The Eyquems’ Social Ascension
“And if I were to live a long time, I do not doubt that I would forget my own name.”1 Montaigne’s name constitutes the author’s memory and incarnates the history of a family and its social ascension, but we still need to know what name Montaigne is talking about. Is it Michel Eyquem, his patronymic, or Michel de Montaigne, the name of his estate and his seigneury? The answer to this question differs over time, and the passage from Eyquem to Montaigne is a textbook case for the study of the social history of the class of wealthy merchants and bourgeois who became gentlemen at the end of the fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth centuries. The author of the Essais was the first member of his family to give up the name of his ancestors and retain only the name of his seigneury. In fact, the biography of “Michel, seigneur Montaigne” begins long before his birth. To understand his familial milieu, we have to study the social ascension of the house of Montaigne that started in the middle of the fourteenth century. The economic transformations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries favored the emergence and domination of well-off merchant families who had settled in the great European cities.
Political power slowly but surely shifted toward centers of exchange and commerce, particularly cities built on navigable waterways or at the mouths of rivers. Bordeaux was ideally situated to become a hub serving most European ports. Its access to the ocean gave a major advantage to those whose main activity consisted in warehousing merchandise and sending it on by sea to new markets. In the fifteenth century, during the decline of the English presence in the region, Bordeaux was a land of opportunity, and a significant number of merchants emigrated there from other parts of France and also from Spain and Portugal. For example, an edict of 1464 authorized emigrants to settle in Bordeaux in houses they found empty and to obtain letters of naturalization. Very early on, the wheels of commerce and the administrative control of the city were concentrated in the hands of a few families that had been able to benefit from the commercial development of Guyenne after the departure of the English.
In the fourteenth century, the name Eyquem was quite common in the Bordeaux region. It was spelled “Ayquem” and “Aiquem” as well as “Eyquem” and is found in several localities, including Mérignac, Taillan, Pessac, Camblanes, Blanquefort, and Langon. The Eyquems of Blanquefort—from whom the Montaignes descended—settled in Bordeaux in the early fourteenth century and joined the juradei as early as 1358, a sign that they had already achieved a significant economic success. Wealthy Bordeaux families formed a bourgeoisie that was little inclined to discuss its origins. Focused on the future, they practiced endogamy to increase their status in the city and to favor their access to municipal political power. Their goal was to advance their social position by means of marriages with other great bourgeois families. In the city, a political void allowed these families to take control of the administration in order to manage the regulation of their economic and commercial activities. By the middle of the fifteenth century, English power had grown considerably weaker in Guyenne, and in 1453 the battle of Castillon put an end to three centuries of English domination in Aquitaine. A parlementii was established in 1462, and the city’s privileges were approved and confirmed by Charles VIII in 1483. The king was generous toward the bourgeois of Bordeaux, declaring them free and exempt from having to pay subsidies and land taxes or make compulsory loans. Troops could not be billeted in the city without the consent of the mayor and the magistrates, and the city’s guard as well as its police were entrusted to the citizens. However, after the English left, Guyenne’s share of the land tax to be collected in Aquitaine was doubled. In this context of European expansion and political reforms, the city of Bordeaux underwent an unprecedented economic growth at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries.
Under Francis I the Anciennes Coutumes de Guyenne (“ancient customary laws of Guyenne”) were reformed to take into account the local bourgeoisie’s demands. The three estates of the sénéchaussée of Guyenne assembled in February 1520 to modify the old Coutumier. Several articles were suppressed or changed and new ones were added. The work lasted five months and the reformed Coutumier went into effect toward the end of 1527. Its territory was extended to include the former sénéchaussée of Bordeaux. The new customary law of Guyenne, which heavily favored the bourgeoisie, consisted of 117 articles written in a rather disorderly fashion and without much equity. Questions of inheritance and testamentary succession strongly recentered customary law around the transmission of property, and the goal of the great majority of the articles was to provide better protection for private property and to favor bourgeois property owners over the feudal territorial rights of noble landlords.iii The first article sets the tone of this rewriting of customary law. It stipulates that every son of a merchant family engaged in commerce or other business (banking, brokerage, purchasing) “can make commitments without his father’s consent, in matters concerning merchandise or business.”2 For example, children had the right to do business under their own names without depending on the authority of their fathers. In the same spirit of liberalizing mercantile law, Article V reorganized the law governing the legacy of goods to descendants by specifying that lineal transmission henceforth always had priority over feudal law. Inheritances, successions, transmissions, and donations of buildings, as well as the regulation of rents and mortgages, were subjected to new interpretations favorable to the rising bourgeoisie and represented more than sixty articles in the Coutumes générales de la ville de Bordeaux et de la sénéchaussée de Guyenne between 1520 and 1527. The revision of customary law at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the end result of a long process of political redistribution in Bordeaux and in Guyenne.
The Eyquems were among the small number of families that very soon came to hold the reins of the city’s administration. Montaigne’s ancestors made a fortune selling woadiv and smoked herring. The Eyquems followed the social trajectory typical of wealthy merchant families and used their economic success to gain access to political power. No matter what Montaigne says about it, his family’s past in Guyenne is not of noble origin, but is instead associated with commerce and merchandise, which may explain why the historical periods mentioned in the Essais are mainly Antiquity and the immediate present. The last hundred years are not referred to anywhere in the text, because for obvious reasons Montaigne is not interested in retracing the history of his family. There are only vague remarks about his grandparents and great-grandparents, on both the paternal and maternal sides. Of course, Montaigne talks about his father and brothers, but he remains almost completely silent about his earlier ancestors. We are told only that he was born of “a race famous for integrity,”3 and that his nobility goes back “more than a hundred years before me.”4 The limit of one hundred years is not chosen by accident. In the sixteenth century, the rules governing membership in the nobility varied depending on the region.5 In his Traité des nobles et des vertus dont ils sont formés, François de L’Alouëte proposes that nobles be forced to produce “once in their lives a description and genealogy of the race from which they come and descend from father and from mother to the fourth degree, and beyond as far as they can go and extend themselves,”6 and to deposit these descriptions in the hands of the bailiffs or seneschals so that they could be consulted in case of need. In Aquitaine, custom required a person to have “lived nobly” for one hundred years on his land before he could claim to be noble “by prescription.”v Usually leaving aside this quantitative conception of nobility, Montaigne prefers a qualitative definition, reminding his reader repeatedly that he behaves as a lord and lives nobly on his lands.
Belonging to the nobility of the sword,vi the only noble race,7 also meant performing military service. Montaigne wholeheartedly adhered to what was called the “soldierly” spirit of the nobility,8 even if he did not wear the sword into combat as his father had done. This correspondence between the social order and the main activity of the members of the nobility is often foregrounded in the Essais. In contrast, the world of commerce and merchandise remains a taboo subject. For Montaigne, money distorts human relations, corrupts traditional values, and injures the spirit of the nobility. He prefers battlefields to markets. It suffices to see the way in which he talks about the Indians of the New World and projects onto them his idea of nobility to see that he fully adheres to the military and chivalric principles that defined the noble ideal. Marked by this idealization of military values and their transformation into virtues, Montaigne reminds us that his father participated in the military campaigns in Italy during Francis I’s conquest and then loss of Milan. He describes himself as a soldier even though he took part in no battles and witnessed only one military siege—perhaps two—as an observer and not as a knight in the service of the king. If Montaigne is proud to be a Gascon, that is partly because of the military reputation the young men of his region enjoyed at the time. He repeatedly emphasizes this origin that made him an excellent horseman and indirectly authorized him to assert his membership in the French nobility. In his Essais Montaigne always distinguishes himself from the mercantile class (mercadence) and the world of the bourgeoisie.
