural Theology” are an elaborate demonstration of the existence and nature of God by the analogies observable in his creation. From man’s superiority to the lower levels of creatures-animal, vegetable, inanimate-God’s superiority is elucidated. The book opens with a preface, or prologue, claiming that it is virtually infallible and more useful than the Scriptures. In 1558 or 1559 the book was put on the Index of Prohibited Books; the body of the work was removed from the Index in 1564, but the Prologue was retained.

Montaigne showed great skill in his first literary labor. The translation is smoother and gayer than the original. As he says he has docked it out a bit, a la Francoise. But he has fully understood his author and rendered his meaning faithfully—at least throughout the now innocent body of the book.

Not so in the peccant Prologue. Montainge cuts all of Sebond’s extravagant claims down to size. “Necessary becomes “useful’; “infallibly” disappears. The book no longer claims to teach “all the truth necessary to man” (about God and man) but “the truth, so far as this is possible for natural reason”: not the knowledge “necessary to man” but the knowledge “necessary to man before all others.” This superb Latinist and faithful translator has deliberately mistranslated in at least twenty places, always to attenuate the presumption of the author’s claims.

Many explanations of this fact are possible. Almost certainly Montainge knew that the Prologue was on the Index. Clearly he wanted his translation to be wholly orthodox-as indeed it was; it was never troubled by censure. There may even be some influence of his father. At all events, Montainge clearly appears at this time to have been thinking and conforming Catholic, willing to undertake a sizable literary chore if his father thought it might help the good cause or work for conciliation between the warring sects. And already he was highly skeptical of the power of unaided human reason in matters divine. The germ of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” exists already in Montainge’s version of the Prologue to the “Natural Theology.”

These were ten hard years for him. Besides the public bloodshed and alarm, which was terrible in Guyenne, he had private grounds for grief and apprehension. In 1561, without warning, his father had fallen grievously ill with a kidney stone, which after seven painful years was to kill him. Montainge’s own fear of the stone, which grew intense until experience cured it, probably goes back to the early days of his father’s suffering. Two years later his beloved friend had been morally stricken in his thirty-third year. Five years afterward, while Montainge was away, his father died in great pain. Now that Montainge for the first time had money of his own, even this began to worry him. Soon after his father, a brother, Arnaud de Saint-Martin, a brave young captain of twenty-three, died as a result of being hit over the ear by a tennis ball. In the same period Montainge came close to death in the most unlikely way-an accidental collision on horseback; this, too was a reminder. Another two years and Thoinette was born, his long-awaited first child, to live only two months. A second child, born in the next year survived, but in 1573 a third child died an infant, and later still another and another and another. “When these examples, so frequent and so ordinary, pass before our eyes,” Montainge writes of his brother’s death, “how is it possible that one can get rid of the thought of death, and that at every instant it should not be seen to us that she holds us by the throat?”