Difficult Engagements

PRIVATE PASSION AND PUBLIC SERVICE IN MONTAIGNE’S ESSAIS

Timothy Hampton

That which the world calls virtue is ordinarily nothing more than a phantom formed by our passions, to which we give an honest name in order to do as we please.

—La Rochefoucauld

THE SUMMONS

SEPTEMBER OF 1581 found Montaigne in Italy, in the baths. He had left France the year before, after submitting for publication the first edition of his Essais, and had traveled through France, Switzerland, and Italy on a trip that was both cultural and therapeutic. He had come to Lucca, the last of several balneal stops on his Italian journey, as he tried, unsuccessfully, to soak his way out of the pain inflicted on him by his kidney stones. As he considered options for further treatment, he received a letter, forwarded from Rome, informing him that he had been selected by the jurists of Bordeaux to be mayor of that city. His first inclination, he writes later, was to decline the office. However he accepted and hurried home to Bordeaux, where the call was seconded by a letter from the king, Henry III, expressing royal pleasure at the selection (which took place, the monarch notes happily, “without intrigue”) and commanding Montaigne to comply “without delay or excuse” [sans délay ne excuse]. By doing so, said Henry, Montaigne would bring “great pleasure” to his monarch. Failure to take up his duties, by contrast, would bring “great displeasure” (“le contraire me desplairoit grandement”).¹

Montaigne places his account of the summons strategically within the architecture of the third book of the Essais. It directly follows the long essay entitled “De la vanité,” in which he speaks at length of inheriting the ancestral chateau, and of the vanity of travel. That essay reaches its climax when Montaigne literally reprints the text of a decree issued to him by the city fathers of Rome, declaring him an honorary Roman. “Being a citizen of no city,” he writes, “I am very pleased to be one of the noblest city that ever was or will be” (766b) [N’estant bourgeois d’aucune ville, je suis bien aise de l’estre de la plus noble qui fut et qui sera oncques” (979b)]. Two pages later this noncitizen is on his way back to Bordeaux to assume a civic post that his father had held before him.

Scholars of Montaigne’s life have underscored the biographical interest of these facts about his travels and his public service.² However, we should note as well that the scenario just described is a literary cliché. The summoning of a young man from the errant life of the scholar or tourist to a position of civic or political responsibility is a familiar motif in Renaissance literature. Hamlet leaves Wittenburg to settle things in Elsinore; Prince Hal gives up his revels in Eastcheap to become Henry V; Gargantua and Pantagruel both leave their studies and come to the defense of the homeland. Part of the joke here may stem from the fact at that at forty-eight Montaigne is a bit old to fit the part of a Hamlet or a Hal. Still, it is one of the general strategies of the Essais to cast large cultural and literary topoi as autobiographical details; and the scene recalls similar literary moments at which knights or students are reined in and put to work by some sort of political or familial authority. To be sure, Montaigne’s assumption of the mayoralty has a biographical dimension since, as noted earlier, by doing so he is following in the footsteps of his father. Yet what he tells us of his father’s service is that he found the job burdensome and unrewarding, that it disturbed him and took him from the health and comfort of his rural estate. Thus the father’s unhappiness with public service sets the scene for the son’s attempt to get it right. In the process, biographical detail and literary cliché overlap to define a site of theoretical reflection on the problem of framing a model of public service that would neither debilitate nor compromise the private self.

Montaigne discusses his mayoral tenure in the tenth chapter of his third book of essays, the essay called “De mesnager sa volonté” (translated as “Of husbanding your will”). It is an essay that has attracted less critical attention than most of the other chapters in the third book. Yet it is crucially important for understanding the relationship of public and private in his work. The most frequently cited passage in the essay is Montaigne’s famous claim that “The Mayor and Montaigne have always been two, with a very clear separation” (774b) [Le Maire et Montaigne ont tousjours esté deux, d’une separation bien claire (989b)]. Yet this claim is only one moment in a larger reflection on the conditions of private selfhood. In its specific context, it is followed by a whole sequence of figures—lawyers, accountants, emperors—whose private identity Montaigne considers in relationship to their public functions. The list touches on one of the grand political themes of Baroque culture—the notion that humans are all role players in a vast cosmic drama. Montaigne exploits this theme, but he also claims an authenticity that transcends it. He does so, I will suggest, by carefully circumscribing the terms through which public action might be understood and presenting his own actions as simultaneously serving the public weal and protected from the vicissitudes of passion and violence.

Montaigne had earlier engaged in forms of public service, specifically through his work in the legal profession in Bordeaux. However, he never discusses that experience, and, clearly, it is his service as mayor that he finds of greater interest. Thus Montaigne’s entry onto the stage of politics raises questions about the ways in which the discourse of the Essais negotiates the relationship between public life and private contemplation, and about how self-cultivation and service can coexist. Indeed, as Montaigne points out in the very first paragraph of “De mesnager sa volonté,” public service threatens autonomy. And the meeting point of autonomy and service is the province of the passions, since the passions both shape selfhood and motivate action. As he says in the essay’s third sentence: “I espouse, and in consequence grow passionate about, few things. My sight is clear, but I fix it on few objects; my sensitivity is delicate and tender. But my perception and application are hard and deaf; I engage myself with difficulty” (766b) [J’espouse, et me passionne par consequant, de peu de choses. J’ay la veue¨ clere, mais je l’attache à peu d’objects; le sens delicat et mol. Mais l’apprehension et l’application, je l’ay dure et sourde; je m’engage difficilement (980b)].³ The rest of the essay suggests that we should take the final word of this passage in its fullest sense. Montaigne engages himself with difficulty; that is, he rarely commits himself, and when he does, it is a difficult process.