Montaigne’s great-grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, was born in 1402; Ramon’s father was Martin (?) Eyquem and his mother was Jeanne de Gaujac, the daughter of a family that exported wine, salted fish, and woad in Bordeaux. Ramon took over the business of his uncle Guillart Eyquem, and around 1440 he married Isabeau de Ferraignes, the sister of Henri de Ferraignes, one of the first members of the Bordeaux parlement. The latter was connected, by his first marriage, to the noble Madeleine de La Mothe, the daughter of Jean de La Mothe, lord of Cambes, and by his second marriage, to the noble Jehanne du Puy, the daughter of Hélie du Puy, lord of La Jarthe. The marriage linking the Eyquems to the Ferraigneses marks the starting point of an alliance that was profitable for the Eyquems both financially and as a way of cultivating useful relationships. Thanks to her brother, Isabeau also offered her husband an opportunity to gain access to new power groups. From the middle of the fifteenth century on, the bourgeois family of the Eyquems signed its notarized documents with the title “honorable man Ramon Ayquem, merchant in the parish of Saint-Michel and bourgeois of Bordeaux.” He was among the city’s influential merchants and joined the jurade in 1472.
Ramon Eyquem’s everyday life was completely focused on pecuniary matters. Like many bourgeois who had grown rich, he invested his profits in real estate. In a logic of accumulating lands and houses, he reasoned and acted as a merchant would and was not yet cut out to be a noble. He left this concern about nobility to his children; his role was limited to preparing the terrain for the generations to come. Everything he did had as its aim to make his family’s name known and respected. Ramon was a prosperous merchant, and he rapidly made himself known as an “entrepreneur” in all sorts of commercial projects. He established his home on the Rue de la Rousselle in Bordeaux and began by exporting mainly salted fish, but he soon diversified his activities and began selling wine and woad, depending on the market opportunities. Like other big merchants of the time—the Carles, the Le Ferrons, the Pontacs, and the Makanams—Ramon Eyquem took an active part in the city’s political life, which greatly helped him in his personal affairs. At the end of the fifteenth century, the wine trade had supplanted that in woad and had become the main source of income for the bourgeois of Bordeaux and the region.9
In 1477, one year before his death, Ramon Eyquem bought the noble houses of Montaigne and Belbeys, in the barony of Montravel, along with their lands, vineyards, woods, and mills, from Guillaume Duboys, for 900 Bordeaux francs.10 This transaction made it possible to move from “Eyquem” to “Montaigne.” The estate of Montaigne is located on a hill between the Dordogne River and a stream called the Lidoire, and is now situated within the departments of Gironde and Dordogne, about forty-five kilometers due east of Bordeaux. The buildings and lands of Montaigne and Belbeys had first been sold to Thomas Pons, Lord of Clermont, for 300 gold royals and an annual income of thirty livres tournois. But Pons was unable to raise the sum asked and Guillaume Duboys had the sale canceled on October 10, 1477. The same day, he sold his lands to Ramon Eyquem and promised to transmit to him the list of the esporlesvii for the past six years. The payment of this fee was required when there was a change of owner. The amount of the esporle was generally modest, but this tax had an important symbolic function because it made it possible to anticipate the prescription of the landed seigneury and to assert the new lord’s right over the property in the event of a challenge. On November 30, 1477, Ramon Eyquem took possession of his land and the noble house of Montaigne, 103 years before the first publication of the Essais. In accord with the custom associated with the transmission of property, Ramon had traveled to his lands in the company of the former owner, who entered his former home in Ramon’s company and then left alone, witnessed by all the neighbors who had gathered there for the occasion. Ramon spoke a few words before a notary and then sat down to table, which allowed him to be officially recognized as the new master of the estate.11
Around 1450, two children had been born to Ramon and Isabeau Eyquem: Grimon, Montaigne’s grandfather, and Pey (Pierre), their second son. In documents notarized in the 1470s, Grimon and Pey are described as “honorable men … merchants of the parish of Saint-Michel.” Ramon also had two daughters, Pérégrina and Audeta. In a process of marriage and mixture between the rising bourgeoisie and a nobility in decline, Ramon married his daughters to Jean de Lansac and Bernard de Verteuilh, respectively; Lansac and Verteuilh were the heirs of noble families that had found it necessary, for financial reasons, to connect themselves with families from the bourgeoisie. In 1473, while he was getting ready to go on a pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela, Ramon wrote a testament in which he left his wife a large number of buildings and lands, provided monetary dowries for his two daughters, and designated his two sons, Grimon and Pey, as universal heirs.viii He died in June 1478, less than a year after acquiring the seigneury of Montaigne. In 1488, after the death of his brother, who had no children, Grimon remained alone to turn the Eyquems’ affairs to good account. Thanks to his acute business sense, especially in exports, his fortune grew considerably. He specialized in the trade in wine and salted fish with England and Spain, which led Scaliger to say, not without irony, that Montaigne’s father was a fishmonger. A document from 1477 presents Grimon as a ship owner who is chartering a caravel, the Nicholas de Saint-Paul, to transport fifty casks of wine to the port of La Crotoy in Picardy.12 His commercial profits allowed him to increase his real estate holdings and to buy more and more forests, houses, and lands around his noble house of Montaigne.13
Like his father, Grimon became a Bordeaux notable: elected to the jurade in 1485, at the age of thirty-five, he continued in that office for eighteen years before becoming provost of Bordeaux in 1503. Around 1490, he married Jeanne Dufour, the daughter of a merchant and juratix of the city. They had three daughters and five sons, including Pierre, Montaigne’s father, who was born on September 20, 1495. In 1485, Grimon Eyquem was still signing official documents as an “honorable man,” “merchant and bourgeois,” or “bourgeois of Bordeaux.” Ramon had enabled his family to acquire a noble land, but Grimon made the Eyquems’ fortune and consolidated their patrimony in real estate. However, for professional reasons he continued to reside in the ancestral house on the Rue de la Rousselle, where the Bordeaux bourgeoisie had settled.14 The Eyquems had owned this house since the middle of the fifteenth century. It remained their main domicile, and even Montaigne lived there for at least three years, after his marriage to Françoise de La Chassaigne in September 1565, and until the death of his father in 1568, before he returned to live in the château of Montaigne, whose owner he had become as his father’s universal heir. The “château” in question was a middle-sized building that did not yet have its towers or surrounding walls. There were far more imposing châteaus in the region than the one Ramon Eyquem had bought.
During the last years of the fifteenth century, Grimon Eyquem was split between two ways of life: that of a commoner residing in Bordeaux and that of a new noble who seldom visited his lands, but who had already begun to let time do the work of attaching the new name (Montaigne) to his family. The best way of being considered noble, without belonging to the nobility of the sword, was to “live nobly” on one’s lands in order to be recognized one day as a noble by prescription. Grimon could not claim to be “noble” without ceasing his mercantile activities, a step he hesitated to take. To do that he had to break all ties with a commoner’s life and spend more time on his estate in order to establish his reputation as a noble. That is what he finally did in 1508, when he handed his business over to one of his employees, Peyrot de Brusselay, and left the world of commerce and merchandise. He had not been able to decide to take this step earlier because he feared that he might lose his noble house and the title associated with it. As a result of an administrative and judicial suit, the sale of the noble house of Montaigne was contested for thirty years by the Duboys heirs. The transaction between the descendants of the former owner of the estate of Montaigne and Ramon Eyquem was ratified only in 1509, after Grimon paid 120 livres to seal the sale contract of 1477 with children of Belbeys.15
This belated agreement between the Duboyses and Grimon Eyquem played a decisive role in the Montaignes’ acquisition of nobility. The notarized documents bear the mark of Grimon’s evolution and testify to his social ambitions at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In fact, when he was on the point of giving up the commoner’s life, Grimon no longer hesitated to strike out the word “honorable,” replacing it with that of “noble,” as is shown by a document dated April 17, 1509.16 Before a notary, Grimon had the descendants of the former owner promise to “hand over and deliver the papers and information” about the two houses of Montaigne and Belbeys. He had to have proofs attesting to his recent social status. At this point Grimon began to present himself as the “noble manx Grimon Ayquem, squire, lord of the noble houses of Montaigne and Belbeys.” He lived on the income from his investments after he had consolidated the revenues from his domains, which came to 300 Bordeaux francs a year. The Eyquems had risen from the rank of well-off bourgeois to that of “country gentlemen” living on their assets. The cession of the noble house of Montaigne was legally settled, but the nobility of the family was not yet established. At that time, the title of “noble man … lord of …” referred to a series of different social realities: members of the nobility of the sword who had acquired their status on the battlefield over several centuries; country noblemen from prosperous peasant families; wealthy merchants who had bought their lands (and even the corresponding coats of arms)—that was the case for the Eyquems; the minor nobility ruined by wars and the movement of populations toward the cities; and councillors, lawyers, and magistrates who, thanks to the acquisition of their offices and their membership in the parlement, had been ennobled and sought in their turn to purchase noble lands where they could settle their families.17
In 1517, Grimon was actively trying to make his recent nobility recognized. In this effort to gain public recognition of his new status, he obtained a mandate from the parish priest of Blanquefort, Jean de Vivant, an honorary protonotary apostolic. In a document dating from the same year, Grimon signed himself “noble man lord of Montaigne and Mathacolom.” He died in early 1519, leaving to his four sons the task of following the long road to nobility by prescription. His eldest son, Pierre, had three brothers: Thomas, who was a lawyer before becoming canon of the church of Saint-André in Bordeaux and parish priest of Montaigne; Pierre Eyquem, lord of Gaujac, who, after having also had a go at being a lawyer, finally opted for the clergy and became canon of Saint-André upon the death of his brother Thomas; and Raymond, lord of Bussaguet, who had a long career as a councillor in the parlement of Guyenne. In conformity with the rules of succession in force at that time, the noble house of Montaigne went to Pierre, the eldest of the four brothers. The house on the Rue de Rousselle was divided up, but Pierre retained the largest share. Grimon had wished to give his eldest son the means of casting off the title of “bourgeois” in order to climb a further rung up the social hierarchy. Full of these aristocratic ambitions—revived by old age and the fear of dying while still labeled a merchant—he had decided to break with his business activities and make his eldest son a military man. Pierre would be a noble and a soldier; there was no better way of accelerating the family’s ennoblement. Spending time on a battlefield was an expedient way of proving the nobility of an individual who had up to that point had only the title of a “gentleman on parchment,” as the poet Tabourot des Accords put it in his Bigarrures. The sole nobility recognized was the nobility of the sword, which was won on the battlefield.
Grimon Eyquem began the transition from “Eyquem” to “Montaigne,” but ridding himself of the status of bourgeois was not easy; it was probably for that reason that he took advantage of his meetings with the notary to sign his name as “Lord of Montaigne” every time he bought a new property, trying to erase the appellation “bourgeois” that appears in all his commercial transactions. Grimon was far from being a lord, but he continued the slow process begun by his father. He played by the rules so well that toward the end of his life he moved unhindered from “honorable man” to “noble man”—a few notarial documents even describe him as “squire” (écuyer), not without exaggeration. Slowly but surely, people forgot his mercantile origins. The various titles given Grimon allow us to understand better the slow development toward nobility and the transition, so delicate and important, from the title of “honorable man” to that of “noble man” in the sixteenth century. There is a subtle distinction between these two attributes. The “noble man” is still a bourgeois who lives on his investment income after having retired from commerce; he belongs to a class in transition that no longer wants to be bourgeois, but is not yet entirely noble. The noble man comes from an urban elite and aspires to political office, seeing in the parlement and in municipal responsibilities a means of social ascent. In Bordeaux, for example, “noble men” had a good chance of ending up on the jurade, an administrative entity that ran the city. Even though it did not yet have either a name or political representation at the regional level, this new class constituted a genuine gentry.18 At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Eyquems were steadfast members of the Bordeaux gentry. Their real estate holdings had greatly increased, and they were about to leave the status of commoners.
Pierre Eyquem played a crucial role in the Eyquems’ slow but certain social transformation into Montaignes. We do not know exactly where he was educated. Montaigne tells us that his father had only a mediocre knowledge of letters and was “a man of very clear judgment for one who was aided only by experience and nature.”19 He is proud that his father embraced the military profession, the sole occupation worthy of the nobility. After his years at school, Pierre Eyquem was initially employed as a page in the noble house of Jean de Durfort, viscount of Duras,20 before leaving for Italy, where he served in a company of archers that accepted only gentlemen. For ten years, he pursued the military profession, most of the time outside Guyenne and abroad. Montaigne writes that his father had “taken a very long part in the Italian wars.”21 He tells us how his father left a diary in which he noted in great detail all the military campaigns in which he had participated. Pierre Eyquem fought in Francis I’s armies and returned to live in the château of Montaigne only in 1528, almost ten years after his father’s death. He retained the military spirit all his life and was able to convey his sense of chivalric virtues and his taste for the art of war to his son Michel. But he was the only true soldier in the family.
By 1558 Pierre Eyquem could no longer meet his military obligations as a lord, as he acknowledged in a statement made before the assembly of the barons and vassals of the sénéchaussée of Périgord. He sought to transmit his passion for arms to his youngest son, Pierre Eyquem, lord of La Brousse, who was serving as a man-at-arms in the company of Burie, governor of Guyenne. In 1561, he ordered military equipment for his son from an armorer in Bordeaux, including a plastron, a saddle, and a head protector for a horse, “the front capable of resisting an arquebuse.”22 After many years spent fighting, the elder Pierre Eyquem could claim the title of “noble Pierre Eyquem, lord of Montaigne, squire” without anyone daring to doubt the well-foundedness of his titles, even if on his return from Italy he resided most of the time in the family’s old house on the Rue de la Rousselle in Bordeaux. In a patrimonial document from 1531, he declared that he lived in Bordeaux. He did the same in 1543, when he bought another house on the Rue Gensan.23 Moreover, he chose, perhaps in accord with a family tradition, to follow the path laid out by his father and grandfather by getting involved in the city’s affairs, but without departing from his status as a noble, since at this time it was preferable, though not yet obligatory, to elect a mayor who came from the nobility. Despite their aristocratic pretensions, the Eyquems never separated themselves from the Bordeaux political milieu and continued to take an active part in the administration of the city. Their political engagement was constant from one generation to the next.
On January 15, 1529, Pierre Eyquem married Antoinette de Louppes (Lopez)—born in 1514—the daughter of Pierre de Louppes (Pedro Lopez) of Toulouse and the niece, or perhaps the god-daughter, of Antoine de Louppes de Villeneuve (Villanueva), a Spanish merchant who had gotten rich by trading in woad. The Louppes family may have descended from Jewish converts to Christianity, so-called Marranos or new Christians who had settled in London, Antwerp, Toulouse, and Bordeaux. In 1527 an arbitrage between Antoine de Louppes and Martin de Castille mentions a delivery of 764 sacks of woad to the port of Antwerp, ordered by “Pierre Loppes” merchant, residing in Antwerp.24 A little later on, we find Pierre de Louppes in Toulouse, where he joined the capitoulatxi in 1542. In Bordeaux, Jean de Villeneuve, the son of Antoine de Louppes, was ennobled when he gained a seat on the Great Council in 1553. The Louppeses specialized in trading in woad, chiefly among the cities of London, Antwerp, Bilbao, Bordeaux, and Toulouse.