We might understand the originality of Montaigne’s notion that commitment is “difficult” by recalling the early sections of Albert O. Hirsch-man’s famous study, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Hirschman posits that Renaissance thinkers tended to offer one of three possible solutions for controlling the passions. These were “repressing” the passions (his example is Calvin), “harnessing” the passions (Pascal, Mandeville), or counterbalancing them with other passions (Bacon).⁴ However in “De mesnager sa volonté” Montaigne offers yet another approach to the passions, which is simply to avoid them altogether: “Passions,” he says, “are as easy for me to avoid as they difficult for me to moderate” (780b) [Les passions me sont autant comme elles me sont diffiles à moderer (997b)]. If passion—and by extension the will—cannot be controlled, what becomes important are the strategies of avoidance. These involve controlling the relationship of the will to the things around it—to the institutions and situations with which it interacts. What is at issue is a problem of positioning the self. It is therefore beautifully ironic that Montaigne’s articulation of what is in effect a psychology of evasion comes precisely in the essay in which he describes the self as constantly tempted away from “home” by the demon of service to the community. Psychology and topography mirror each other. Having evaded responsibility through travel in “De la vanite ,” he now returns home to enter public life and seek to evade the worry that accompanies it.

Montaigne’s hesitation about commitment may not be merely an effect of personality. It points as well to his position as a member of a provincial aristocracy that is caught between emerging models of centralized political power and the intense, passionate position-taking made urgent by the wars of religion in France. In the middle and later years of the sixteenth century the famous “crisis of the aristocracy” in France begins to impose upon nobles a set of urgent political and ethical choices. After centralized political power began, in the early decades of the century, to erode the traditional autonomy of the provincial nobility, the wars of religion provided that same nobility with an opportunity for reaffirming its independence. The great noble families frequently took religious discord as a pretext for bloody bouts of score-settling and vendetta.⁵ We can read this violent background in the king’s obvious relief at Montaigne’s easy election. Yet at the same time, the relative ineffectiveness and corruption of the court following the death of Henry II in 1559 rendered a strong association with the royal cause potentially disastrous, and the provincial nobility tended to ally itself strongly either with Protestantism or with the ultramontane Catholic extremism of the Holy League. Montaigne alludes to this fragmentation of the public sphere when he notes that his contemporaries allow their passions to place them under the thrall of various charismatic leaders, in the process distorting their vision of the larger political issues underpinning the wars. Excessive service, marked by passion, is destructive to the servant. As he notes, “A friend of mine, a gentleman and a very fine man, nearly drove himself out of his mind by too passionate an attention and devotion to the affairs of a prince, his master” (771b) [Un gentil’homme, très-homme de bien, et mon amy, cuida brouiller la santé de sa teste par une trop passionnée attention et affection aux affaires d’un prince, son maistre (986b)]. Indeed, he goes on, his contemporaries frequently give themselves over to private hatreds that have nothing to do with the ills of the state: “they are stung . . . with a personal passion and beyond justice and public reason” (774c) [ils se picquent de passion particuliere et au delà de la justice et de la raison publique (990c)]. Thus we can say that for Montaigne the crisis of French politics is brought on by the injection of private interest, powered by passion, into the public sphere. It’s not only that the passions are political, but that the political, during the French religious wars, is the passionate. In such an atmosphere traditional humanist ideals of public service—grounded in Ciceronian and Aristotelian notions of the polis—appear outmoded or naive, even as the new ideals of retirement associated with Renaissance neo-Stoicism seem to point to a rejection of public life altogether.⁶

“De mesnager sa volonté” offers us the novelty of a meditation on service in the public sphere that is linked neither to the court nor to the vicissitudes of monarchy—those topics that have conventionally interested scholars of early modern political culture. Much has been written on Montaigne’s politics and on his role as a member of the so-called Politiques group—that group of moderate humanists which advocated a secular, that is, political, solution to the wars of religion.⁷ However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which his own self-representation involves a struggle to define a position for the subject that is both politically engaged and psychologically and emotionally disengaged. The complex interweaving of discourses that underpins this positioning is evident in the very title of Montaigne’s essay, which juxtaposes the “management” techniques of home economics with the self-transformative dynamics of traditional moral philosophy. It suggests that Montaigne is trying to work out a new technology of selfhood.⁸ The essay draws upon such classical documents of self-adjustment as Seneca’s De Tranquilitate Animi but blends a reflection on the power of the passions to distort the equilibrium of the soul with a consideration of how to act both effectively and happily in the public service.