The marriage of Pierre Eyquem and Antoinette de Louppes has caused much ink to flow, and we have to linger on it for a moment. Antoine de Louppes belonged to the Bordeaux bourgeoisie and signed notarized documents with the name “Anthoine de Louppes de Villeneufve.” After marrying his daughters to notables in the city, Antoine de Louppes saw in Pierre Eyquem, a young gentleman who had recently won glory by his military exploits, a fine husband for the daughter of his brother Pedro, who also traded in woad in Toulouse. The Louppeses belonged to the class of nouveaux riches who did not shrink from making use of any means of giving their children access to nobility. They generally chose the fastest way of achieving that end, namely, marriage with families that had recently been ennobled or were about to be ennobled. Thus in 1525 Étienne Eymar, the king’s advocate in the sénéchaussée of Guyenne, married Béatrix, the daughter of Antoine de Louppes, who was Pierre de Louppes’s brother. Eymar’s new father-in-law used his influence to secure Eymar a position in the sénéchaussée. Antoine de Louppes saw placing his daughter in a good family as an investment, especially since his new son-in-law was a lawyer who might someday become a parlement member (parlementaire). Étienne Eymar did join the parlement eight years later, in 1533. In accord with the same logic, the Louppeses married another daughter to another future parlementaire, Pierre Ferrand.25 The noble land of Montaigne promised Antoinette an attractive future.
The bourgeois origins of Montaigne’s mother—who became noble through her marriage, but whose ancestors were not at all noble—seemed a little too close and thus problematic for the author of the Essais, who is constantly preoccupied with asserting his own nobility. The mercantile branch on his mother’s side, which was still very present in the collective memory, might explain Montaigne’s famous failure to mention his mother. The evidence he adduces to show that his mother came from a noble family is far from corresponding to reality. Thus the well-known entry in his almanac (livre de raison, Ephemeris historica) in which he declares that he was born of noble parents (nobilibus parentibus) has never been taken seriously by scholars. It has even been suggested that Montaigne’s silence regarding his mother probably indicates that his father’s marriage was considered “unfortunate.” Let us be clear: “unfortunate” socially, not religiously. This hypothesis gains even more validity if we take into account Montaigne’s constant concern to emphasize his noble origins. Antoinette’s dowry nonetheless allowed Pierre Eyquem to escape worries about money, to spend major sums on his lands, and to undertake the renovation of his noble house, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century hardly resembled a château. However, his marriage in no way helped to confirm or accelerate his accession to “noble” status. It might even have been counterproductive insofar as the Louppeses had not yet left the world of commerce.
Although it is possible, Antoinette de Louppes’s Jewish origin has never been demonstrated with certainty and does not allow us to conflate Montaigne’s familial origins with his cultural and religious identity.26 In fact, the Louppes family’s establishment in Toulouse goes back to a time long before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 or from Portugal in 1496. The fact that they settled in southern France is explained by the economically viable trade in woad in that region. All through the fifteenth century, fiscal opportunism led many Spaniards to settle in Toulouse. Nonetheless, Montaigne’s ancestry on his mother’s side remains an interesting problem in the Essais, but although we do not have the slightest documentary certitude—except by textual cross-checking—the remarkable absence of references to his mother can be plausibly explained by his desire to avoid mentioning her ancestry. Although time had made it possible to erase Montaigne’s bourgeois ancestry on his father’s side, this was not the case for his mother’s side. Dowries are soon forgotten, but social origin leaves a more persistent mark on people’s minds.
In his marriage contract with Antoinette de Louppes, Pierre Eyquem signed his name as “noble Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne, bourgeois of Bordeaux.” In 1530, at the age of thirty-five, he was named first jurat and provost of Bordeaux; once again, after paying homage to the archbishop of Bordeaux during a ceremony that provided him with an opportunity to take his oath publicly, to promise to lease his lands instead of working them himself, and to list within a period of forty days all the fiefs, cens,xii and revenues that he possessed, he presented himself as “noble Pierre Eyquem,” “lord of the noble house of Montaigne.” Bernard de Villiers, lord of Canican and governor of Armaignac; Jean de Martin, lord of La Roque; Bertrand de Mendosse, lord of Montlaur; Bernard de Saint-Genez; and Johan de Peutotz, lord of Cugnac, were the noble witnesses to this ceremony. They made it possible, in accord with the custom, to confirm Pierre Eyquem’s nobility by their simple presence at his side.27 This symbolic homage was supposed to leave a memorable mark on the inhabitants of the region who might then report the event. Pierre Eyquem considered himself to be a member of the minor nobility, and his neighbors confirmed his title. The eldest of his children was to inherit the family patrimony; to that end Pierre wrote a testament that stipulated the terms of his legacy.28
Shortly after their marriage, Pierre and Antoinette set up housekeeping in the château of Montaigne and begin to “live nobly.” Following an already well-established family tradition, Pierre did not abandon his municipal responsibilities and divided his time between Bordeaux and his estate of Montaigne. The official change in his residence, which was more symbolic than real, marked an important step toward the final ennoblement of the Eyquems.29 Pierre behaved as a lord, and noble life was all the more agreeable to him because he could boast of having fought in Italy at the side of the king. He drew attention to his military service and “dragged his sword” (traînait l’épée), as people said at that time. He liked to receive on his estate local scholars or strangers who were passing through. In April or May 1542, Pierre Bunel, a scholar from Toulouse who wrote esteemed Latin letters, spent some time at the château of Montaigne. When he left, he gave his host a copy of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis, a gift that shaped the intellectual evolution of the young Michel de Montaigne, who was not yet ten years old. A few years later Pierre asked his son to translate this Latin work into French, as a simple schoolboy’s exercise. Fifteen years later, still inclined to receive erudite humanists who were stopping in Bordeaux or in Guyenne, Pierre Eyquem played host to John Rutherford, a classmate of Montaigne’s at the College of Guyenne, who took advantage of his stay at the château to write the opening epistle for his Commentarium de arte disserendi libri quatuor (published in Paris in 1557), a treatise in which he proved to be a bitter enemy of the Ramists.xiii Rutherford even supervised the studies of Michel’s young brother, Thomas.30 Pierre Eyquem’s benevolent hospitality toward men of letters also allowed him to draw attention to his noble way of life and to imbue his sons with the doctrines of the glorious humanism of the first half of the sixteenth century.
FIGURE 2. Michel Beuther, Ephemeris historica, Paris, 1551, p. 61, February 28. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux.
Pierre and Antoinette’s first surviving child, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, was born in the noble house of Montaigne on February 28, 1533, between 11:00 a.m. and noon.xiv In his almanac (Ephemeris historica), Montaigne notes that his father and mother were noble by birth: “natus est Petro Eiquemio Montano & Antonina Lopessia nobilibus parentibus, Michael Eiquemius Montanus”31 (figure 2). Montaigne later modified this first inscription in his hand—probably after 1570, because in the early 1560s he was still using his Latinized name—doing away with “Eyquem” by twice striking out the patronymic. In another entry in his almanac, Montaigne’s father’s name is again struck out, leaving only the name of the noble land: “in 1495 Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne my father was born at Montaigne”32 (figure 3).
A few days after his birth, Michel was held at the baptismal font by four persons “of the most abject fortune,” in accord with an aristocratic practice that consisted in having a child baptized by beggars or impoverished people. The child was immediately taken to a wet nurse in a hamlet near the château where he was brought up to “the humblest and commonest way of life.”33 In his Essais, Montaigne mentions this nurse whose milk, “moderately healthy and temperate,”34 is supposed to have given him a “heavy, lazy, and do-nothing nature”35 and a “soft” (molle) disposition. Montaigne even goes so far as to insinuate that a person’s character is not hereditary but is transmitted by his nurse.36 The following year, 1534, Antoinette de Montaigne gave birth to her second son, Thomas (1534–1602), who became the lord of Arsac after marrying his second wife, Jacquette d’Arsac, Estienne de La Boétie’s stepdaughter. Thomas joined the Protestant cause, thereby incurring his elder brother’s disapproval. Montaigne’s second brother, Pierre (1535–1595), was born the next year. Montaigne’s father had ensured the transmission of the name of the seigneury of Montaigne by producing three sons in less than three years. In 1536 his first daughter, Jeanne (1536–1597) was born; she married Richard de Lestonnac in 1555. After having opted for Protestantism as well, Jeanne gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne (1556–1640), a devout Catholic who founded the Convent of Notre-Dame in Bordeaux.xv
FIGURE 3. Michel Beuther, Ephemeris historica, Paris, 1551, p. 284, September 29. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux.
Six years later, Pierre and Antoinette had another child, Arnaud (1541–1569), who died shortly after his father of an apoplexy resulting from being struck in the head by a court-tennis ball. He had inherited 1,700 livres and property on Macau, an island in the estuary of the Gironde. Montaigne pays homage to his late brother in the 1580 edition of his Essais. A second sister, Léonor, was born eleven years later, in 1552. She married Thibaud de Camain, lord of Tour-Carnet and a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux. Like her brother Thomas, she also converted to Protestantism. In 1555, Montaigne had a third sister, Marie, who married Bertrand de Cazalis, lord of Frayche, in 1579, shortly before her sudden death in 1580.
Although he made a point of “living nobly,” Pierre Eyquem did not cut himself off from the urban world, because Bordeaux remained the center of power. Remaining on his lands would have been tantamount to political and social suicide for him and his family. Therefore, he went regularly to Bordeaux, where he had become the owner of several houses. Like his father, he rapidly acquired an important position in the municipal government and became Bordeaux’s deputy mayor in 1536. He was also reelected to the jurade. Pierre Eyquem had established himself as an administrator of the city, but the time was not propitious, because it was still too close to the salt-tax revolt of 1548, which had cost Bordeaux dearly. After this revolt, the city was summarily deprived of its privileges and severely sanctioned by Henry II. To make amends and to speed the reestablishment of the city’s privileges, Pierre Eyquem traveled to Paris with “twenty casks of wine to make gifts to lords favorable to the city of Bordeaux.” His devotion to the city’s service got him elected mayor of Bordeaux in 1554. This office marked the culmination of a local political career begun three generations earlier. Pierre took advantage of his success in public life to transform his noble house of Montaigne into a genuine château. On December 8, 1554, he obtained from the archbishop of Bordeaux, François de Mauny, the authorization to fortify it.37 In 1555, he had towers and a surrounding wall constructed, thus giving his home a more imposing appearance. The religious disturbances that had begun to rage in Guyenne made such fortifications indispensable. The lands and buildings his grandfather and father had bought now formed a fairly respectable seigneury, without being among the most opulent of the region. Five years later, Pierre and Antoinette had their last child, Bertrand (1560–1627), lord of Mattecoulon, Montaigne’s fourth brother, twenty-seven years younger than he. Although he was a fervent Catholic and devoted to the Virgin Mary, Bertrand became, like his brother Michel, a gentleman of Henry of Navarre’s chamber in 1584. He accompanied Montaigne to Italy and remained in Rome to take fencing lessons there.
At the time, Bordeaux was a city in transition. The authority of the jurats and the mayor had been seriously reduced after the revolt of 1548, and in the early 1550s the provost appointed by the king had more actual power than the mayor. On May 25, 1556, while Pierre was mayor, letters from Henry II and a decision by the parlement of Bordeaux defined the respective rights and powers of the provost, the mayor, and the jurats. Following a difference of opinion regarding jurisdictional questions, a suit concerning the supervision of the city’s political police was filed by the mayor and the jurats against the provost of the city, Pierre d’Estignoulx. The king demanded that the parlement issue a ruling reasserting the provost’s authority. On this occasion he reminded the parlement that in conformity with the decrees of August 1550, the representative of the political authority was the lieutenant general, Thomas de Ram. Forced to recognize that this representative of royal authority in the sénéchaussée of Guyenne had the right to intervene in matters of political justice, the parlement nonetheless decided that the provost of the city could take no part in them. This represented a small victory for Pierre Eyquem and the jurats, even if they did not yet recover the authority they had exercised earlier. It was in this climate of the slow reestablishment of municipal powers that Pierre performed his functions as mayor.
During his term as mayor of Bordeaux, Pierre Eyquem lent a sympathetic ear to the grievances the city’s rich merchants expressed. He quickly understood that only the bourgeois could ensure the economic security necessary for the everyday management of the city. The price of wine was a central preoccupation, because a decline in prices had set in after the revolt of 1548 and lasted until the end of the 1560s. A petition filed by the jurats and the mayor of Bordeaux, dated June 11, 1568, reminded the king that “the country of the Bordelais is more sterile and infertile than any other in your kingdom.”38 Charles IX had been able to observe this firsthand during his journey through the region in 1565. According to the jurats, it was impossible to “sow and grow grains or fruits other than grapevines.” The producers and merchants of wines from the Bordeaux region deplored the increase in expenses connected with the production and transportation of wine, and in particular the increase in the cost of a day’s work by a “laboring man.” They drew the sovereign’s attention to the fact that despite the rise in prices for other products, the price of wine had not risen for almost ten years. They also complained about the fees for transportation and storage, which they considered excessive. In addition, there were the increasing taxes for the maintenance and wages of the military forces. To compensate the wine merchants’ losses, the jurats asked to be exempted from the tax of five sols per hogshead of wine stored inside the city walls. To make up for this deficit, they proposed to pay the king a fixed sum of 10,000 livres tournois instead of the 33,234 owed to the Crown, referring to various misfortunes and calamities, past and present. There followed a disguised form of blackmail that reminded the sovereign of Bordeaux’s strategic position as the capital of Guyenne and a “frontier and maritime” city that had to be kept loyal at any cost “in order to avoid the surprises that might occur [as a result of] the pernicious conspiracies that everyone has seen being covertly formed in the sermons of those belonging to the so-called reformed religion.”39 The jurats promised the king that they would see to it that “the so-called reformed religion”—as the Catholics called it—did not establish itself in their region, in exchange for which they expected a decrease in taxes on the storage and sale of wine. The political and religious argument did not remain a dead letter.
As an elected municipal official, Montaigne’s father was at the center of the negotiations with the king seeking to reestablish the city’s privileges, which left him little time to visit his lands or to display before his neighbors his status as a noble lord. The author of the Essais preferred to keep silent about his father’s and his grandfather’s various municipal responsibilities, emphasizing instead the noble land of Montaigne and considering his château his ancestors’ sole place of residence. Although Bordeaux remained the political and economic center of the region, he chose to depict himself on his estate. Speaking of his ancestors’ château, he presents it as “my birthplace and that of most of my ancestors; they set on it their affection and their name.”40 After 1588 Montaigne added: “and of my father,” but changed his mind and ended up striking out this manuscript notation on the Bordeaux Copy. It was now his château, and after all, his father was, like Ramon and Grimon, relegated to the status of ancestor. However, few of these ancestors had lived at Montaigne, and the author of the Essais is obviously inclined to transform this brief history of the lords of Montaigne into an immemorial reality. Montaigne was only the second member of his family to have been born at Montaigne. To compensate for his family’s recent accession to nobility, he describes selected moments when his ancestral nobility is revealed in all its dignity and even creates memorable events that show off his noble way of life.
Establishing his nobility required him to present documents relating to his house and to leave records that could be used by future generations. On the matter of these records, we know that Pierre Eyquem had the habit of keeping a diary (papier journal) in which he was accustomed, according to Montaigne, to “insert in it all occurrences of any note, and the memorabilia of his family history day by day.”41 At one point in his life, Montaigne had the same habit, and we now have the first page of an old manuscript on which we read: “1568. Memoir of the affairs of the late Messire Michel de Montaigne, after the death of Monsieur his father.”42 This “diary” still existed at the end of the seventeenth century, because an inventory drawn up by a notary named Claveau on October 21, 1697, mentions a “Livre d’heures” written by Montaigne. Unfortunately, the rest of this precious document later disappeared. The use of a diary was never a practice diligently pursued by Montaigne, who nonetheless regards it as “an ancient custom, which I think it would be good to revive, each man in each man’s home. And I think I am a fool to have neglected it.”43 We know that Montaigne accorded great importance to everything that had to do with his name, his titles, his lands, and his “family history” in general, without for all that deigning to elaborate on that history in his Essais.