The summons to service—the moment of “interpellation,” if you will—thus evokes a well-worn literary topos under a new pressure. It recalls a cliché of masculine education applied to a newly complex social and political situation. Yet at the same time it contrasts with the intense self-absorption of the Essais. “Few things touch me, or, to put it better, hold me” (766b) [Peu de choses me touchent, ou, pour mieux dire, me tiennent (980b)], says Montaigne in the first sentence of the essay. This gesture of self-correction—“pour mieux dire”—is telling, since throughout the essay he notes repeatedly that, in fact, it is fine if things “touch” us as long as they don’t possess us. The difficult thing is to let them touch us without letting them possess us. The space between being troubled and being possessed is the space of effective service. “We cannot distinguish the skin from the shirt” (773b) [Nous ne savons pas distinguer la peau de la chemise (989b)], he writes a few pages later. Yet the halting correctio, “pour mieux dire,” that marks the entry into the chapter suggests that what is at issue here is both a problem of ethical action and a problem of writing. Montaigne must find a language for describing a kind of public service that is engaging but not entangling. There are few literary models for writing about this middle position, between engagement and disengagement. In the tradition of Aristotelian and Ciceronian moral philosophy that Montaigne inherits, it is through public service that virtue is most effectively demonstrated and that selfhood is most powerfully realized. Fifty years before Montaigne, Rabelais’s Panurge, that purveyor of cultural reminds his friend Pantagruel that his own virtue can be most clearly shown only if he engages in public life. He is distantly recalling Cicero, who writes in De Officiis of the importance of public action as both a civic necessity and a way of displaying “greatness of spirit.”⁹ Even in the Senecan tradition, from which Montaigne drew most heavily in the writing of the Essais, retirement from public life is generally depicted as something one does after public service, as one looks back on the snares of the political world and cultivates repose. When Montaigne is elected mayor, he has already been cultivating repose for close to a decade. He elects to leave retirement, not fade into it.¹⁰

Montaigne describes his general approach to public action by stating that one should not refuse public commitment, but that one should take it on without any sense of burden or obligation, “by way of loan and accidentally, the mind holding itself ever in repose and in health, not without action, but without vexation, without passion” (770b) [C’est par em-prunt et accidentalement, l’esprit tenant tousjours en repos et en santé, non pas sans action, mais sans vexation, sans passion (984b)]. At one level, the affirmation of a commitment that refuses passion is a commonplace of moral philosophy. In the first book of De Officiis Cicero reminds his son that the man who engages in public life must learn to disdain “human affairs” as a way of cultivating tranquility of mind: “Otherwise, how will they live without anxiety, with seriousness and with constancy?” ¹¹ This theme of the disdain for the human world as a precondition of constancy gains new urgency in the context of the French religious wars. The civil and political unrest of the late sixteenth century had produced a revival of classical Stoic thought, and a number of Montaigne’s contemporaries had been writing on the control of the passions. The most famous of these was the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, whose De Constantia is exactly contemporaneous with the Essais and explores much of the same terrain as does “De mesnager sa volonté.” De Constantia opens, in fact, with a reflection on the problem of political commitment in the face of political and civil disorder, as Lipsius is presented fleeing the Flemish wars into philosophical retreat and the control of the passions.

Montaigne reverses Lipsius’s scenario. His essay stresses the necessity of public action and the desirability of avoiding the passions. De Constantia closes with a reflection on the value of gardens as places of spiritual and physical refuge.¹² For Montaigne, the site of philosophical reflection is the home, which functions both literally and figuratively in his work, referring both to the ancestral castle (from which, he reminds us, his father was drawn into public service) and to a self that is at ease with itself.¹³ Indeed, the language that opens the essay is the language of husbandry. In the third paragraph Montaigne argues that men (“les hommes”) are given over to “renting themselves out” [(ils) se donnent à louange] to the public world. They have abandoned themselves to outside forces who now take up residence inside them: “their renters are in their house; it is no longer they” (767b) [leurs locataires sont chez eux, ce ne sont pas eux (981b)]. The reason for this abandonment of the self and its location, he goes on, comes from moral philosophy itself. For it is the teachers and moralists who have instructed men to give themselves over to public service: “Most of the rules and precepts of the world take this course of pushing us out of ourselves and driving us into the public square, for the benefit of public society” (769b) [La plus part des reigles et preceptes du monde prennent ce train de nous pousser hors de nous et chasser en la place, à l’usage de la societé publique (983b)].¹⁴ Thus the humanist emphasis on civic service—a commonplace of moral philosophy since Aristotle and Cicero—turns out to be the spur to a loss of the self. To counter this tendency, says Montaigne, we must “manage the liberty of our soul and only lease it out on the right occasions” (767b) [il faut mesnager la liberté de nostre ame et ne l’hypotequer qu’aux occasions justes (981b)]. Montaigne’s use here of the verb “to manage” (“menager”) is striking. For this crucial economic term gives the essay its title, which we might translate literally as “Of managing the will.” Yet the only time in the body of the essay in which the word appears is in the sentence just quoted. Thus an essay that purports to be about “managing” the will (a problem of self-control) turns out to be about “managing” the freedom of the soul (a problem of social positioning).

This freedom turns out to have much to do with a kind of internalization of the pose of the country aristocrat. Following his admission, cited at the outset, that “Passions are as easy for me to avoid as they are hard for me to moderate” (780b) [Les passions me sont autant aisées à eviter comme elles me sont difficiles à moderer (997b)], Montaigne goes on to add that those who cannot be as constant as the Stoics should take refuge in “the bosom of this plebeian stupidity of mine. What those men did by virtue, I train myself to do by disposition” [qu’il se sauve au giron de cette mienne supidité populaire. Ce que ceux-là faisoient par vertu, je me duits à le faire par complexion]. Philosophers and rustics—the extreme examples of virtue and dullness—are tranquil and happy, he asserts. Those between them suffer. And he goes on to cite Virgil’s second Georgic (vv. 490–94), where the poet speaks of the special knowledge of those who “know the origins of things” [qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas]. These are the philosopher, “who can scorn inexorable fate” [qui . . . inexorabile fatum / subjecit pedibus] and the husbandman, “who knows the woodland clan” [ille Deos qui novit agrestes]. Montaigne suggests that whereas others seek knowledge of the origins of things outside the self, he observes the tiny origins of the passions, and learns to avoid them. In this sense, as retired aristocrat, he is both woodsman and philosopher in one. Yet what does it mean to counter “virtue” with “disposition,” and to claim that one can “train oneself” “by disposition” instead of virtue?