In his Discours de la noblesse, et des justes moyens d’y parvenir, which dates from 1584, Loys Ernaud describes the grave malady then afflicting the French nobility. He notes with annoyance that it is very hard to distinguish noble lords because “one does not know by what marks a Gentleman can be recognized: this title being today so vague in France.”44 From a strictly legal point of view, in the Renaissance there were only two social categories: the nobles and the commoners. The jurist Jehan Bacquet explains, in his Quatriesme traicté … des droicts du Domaine de la Couronne de France, published in 1582, that “under these kinds are included all the inhabitants of the kingdom.”45 In reality, things were more complex, and a large number of “gentlemen” took advantage of the ambiguity that prevailed at the end of the sixteenth century regarding the definition of nobility.46 Wealthy merchants achieved noble status more and more frequently by buying noble lands and houses, which were sold to them by minor lords or impoverished barons in need of money. All they had to do was pay the franc-fief xvi fee.47 Then these “nobles on paper” sought to be exempted from paying this fee and thus gain equal footing with nobles from ancient families. This practice rapidly became general, and the mercantile bourgeoisie knew how to exploit a legal possibility that opened the door to nobility for them. Some foreign bourgeois even occasionally succeeded in having themselves naturalized by the king in order to no longer be subject to the droit d’aubaine,xvii but to do so they had to obtain letters of ennoblement. This required them to follow a rather tricky but effective procedure that allowed them to procure legal documentation that was then religiously transmitted from one generation to the next.
Montaigne’s grandfather had demanded such written records of his new nobility from the former owner of the noble house he had acquired. But these letters had to be verified, and everything depended on contacts made with the royal chancellery. The second and better means of being ennobled was based on the condition, dignity, and service of the person in question. The Eyquem family chose to take this route to ennoblement through performing official functions. In France, several conditions and responsibilities then guaranteed the ennoblement of persons who fulfilled responsibilities for the king. This was the case for the Chancellor of France, the Keeper of the Seals, the members of the king’s Privy Council, and the members of the Council of State, that is, the members of the high nobility of the parlements. Similarly, the presidents, councillors, attorneys, and state prosecutors of the Paris parlement were considered noble and thus exempt from the franc-fief fee. The provincial parlements soon followed this practice, basing themselves on the principle that they too belonged, in a statutory fashion, to the Paris parlement, on which they depended. On this principle, all councillors, no matter in what city they performed their duties, were themselves attached to the Paris parlement and thus should enjoy the same prerogatives.
The Paris parlement served as a model for the kingdom’s other parlements. Bacquet notes that the prerogatives of the various provincial parlements were comparable to those of the capital’s: “The same can be said of the other Courts of Parlement in the Kingdom of France.”48 This possibility of ennoblement via parlementary office also applied to the councillors of the Cours des Aides and of any court sovereign in its jurisdiction. The reasoning went like this: since the members of parlement dispense royal justice, they must themselves belong to the nobility. There can be only one justice, that of the sovereign, and it can be dispensed only by nobles. The nobility of the “long robe” was transmitted to descendants, like the nobility of sword.49 Both were hereditary. The children of the councillors of the courts of parlement could “enjoy all the rights, authorities, privileges, freedoms, and immunities that nobles of the sword enjoy.”50 François de L’Alouëte testifies to this with regard to royal officers: “Such is the force of the nobility’s privilege and right that the king grants those who hold these positions, responsibilities, and offices. And the merit of their service is so prized and esteemed that if their children want to follow the vocation of nobility, they will be immediately received into the rank of nobles, even if they hold it [only in] the first degree, and from then on all those who descend from them will be nobles.”51 However, no one was deceived, and tensions rapidly appeared between the nobility of sword and the nobility that had emerged from the law courts. The courts of parlement could not be confused with the true court, that of the king. Those who had succeeded in retiring to their lands after occupying offices in parlements preferred to forget their pasts as magistrates.
Probably for the same reasons, Montaigne does not dwell on his family’s lineage, and he also prefers to emphasize his noble way of life. He does not expand on the origin of his nobility, and he was not the only one who found for himself ancestors of elevated extraction. Unable to trace their families back more than a hundred years to find ancestors of lofty extraction, most of these new nobles preferred to stress their way of living in retirement on their lands, free from any visible commercial activity. In this way, “living nobly” is a leitmotiv and a genuine social aspiration in the Essais. Family history is usually not mentioned, to the advantage of the present and everyday preoccupations. According to this credo, the merchant class that sought to join the nobility preferred to ignore its history the better to glorify itself by emphasizing its present service. This ideological choice led to a preference for writing about everyday life, a new category of modernity into which the form of the essay inserts itself. Montaigne quickly learned to use his book as a proof of nobility and to make it an object of memory. It could be argued that the Essais are substituted for a lacking documentation and constitute the proof par excellence through which the author establishes his own nobility.
In the sixteenth century, the surest way for a wealthy merchant to achieve nobility was to purchase a public office and join a provincial parlement. A royal councillor at the court of a parlement automatically became noble, and so did his children. The rising bourgeoisie, including that in Bordeaux, made extensive use of this way of moving from one order to the other. One then had to “live nobly” for two or three generations before this nobility was no longer subject to challenge. A decree issued by the Paris parlement in 1573 confirmed this condition. In his “Seventh Plea,” titled “That to justify nobility of blood, it has to be shown that the father and grandfather lived nobly,”52 Cardin Le Bret asks whether the children of councillors enjoy the same privileges as their parents. Are they, for example, exempt from the land tax? Taking as his model the Romans, who ennobled ministers and magistrates, Le Bret indicates that “the appellants must set forth their genealogy and demonstrate it” before the court in order to benefit from the same rights as their parents.53 A decree of 1593 endorsed this system of verbal verification, which appealed solely to the collective memory. Families in possession of an office in the magistracy were exempted from the requirement of a hundred years (of living nobly) or three quarterings (of noble blood); the possession of an office, including that of councillor in the parlement, over three generations could usually be substituted for any other proof of nobility.54
In a chapter on the law of ennoblement taken from the Trois premiers traictez … des droits du domaine et de la couronne de France, published in 1580, Jehan Bacquet explains that there are five ways of proving nobility: by “common reputation,” that is, by proving that one’s parents were themselves “considered” noble by their neighbors; by “noble and decent conversation,” the best proof of which consisted in demonstrating that one’s ancestors were accustomed to wearing noble clothes or devices; by showing that one of one’s ancestors had borne arms and served in the military profession; by demonstrating that one of one’s parents had previously owned a château or a “terre forte”; and finally, by attesting that members of one’s family had ancient coats of arms painted in “lofty places” such as churches and burial sites. Bacquet explains that when combined, the first two of these means make it possible to demonstrate an individual’s nobility, while the other three do not suffice by themselves to establish nobility irrefutably. In any case, one had to present documents or rely on witnesses whose role Bacquet seeks to explain: “To prove that a man is noble, it suffices that the witnesses state that they knew his grandfather and father, saw them living nobly, following the profession of arms, going off to war, … consorting with Gentlemen, wearing Gentlemen’s clothes, their wives wearing the garments of ladies, and performing other noble acts, without being subject to the land tax, as nobles, and that they have been considered, esteemed, and reputed to be noble by all the inhabitants of the area.”55 Thus a bourgeois could not claim to be transformed into a gentleman from one day to the next. Purchasing land and obtaining the title that was attached to it did not suffice to be ennobled. To enjoy the privilege we have just enumerated, the “new noble” had to live nobly for an indeterminate and variable period. This temporal tribute was the only way of being recognized as noble. The procedure consisted in patiently displaying one’s way of life before the largest possible number of people. In order to do that, one had to organize and participate in events whose function was to exhibit the noble life of these lords-on-paper.