MONTAIGNE READING: VIRTUE AND EXCESS

Throughout the Essais Montaigne insists on the centrality of the public sphere for the definition of the subject. As he writes in “De l’utile et de l’honneste,” the first essay in the third book, “Both my word and my honor are, like the rest, parts of this common body. Their best operation is public service; I take that for granted” (604b) [Ma parolle et ma foy sont, comme le demeurant, pieces de ce commun corps, leur meilleur effect, c’est le service public; je tiens cela pour presupposé (774b)]. But there is more to this sense of public service than a moral choice. It is, in fact, the public sphere that controls action and gives acts their meanings. Since desire is virtually impossible to control, he says in the same essay, action must be framed by public institutions: “Will and desires are a law unto themselves; actions must receive their law from public regulation” (603b) [La volont et les desirs se font loy eux mesmes; les actions ont à la rece-voir de l’ordonnance publique (772b)].

Montaigne’s position is quite traditional. At least since Cicero, moral and political philosophers had insisted on the importance of the public world as the center of human action, as that place through which human action takes its meaning. As Peter N. Miller has noted, Cicero’s argument in the case of Vatinius affirmed that the greatest honor available to a political actor derived from the notion that “the welfare of the State [was] bound up with the welfare of [the] self.”¹⁵ Yet under the political pressures of the late sixteenth century, this traditional notion of the political world as the preeminent shaper of action had taken on a new coloration and become intertwined with a new theory—new at least since Machiavelli—which began to privilege the safety and stability of political institutions over the moral disposition of the subject. It is this theory, as Miller points out, that comes to be called reason of state.¹⁶

Yet Montaigne does not go so far as to advocate a doctrine of reason of state. In “De l’utile et de l’honneste,” alluded to above, he considers what will become the classical topos in treatments of reason of state, the moment of the coup d’état, when the prince must act against his subjects in order to preserve the health of the state. In this case, says Montaigne, he accepts that the prince must act in certain seemingly unethical ways, yet it is his hope that the prince will regret those same actions: “If he did it without regret, if it did not grieve him to do it, it is a sign that his conscience is in a bad way” (607b) [s’il le fit sans regret, s’il ne luy greva de le faire, c’est signe que sa conscience est en mauvais termes (777b)]. This slightly sentimental reference to the prince’s conscience is telling. For it points to Montaigne’s interest—which we will see repeated in a moment—in translating the increasingly impersonal maneuvers of political rationality into personal terms, as if they were carried out as part of a dialogue between sages.¹⁷

This conventional vision of the relationship between the self and the public world is what seems to be in crisis in “De mesnager sa volonté.” Yet we can see the origins of this crisis much earlier on in the Essais by turning to the first chapter of the second book, “De l’inconstance de nos actions.”¹⁸ For it is there that Montaigne considers the relationship between public action and the classical notion of constancy that is so important to traditional discourses on the passions. “De l’inconstance de nos actions” addresses the relationship of action, passion, and virtue by talking about reading. The essay is centrally concerned with problems of interpretation, and in specific, with the ways in which we can read specific actions as signs of the disposition of the soul. Montaigne is skeptical that actions might represent interiority. Those who try to make sense of human action, he says, are hindered by the diversity of human behavior. In fact, so variable is human action that it seems impossible to bring different actions into harmony with each other and identify them all as parts of “the same shop” ( 239b) [de mesme boutique (314a)]. A man who is courageous one moment is cowardly the next, such that the pieces represented by his diverse acts cannot be assembled into a whole. Even among the ancients, he notes, scarcely a dozen men were able to define their lives by the “certain and assured pace” [certain et asseuré train] that is the mark of wisdom.

Montaigne states that his own interpretive practice tries to respond to this epistemological uncertainty. He points out that he is generally inclined to say good things about others, and to interpret things “in the best way” (242b) (“d’interpreter plustost en bonne part les choses qui le peuvent estre” [319a]).¹⁹ However, he also recognizes that virtuous actions may be motivated by vicious motives. The pressure of the moment and the impulses of ambition make actions into ambiguous signs—ironic indicators of the absence, rather than the presence, of virtue.

The possible responses to this condition are several. As Montaigne notes in a revision to the text made for the second edition of the Essais, readers and interpreters tend to try to counterbalance the dissolution of self into action by choosing as a point of reference a kind of abstract idea of a particular subject, a “universal air” (239b) [un air universel (314b)] against which they sort out and interpret the various contingent moments in which he or she acts. A moment later, in an addition made at the very end of his life, he avers that one must simply divide one’s consideration of people from one’s interpretation of action. If an act is praiseworthy, he notes, it should be praised—but we must remember that it is “the action alone that is laudable, not the man” (242b) [l’action est lou¨ able, non pas l’homme (319c)]. This is, of course, to empty historical actions of character altogether.

At one level Montaigne’s resigned relinquishment of the tendency to always interpret “in the best part” constitutes a turning away from a certain tradition of Christian exegesis that was central to much of French humanism a generation earlier. In his De Doctrina Christiana Saint Augustine had stressed the importance of always interpreting in such a way as to promote the rule of charity and the common good. His formulation is repeated often by Montaigne’s countryman Rabelais, who, under the influence of Erasmian Christian humanism, advises his readers always to “interpret me in the best way” (“en perfectissime partie”). This hermeneutics of faith is one of the elements of what Rabelais calls “Pantagruelism.”²⁰

For Montaigne, however, political and intellectual climates have changed in such a way that actions have ceased to signify in the ways they did earlier, and, hence, new hermeneutic strategies are required. He expands on these themes in an essay titled “De la vertu,” the twenty-ninth essay of the second book, which explicitly links interpretation to politics. There he makes a distinction between the Stoic ideal of constancy and “the erratic impulses of the soul” (532a) [les boutees et saillies de l’ame (683a)]. Man can do anything, he says, even surpass the gods in certain things. However, he does not do so by virtue. Instead, he is possessed by a momentary excess, “by fits and starts” (533a) [c’est par secousse (683a)]. In the lives of the exemplary heroes of antiquity, he goes on, there are instances of extreme virtue and heroism, “miraculous traits” [des traits miraculeux]. But they are only “traits”—that is, moments (with Montaigne relying on the etymological sense of “trait” as coming from the Latin tractus, “carried along”). Even for the moderns, “we who are merely aborted men” [qui ne sommes qu’avortons d’hommes], such moments of excess come occasionally, when we are roused by the examples or discourses of others. However, the results of those impulses are not signs of the true nature of the soul. Rather they are described by Montaigne as passions, as moments that take us completely out of ourselves: “but it is a kind of passion that impels and drives [the soul], and which to some extent tears her out of herself” (533a) [c’est une espece de passion qui . . . pousse et agite [notre ame], et qui la ravit aucunement hors de soy (683a)].

What is striking here is Montaigne’s use of the term passion to describe the motivation of a the soul when it behaves heroically. For, of course, traditional moral philosophy would call this force “virtue.” By calling virtue passion Montaigne breaks with the Ciceronian and Senecan traditions of moral philosophy on which he draws throughout the Essais. For those traditions virtue is what is supposed to control and police passion. Montaigne’s phrase collapses the distinction between the soul’s movements and the force through which those movements may be policed or corrected. Virtue, which should be a bridle and guide for the passions, now turns out to be the force incites them. The force that that would “manage” the will turns out to be the spur that drives it to excess.

This theme is stressed elsewhere in the Essais as well. Midway through the famous “Apologie de Raymond Sebond,” the longest of his essays, Montaigne states that passion is the necessary impetus behind virtue. He notes that the soul receives powerful shaking from the passions of the body (“les secousses et esbranlemens que nostre ame rec¸oit par les passions corporelles” [550a]), but that it suffers no less from its own passions, such that it often has no movement than from its own motion, “the breath of her winds” (426a) [le souffle de ses vents] and that without such motivation it can do nothing. Indeed, he ends, “Valor, they say, cannot become perfect without the assistance of anger” (426a) [La vaillance di-sent- tils, ne se peut parfaire sans l’assistance de la cholère (550a)]. It is important that he should end with valor or “vaillance,” here since what is at issue is in part the opposition between a private, intellectual, or moral virtue, and public military and political virtue. Montaigne strives to blend his own ideals of aristocratic heroism with the internal, self-regarding concerns of the Stoic sage.²¹

The context for this fragmentation of virtue is hinted at in Montaigne’s revisions for the second version of “De mesnager sa volonté,” published in 1588. Here he shifts the focus of his meditation to contemporary events. He inserts two long paragraphs that discuss several notorious political crimes resulting from the sectarian violence of the French religious wars. These crimes, which would have been well known to his readers, are the two attempts, the second successful, on the life of the Protestant leader William of Orange in 1582 and 1584, and the murder of the ultraCatholic duke of Guise in 1563. “There has not occurred within our memory a more admirable act of resolution than that of those two who plotted the death of the prince of Orange” (537b) [Il n’est point advenu, de nostre memoire, un plus admirable effect de resolution que de ces deux qui conspirerent la mort du prince d’Orenge (689b)], remarks Montaigne. In this formulation, “resolution” emerges as the double of the Stoic ideal of constancy. It produces a direction for the self through time precisely because it aims at a goal that is outside the self—an end point resulting in a particular act. Montaigne is particularly impressed by Balthazar Gérard, who went after William of Orange when he knew that an earlier attempt had failed and that the prince would be well guarded. Moreover, Gérard’s weapon of choice was a dagger, which, says Montaigne, requires more steadiness and is more easily deflected than a pistol. “Certainly he employed a very determined hand and a courage moved by a vigorous passion” (537b) [Certes, il y employa une main bien determinée et un courage esmeu d’une vigoureuse passion (689b)].