“Living nobly” became a necessity for every gentleman who wanted to be recognized as such and thus confirm his status. Although this expression generally had a legal value in the sixteenth century, it was not based on any specific criterion and remained rather vague on the legal level.56 For example, “living nobly” was not self-evident and had meaning only in the eyes of others, mainly one’s neighbors. Once his rank was established, the new noble had to give up all commercial activity. Those who did not risked losing their status. In reality, however, this seldom happened during the second half of the sixteenth century, and a large number of new nobles continued to pursue hidden commercial activities through intermediaries.
Officially, a gentleman had to live solely on the income from his assets, espouse a military career, or belong to the nobility of the robexviii through his office. Commercial activity and nobility did not go together, which implied a radical modification of the former bourgeois’s way of life. Being noble designated a mode of life extending over a limited time, because genealogical research to prove nobility seldom went back more than three generations. At the end of the sixteenth century, being noble implied being perceived as such by the community and by the collective memory. Every lord worthy of the name had to live in a way that respected noble values. Nobility could be summed up as a question of reputation, which was established by multiplying “representations of nobility” that could mark the minds of the nearby peasants and neighbors. Public opinion and appearance were determining factors in claiming a nobility that was still poorly established. Consequently, many of these bourgeois gentlemen had become experts at communication and applied literally one of Machiavelli’s political principles: only appearances matter. Human memory has an unfortunate tendency to register only what is displayed in an ostentatious way. Therefore, what was important was to be “notoriously noble,” to use Bacquet’s expression. Montaigne invariably sought to demonstrate his notorious nobility. The necklace of the Order of Saint Michael was for him a godsend because it was a constant reminder of his status as a gentleman, and he followed rigorously all the rules set forth in the order’s statutes.
Without always being able to present letters of nobility, it was nonetheless possible to prove that nobility went back several generations. But abuses were frequent, and the courts sometimes intervened to decide cases involving the false attribution of nobility. Thus a judgment handed down on July 30, 1575, against the lord of La Motte de Mar-Fontaine stipulates that “nobility must be proven back to the great-grandfather, having lived nobly, otherwise one is not acceptable without letters of ennoblement, even if one is considered noble from father to son.” Another decree, dated August 8, 1582, prohibits “anyone to call himself noble if he is proven to be a commoner, on pain of corporal punishment.”57 However, these cases were relatively rare, and few of the new nobles were ever bothered. Montaigne had no difficulty defending himself against his detractors who accused him, when he was reelected mayor of Bordeaux in 1583, of having usurped his title of nobility. Accusations of this kind were difficult to prove, and nobles on parchment had ample means of defending themselves when a suit was brought against them.
The shortest path to the recognition of nobility was, as we have said, to show that one’s ancestors had lived nobly on their lands. For example, membership in this rank could be demonstrated by gathering all the local inhabitants at a parish high mass in order to attest publicly to one’s good faith. The approval of one’s neighbors served as a legal proof. But the converse could also occur, and sometimes made it possible to unmask a false noble. For example, a community meeting at which Pierre Doignet was denounced before the parishioners of his quarter in Paris on March 10, 1581, made it possible to begin a procedure of liquidating his right of franc-fief. Generally speaking, if it was established that a man’s father and grandfather had lived nobly on their lands, then his title of nobility was verified and his status as a gentleman was confirmed. On this point Montaigne felt invulnerable, and he was. His strategy consisted in combining the three means that highlighted his nobility: first, by acquiring an office as councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux, he was assimilated to the nobility of the robe; then he created a reputation and a “common renown” on his lands; and finally he successfully proved his father’s military service in Francis I’s royal army. Montaigne had little to worry about. Descended from a “noble lineage,” “living nobly,” and a member of parlement since the end of the 1550s, he had all the assets mentioned and commented upon by the jurists of his time. After 1575—that is, after having obtained his title of knight of the Order of Saint Michael and after his appointment as a Gentleman of the Chambers of the Kings of France and Navarre—he really no longer needed to pursue the parlementary path to claim to be noble. The triple strategy of the 1560s was no longer necessary, and he preferred to count on his family’s true nobility of blood.
Most of the time, bourgeois who had conformed to a certain mode of noble life over several generations became noble by prescription. They had succeeded in making productive use of the lands and seigneuries purchased from the bankrupt minor nobility and felt themselves to be legitimate members of the aristocracy. They had also been able to infiltrate the administrations of cities and still participated indirectly in the economic activity of their region. The process of ennoblement begun by the Eyquem family toward the end of the fifteenth century began to bear fruit, and Montaigne was the first to enjoy it fully. Others quite frequently followed his family’s course of action. Ennoblement by prescription was not rare in the Renaissance, even though we have very few texts relating to this means of entering the nobility. As one scholar has put it, “prescription consists above all of silence. It is based on oblivion or on a complicity of interests.”58 We can easily see why this increasingly widespread practice was not based on any legal text, because it was in everyone’s interest to leave no written trace of this form of ennoblement. The vaguer the term “prescription” was, the more it could be exploited. In practice, the “oblivion” covered a period of three generations or, in certain parts of France—including Guyenne—a period of about a hundred years. The noble whose status was recognized after the third generation or one hundred years then had a right to the title “noble.”
In the Essais, Montaigne points to his nobility by referring to his own title’s right of prescription: “All her [Fortune’s] gifts that my house enjoys were there more than a hundred years before me.”59 With this apparently trivial remark, Montaigne intends to distinguish himself from those who have not followed this sacred rule: he does not want to be confused with the nouveaux riches who ignored temporal prescription and tried to cut corners. By informing the reader that his lands and his seigneury date back more than three generations, he reminds him that he has the right to consider himself a true gentleman. Let us note that in Brittany, for example, the period of a century was often mentioned as a proof of nobility.60 In any case, the gentleman by prescription seeks to show that a necessary and “legal” period of time separates him from commoner status and from the mercantile world to which his ancestors formerly belonged.
Marriage also allowed new nobles to consolidate economic alliances and to carry members of other merchant families along in the wake of their recognized nobility. For the minor, newly established nobility, marriage was above all an economic and social matter that favored both the increase of its patrimony and the transmission of its name. L’Alouëte observes that most of the new nobles obtained their titles “by marriage through the alliances and conjunctions of the Nobles with the aforementioned commoners, through inheritances, divisions, gifts from the King or the Princes, or other similar means.”61 He recommends prohibiting marriages between commoners and nobles in order to preserve “the Condition of the nobility.” In the Renaissance, marriage was a matter of social or economic advancement and not a matter of the heart.62 As Montaigne writes, “Let us choose the most necessary and useful action of human society; that will be marriage.”63 When in 1565 he wed Françoise de La Chassaigne, the daughter of Joseph de La Chassaigne, soudanxix of Pressac, and Marguerite Douhet, the granddaughter of the late vice president of the parlement, Geoffroy de La Chassaigne, lord of Pressac, he made a good marriage on the social level, at least in the context of his first career in the parlement of Bordeaux. This was not, moreover, the first alliance between the Eyquems and the La Chassaignes, who had long shared political ambitions and pretensions to nobility.
Twenty years earlier, taking advantage of the king’s expansion of the number of members of parlement, Montaigne’s uncle, Raymond Eyquem, lord of Bussaguet, had entered the parlement of Bordeaux as a councillor. In 1546, he married Adrienne de La Chassaigne, the daughter of Geoffroy de La Chassaigne, who was also a councillor at the parlement.xx They had four children: Geoffroy, Jeanine, Jeanne (married to the lord of La Taulade), and Robert, the lord of the noble house of La Salle de Brielhan and of the parish of Blanquefort. The family of the La Chassaignes of Guyenne was a branch of the La Chassaignes that had long been established in Berry.xxi Settled in Poitou and Périgord since the beginning of the sixteenth century, this family rapidly made a place for itself in the political and judicial administration of these regions. We find the name La Chassaigne in Guyenne for the first time in 1512.64 The family established itself permanently in Bordeaux by holding the office of general prosecutor of the parlement. The La Chassaignes very quickly contracted powerful alliances and made the acquisition of several titled lands, including the soldaneriexxii of Pressac attached to their house of Ségur. The registry of nobles for Gascony and Guyenne indicates that, in the sixteenth century, there were only two soudans in Guyenne: that of Pressac and that of La Trau. The soldanerie of Pressac was inscribed on the rolls of the nobility of Basadois in 1557. Harassed during the salt-tax revolt of 1548, Geoffroy de La Chassaigne lost the exercise of his office of president but nonetheless retained a significant political influence.