Here a “vigorous passion” motivates action that is horrible, but, by virtue of that same passion, admirable. Moreover, in contrast to the disruptive momentary excess seen earlier, passion is finally channeled into determinate action and is contemplated and shaped over time. These references to the violence of religious conflict in Renaissance France bring the crisis of reading virtue set forth in “De l’inconstance de nos actions” into a powerfully immediate context as Montaigne, the moderate humanist, is forced to admire the “heroism” of political assassins. It may be no accident, then, that in the final edition of the Essais Montaigne seems to shift the focus away from the ethics of political assassination and back to the problem of how human action may be read as a sign of virtue. At the end of his life Montaigne revises the essay yet again and frames the discussion of assassination with two intercalated references to the world of Islam. In the first he describes a particularly heroic Turkish fighter who declares that his ferocity comes from watching a hare he once hunted unsuccessfully. Despite the many arrows shot his way, the hare never flinched. From the example of the hare, the fighter concluded that we are bound by our destinies and that neither arrows nor blades can turn destiny aside. And the essay closes with an evocation of the “Assassins,” a nation living near Phoenicia, where the soldiers are esteemed for their “devoutness and purity of morals” (538c) [devotion et pureté de moeurs (690c)]. Their way of achieving Paradise is to kill someone from the “contrary religion” [de religion contraire]. For this reason they fear nothing and are willing to die to achieve their goal. The late additions to the essay seem to turn away from the problems of reading or manifesting virtue and controlling passion. These “exotic” examples—safely distanced from Montaigne’s immediate context—suggest that through the acceptance of one’s own destiny—as either limited or defined by the gods—some type of unity of purpose may be introduced into the narrative of human life. Momentary passion gives way to a larger purpose—deadly though it may be.

READING MONTAIGNE: PUBLIC SERVICE AND SELF-DESCRIPTION

“De l’inconstance de nos actions” and “De la vertu” suggest that the passions of politics are inextricably linked to the politics of interpretation, and that interpretation is threatened by passion. Passion, in this context, might be another name for the injection of private interest into the public sphere at a moment when traditional notions of political life are threatened. The language of the passions provides Montaigne with a vocabulary for naming in moral terms a moment when the new political structure of the centralized absolutist state has not yet replaced traditional concepts of the common good. The two essays just analyzed point to the limitations of traditional Ciceronian notions of the public sphere for understanding the intersection of private passion and public action at a time of political crisis. For Montaigne, momentary passion makes constancy impossible, and “resolution” emerges as the demonic inversion of virtue expressed through time. This dismantling of traditional figurations of virtue opens the way for the meditation set forth in “De mesnager sa volonté,” the essay mentioned at the outset, and to which I now want to return. The essay falls loosely into three sections. Opening and closing discussions of Montaigne’s actions as mayor frame a central consideration of the problem of public action and its power over the private subject. Near the beginning of the central section, Montaigne turns back on the language of selfhood that he has worked out in the essays discussed above.²² For it is here that he replaces the figure of the self as defining itself through a series of actions—a kind of unfolding through time—with an image of careful circumscription in space:

The range of our desires should be circumscribed and restrained to a narrow limit of the nearest and most contiguous good things; and moreover their course should be directed not in a straight line that ends up elsewhere, but in a circle whose two extremities by a short sweep meet and terminate in ourselves. Actions that are performed without this reflexive movement, I mean a searching and genuine reflexive movement—the actions, for example, of the avaricious, the ambitious, and so many others who run in a straight line, whose course carries them ever forward—are erroneous and diseased actions. (773b)

[La carriere de nos desirs doit estre circonscripte et restraincte à un court limite des commoditez les plus proches et contigu¨ es; et doit en outre leur course se manier, non en ligne droite qui face bout ailleurs, mais en rond, duquel les deux pointes se tiennent et terminent en nous par un brief contour. Les actions qui se conduisent sans cette reflexion, s’entend voisine reflexion et essentielle, comme sont celles des avaritieux, des ambitieux et tant d’autres qui courent de pointe, desquels la course les emporte tousjours devant eux, ce sont actions erronées et maladives. (988–89b)]

Here, then, is the figuration of the famous “private” self that scholars have seen as first emerging with Montaigne. Montaigne marks out privacy through a critique of desire that is also a critique of the linear model of the self, which struggles to keep itself constant through its “train” or forward movement. The role of passion in destroying that movement, articulated in the earlier essays discussed above, is here recalled by the notion that linear movement is itself error and that the desiring self is lost in a kind of romance wandering into illness. Only self-sufficiency, figured by the image of the circle, can control desire and free the self from the destructive power of passion.²³

It is within this circumscribed space that Montaigne paints a portrait of the ideal political actor, free from alliances and allegiances, acting not from passion but from his own sense of the exigencies of the moment:

he who employs in it only his judgment and skill proceeds more gaily. He feints, he bends, he postpones entirely at his ease according to the need of the occasions; he misses the target without torment or affliction, and remains intact and ready for a new undertaking; he always walks bridle in hand. (770b)

[Celuy qui n’y employe que son jugement et son adresse, il y procede plus gayement; il feinct, il ploye, il differe tout à son aise, selon le besoing des occasions; il faut d’atainte, sans tourment et sans affliction, prest et entier pour une nouvelle entreprise; il marche tousjours la bride à la main. (985b)]

At one level this description draws upon the image of the effective political actor as described by Machiavelli. The feinting agent who controls events by deferring and dissimulating, by seizing the occasion in order to act, recalls the Machiavellian prince, who molds events to his own advantage. Indeed, the image of the archer who “misses the target” but quickly moves on may even draw on Machiavelli’s figuration of political actors imitating models as archers trying to hit the bull’s-eye, in the sixth chapter of The Prince. Yet what is striking is that Montaigne turns the topos of Machiavellian improvisation into a description of a psychological state. What is at issue is not political efficacy, but the care of the self. By improvising and acting in the moment, free of allegiance and passion, one acts “gayly.” Machiavellian virtù, here read as psychological flexibility, becomes the alternative to what is left of the vocabulary of traditional moral philosophy, in which virtue is really passion and constancy is haunted by the assassin’s “resolution.”

And yet it is instructive to contrast Montaigne’s depiction here of the gay improviser with his description of the risks of public service. If in the earlier essays discussed above action is linked to problems of interpretation, that connection resurfaces again in “De mesnager sa volonté,” as he shifts in the final pages to consider his own service. The problem with acting publically may not, it seems, only involve the management of one’s freedom. It also involves the way public action is read: “All public actions are subject to uncertain and diverse interpretations, for too many heads judge them. Some say about this municipal service of mine . . . that I went about it like a man who exerts himself too weakly and with a languishing zeal; and they are not at all far from having a case” (781) [Toutes actions publiques sont subjecte à incertaines et diverses interpretations, car trop de testes en jugent. Aucuns disent de cette mienne occupation de ville . . . que je m’y suis porté en homme qui s’esmeut trop lachement et d’une affection languissante; et il s ne sont pas du tout esloignez d’apparence (998b)]. On the one hand, Montaigne asserts moral efficacy of the subject who can manage his passions by not being overly invested in his job. On the other hand, people have criticized him—for not being overly invested in his job. Montaigne here seems to have been misread, to have become the victim of the interpretative malaise I traced earlier in such essays as “De l’inconstance de nos actions.” And while he might seem to dismiss the criticism with a quip, his lament about the misunderstanding that attends public action suggests that there is no small degree of impatience and frustration beneath the sunny exterior. Indeed, he goes on to defend himself from detractors who have suggested that his mayoralty was ineffective and that he was overly passive. “They accuse me of inactivity in a time when almost everyone was convicted of doing too much” (781b) [On accuse ma cessation, en un temps où quasi tout le monde estoit convaincu de trop faire (999b)].

Both the jaunty image of the improvising political actor and Montaigne’s concluding grumpiness about public judgments of his tenure point us back to the beginning of the essay, where Montaigne first broaches the subject of his own political service. The reason he was able to serve the people of Bordeaux without strife or anxiety, he avers, is that he told them from the outset what to expect of them: “On my arrival I deciphered myself to them faithfully and conscientiously, exactly such as I feel myself to be: without memory, without vigilance, without experience, and without vigor; also without hate, without ambition, without avarice, and without violence; so that they should be informed and instructed about what they were to expect of my service” (768b) [A mon arrivée, je me deschiffray fidelement et conscientieusement, tout tel que je me sens estre: sans memoire, sans vigilance, sans experience, et sans vigueur; sans hayne aussi, sans ambition, sans avarice et sans violence; à ce qu’ils fussent informez et instruicts de ce qu’ils avoyent à attendre de mon service (982b)]. Here we get an ideal vision of honesty and independence. Whereas his contemporaries are haunted by memory, constrained by allegiances, and driven by ambition, Montaigne simply lacks these qualities and is, as he notes elsewhere in the essay, too old to change. In both time and space he is free of pressure and is reined in only by the bridle of his judgment.

Yet there is an important difference between Montaigne’s entry into public service and the Utopian depiction of the improvising actor I discussed earlier. This involves Montaigne’s self-description to the city fathers of Bordeaux. In a political space that has been fragmented by conflicting private passions, in which, indeed, virtue itself has become a kind of passion, some sort of new frame for delineating action must be defined that would replace the traditional Ciceronian humanist model of the cives. That frame, which both insulates Montaigne from public strife and mediates his relationship to the political sphere, is the compact through which he reveals himself to those who have chosen him as mayor. Like the figure of the circle that delimits the movements of the self, the compact circumscribes the terms of Montaigne’s activities, freeing him to perform as the improvising actor in a carefully defined conceptual space. Here we might see a version of the promissory speech act, the giving of one’s “word of honor,” which is so important both to Cicero’s description of public life in the De Officiis, and to Montaigne’s own descriptions of obligation in the Essais. Indeed, we might locate it as part of the chivalric aristocratic code that the recently ennobled Pierre Eyquem bequeaths to his son Michel de Montaigne—a kind of civic version of the feudal oath of service offered by the vassal to his lord and employer.²⁴ Yet it is none of these things. The moment of compact, where Montaigne cements his relationship to the city fathers, is neither a chivalric oath, nor a contractual obligation—either of which would link it to traditions of political allegiance. Nor again is it a display of oratorical persuasion, which would call to mind traditional links between rhetoric and the passions.²⁵ It is a simple self-description. Montaigne engages himself with those who have summoned him to service and guarantees the tranquility of soul by talking about himself, “I deciphered myself to them faithfully and conscientiously” [je me deschiffray fidelement et conscientieusement]. In the history of political relations, this gesture places us neither in the context of chivalric fealty or humanist civility, nor yet in some larger structure involving reason of state. Montaigne’s gesture might be seen as a strategic attempt to preserve the Ciceronian notion of tranquility of mind in the midst of service, while jettisoning the crucial classical emphases on constancy and community. Instead, we get individuality, the uniqueness of the private subject as the force that binds actor to action. Whether that individuality is the expression of some unique “interiority,” as a certain critical tradition would have it, or whether it is improvised in response to the contingencies of the moment may be open to question.²⁶

We can see the limits of this approach to the public world when we compare Montaigne’s confident entry into service with his complaints, at the end of the chapter, about those who have criticized him: “I had published elaborately enough to the world my inadequacy in such public management” (784b) [J’avois assez disertement publié au monde mon insuffisance en tels maniements publiques (1002b)], he avers. In other words, I told you I was limited, why then do you criticize me for my limitations? Self-disclosure in the political world, it would appear, is not enough. This complaint about the failure of observers to take his admissions into account is followed by yet another shift in terms. Montaigne goes on to assert that if he left any “regret” or “desire,” he doesn’t care about it anyway—especially since he always promises to do less than he knows he can. This self-justifying description of his relationship to his own self would seem to be at some distance from his opening claim that he “deciphered” himself “faithfully and conscientiously” to the city fathers of Bordeaux. We now learn that he was dissimulating all along, so as not to disappoint anyone. As he says in the closing paragraph, “I am apt to promise a little less than what I can do and what I hope to deliver” (784b) [je promets volontiers un peu moins de ce que je puis et de ce que j’espere tenir (1002b)]. However, this dissimulation seems to have failed, since even under such reduced expectations he has disappointed some.

We may wonder, in fact, what, precisely, Montaigne means by the statement made early in the essay, “I deciphered myself to them faithfully and conscientiously: exactly as I feel myself to be” [je me deschiffray fidelement et conscientieusement, tout tel que je me sens estre (982)]. Se déchiffrer is both a verb of interpretation and a verb of description. Montaigne uses it in both senses elsewhere in the Essais.²⁷ It implies both a reading of the self and a writing of the self, both a self-presentation and a self-understanding—two activities that might be said, in their combination, to describe the act of essay writing itself. Yet no less surprising is the present tense of the moment of self-definition, “just as I feel myself to be” [tout tel que je me sens estre]. It suggests that Montaigne’s description of himself then, to the magistrates of Bordeaux, is of a piece with what he is now. This is a surprising move, when we recall that throughout the Essais Montaigne returns again and again to the mutability of the self, to the fact that one is never the same two moments in a row. “Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two” (736c) [Moy à ceste heure et moy tantost sommes bien deux” (941c)], he says in “De la vanité,” the essay that precedes “De mesnager sa volonté.” Here, beneath the gaze the Other, at a moment when his actions may be, as he puts it, prey to constant misinterpretation, Montaigne suddenly finds a stable self to “decipher.” This may relate to the notion, noted earlier, that he is getting too old to change. However, given the insistence throughout the essay on the mutability of action and the instability of interpretation, it also has the function of a rhetorical gesture aimed at claiming a private stability over against a public world that is suddenly in flux. When the institutions of public life no longer guarantee the meaning of actions, an act of writing may help to fix them. Yet the very fact that the phrase is in the present tense and features a verb suggesting momentary impression—”as I feel myself to be” (rather than, say, “as I know myself to be,” or “as I am”)— underscores the fragility of this claim of essence. It suggests that, like so much in Montaigne, this stability may be produced out of the writing process itself and located in the present of the writing. It stands in unresolved tension with the pastness of Montaigne’s various expressions of regret and with his annoyance at those who criticized his mayoralty. Indeed, we may speculate that if “publishing” his defects to the city fathers of Bordeaux had only limited success, publishing essays in which his public service is framed and reinterpreted offers a bit more satisfaction.

“De mesnager sa volonté” closes with a citation from the Aeneid, in which the sea pilot Palinurus—a Renaissance commonplace figure for the political leader—is about to fall asleep and tumble to his death.²⁸ As he gazes around him he expresses his mistrust of the placid surface of the waves that are about to swallow him up: “My trust in such a monster place? / Ignore the meaning of the sea’s smooth face, / The quiet waves?” (784b) [me ne huic confidere monstro, / Mene salis placidi vultum fluctusque quietos / Ignorare? (1002b)].²⁹ This moment of anticipation, coming as it does in the last line of the essay, suggests that Montaigne is happy to have gotten out of public life without falling into the metaphorical sea of disaster. But it may also remind us that the most placid of surfaces, from the glassy sea to the written page of the essay, can conceal turbulence.

“De mesnager sa volonté” offers one of the few moments in the Essais when Montaigne appears as a public actor. It repeatedly turns the conventional vocabulary of moral philosophy on its head. It seeks to work out a model for a posthumanist political action, for a form of public service that is no longer built upon a shared public world. Montaigne’s response to a political sphere broken up by private passion—in which virtue itself has become a passion—involves the repeated admonition that the self must be protected from distractions, that duty must be undertaken dispassionately. In place of a traditional ideal of constancy we get the figure of the improvising actor, free from allegiance and memory, shaping the moment as he finds it. Next to this ideal, Montaigne depicts his own mayoralty. Yet his own improvisational practice is carefully preceded by an admission of personal shortcomings, as if Montaigne were preparing a stage upon which he might act without consequences. The last sections of the chapter, moreover, hint that this hedging strategy was only partially successful, as the essayist feels compelled to defend himself against those to whom he revealed his limitations at the outset. This need for a supplementary commentary on the mayoralty suggests that political action can never adequately be framed in advance by admonitions or warnings, as generations of moral philosophers have sought to do. It can only be justified retrospectively. Yet the very presence of the hydra-headed reading public, with its “multiplicity of interpretations,” suggests that that act of justification, like the Essais themselves, is potentially endless.