Geoffroy’s son, Joseph de La Chassaigne, also served as a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux from 1543 to 1569 before becoming vice president of this law court in 1569. He had inherited by testament the land and seigneury of Pressac. From his marriage with Marguerite Douhet he had five children: Geoffroy II, who became squire and soudan lord of Pressac, gentleman of the king’s chamber; François; Nicolas; Jeanne; and Françoise, who inherited 7,000 livres tournois from her father and was to be Montaigne’s future wife. The enviable political trajectory of Joseph de La Chassaigne, lord of Pressac, did not go unnoticed in Bordeaux, and his daughter, Françoise, was a fine match for someone who sought a parlementary career in Bordeaux. The La Chassaignes were not nobles by blood, but in the early 1560 the Eyquem family had not yet reached the hundred years necessary for nobility by prescription. An alliance with the La Chassaignes offered other, more immediate advantages, and might permit Michel de Montaigne to join a well-established parlementary clientele that was sufficiently powerful in Bordeaux to allow him to envisage a promising career in the parlement.
From the La Chassaignes’ point of view, the Montaignes were an equally ideal alliance, because the two families were pursuing similar strategies, as members of the parlement, as administrators of the city, and as potential new nobles. For Michel de Montaigne, a marriage with a La Chassaigne—after that made by his uncle—had the advantage of increasing the social and political visibility of the name Eyquem in Bordeaux, thanks to the La Chassaignes’ rich connections and political influence. This marriage also allowed him a chance to ensure that he had children and could hand down a name. On this point, Montaigne was less fortunate, because his wife never gave him a male child; we can imagine the frustration of the man who was the first “noble by prescription” in his family, but was incapable of transmitting the new name of Montaigne to his descendants. Françoise de La Chassaigne gave birth to six children, all girls, of whom only one survived, Léonor. The nobility of the Eyquems thus began and ended with Michel.
Pierre Eyquem wanted to give his son the best of educations, in accord with the pedagogical precepts of the humanism of the time of King Francis I. From birth, Montaigne was instructed and brought up as the heir of a noble family. It was he who would ensure in a definitive way the conversion of the Eyquems into Montaignes. It was necessary to lavish on him an upbringing worthy of his future responsibilities. After having been put out to a wet nurse, he was brought back to the château, where in early1535 his father decided to make Latin his son’s native tongue, a practice Erasmus had recommended in his De pueris (1529). Thus in his early childhood Montaigne was instructed in Latin. His father forced even the château’s servants to speak to him only in Latin: “it was an inviolable rule that neither my father himself, nor my mother, nor any valet or housemaid, should speak anything in my presence but such Latin words as each had learned in order to jabber with me.”65 Montaigne relates that his parents learned enough Latin to be able to communicate with him. As he notes, not without exaggeration and irony: “Altogether, we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side, where there still remain several Latin names for artisans and tools that have taken root by usage.”66
The young Montaigne was entrusted to a tutor whom his father “had sent for expressly, and who was very highly paid,” “a German, who has since died a famous doctor in France,” but who did not know a word of French.67 Two “less learned” assistants helped the tutor perform his pedagogical task; everyone, including Montaigne’s mother and the servants, avoided speaking French or Gascon in Michel’s presence. In his Essais, Montaigne asserts that French was a foreign language for him. However, we can presume that in his contacts with servants and the peasants who worked the seigneurial land, he was exposed to numerous Gasconisms that later studded his writings. Montaigne’s education had begun in the château with his tutors, according to the principles of the noble tradition. Influenced by humanist education as it is described, for example, in Gargantua’s famous letter to his son in Rabelais’s Pantagruel, Pierre Eyquem wanted to send Michel to the best school to learn the humanistic disciplines. In the region, only one institution then offered an education that combined both the gentleness “without rigor or constraint” of the Erasmian system and the methodicalness of a Scholastic education. In 1539, at the age of six, Montaigne entered the College of Guyenne as a boarder, joining immediately the third grade (or maybe even fourth grade)xxiii class, because he already had sufficient knowledge of Latin.
Established in February 1533, the College of Guyenne had been founded specifically to meet the demands of the well-off bourgeois of the region who wanted to give their children a humanistic education as early as the age of six or seven.68 Under the presidency of the deputy mayor Pierre Dagès, the Bordeaux jurats had met as a committee in February 1533 to discuss the creation of a college in their city. Shortly afterward, they recommended to the parlement the foundation of a college in Bordeaux. Jean de Tartas, the principal of the College of Lisieux, had proposed a model that was not likely to displease the wealthy merchant families or the members of the parlement.xxiv The instruction in Latin and humanist training proposed by the committee was supposed in particular to prepare students for the examinations required to join the magistracy.69 A solid education at the college could also allow the students to go to a university as prestigious as the one in Toulouse. The record of the foundation of the College of Guyenne thus proposes to “found and endow a College, similar in form and manner to the Colleges of the city of Paris, in order that the children of the said city and other neighboring cities and places, and all countries, might be able to study and benefit at lower cost and expense.”70 The college opened on May 15, 1533, the year of Michel de Montaigne’s birth. The program proposed by Jean de Tartas was so successful that the college had to enlarge its premises and recruit more teachers.
However, less than a year after he had created the College of Guyenne, Jean de Tartas was dismissed and replaced by André de Gouvéa, who had been the principal of the College of Sainte-Barbe in Paris since 1530.71 Although he retained Tartas’s main ideas regarding the educational cursus, Gouvéa wanted to improve the quality of the teaching. He personally brought to Bordeaux Guillaume Guerente, Nicolas de Grouchy, Gentian Hervet, Élie Vinet, Marc-Antoine Muret, and George Buchanan, with whom Montaigne studied. Gouvéa and his teaching staff arrived in Bordeaux on July 12, 1539, the same year that the young Montaigne began his studies there. Called in by Gouvéa, Vinet was among the most famous members of the college’s faculty. A passionate scholar of antiquities, he even became one of the first archaeologists of Bordeaux. George Buchanan also began teaching at the college in 1539 as professor of rhetoric; he too had taught in the past (1528–29) at the College of Sainte-Barbe in Paris. Nicknamed the “prince of poets,” Buchanan was one of the most remarkable figures at this institution and soon acquired a reputation as a free thinker. It was probably he who introduced the young Michel to poetry, and Montaigne declared his admiration for “that great Scottish poet.”72 A non-negligible part of the curriculum consisted of an introduction to the Greek and Latin poets, and also to poets who wrote in neo-Latin and French. Several teachers openly sympathized with the ideas of the Reformation, and Buchanan belonged to a new intellectual movement that was one of the most critical of the dogmas of the Catholic Church.73 Other teachers embraced the ideas of the Reformation more covertly. This was the case for André Zébédée, Nicolas de Grouchy, Claude Budin, and Mathurin Cordier. Montaigne was exposed to these ideas at a very young age, but always within a strictly Catholic framework punctuated by the sacraments of the Roman church. The college remained Catholic.
Montaigne began his studies at the College of Guyenne in 1539. He was destined one day to succeed his father as lord of Montaigne, and Pierre Eyquem spared no expense to procure the best education possible for his descendants. Subsidized in part by the city, which put municipal premises at its disposal, the College of Guyenne still had to find the money necessary to defray its operating costs. Each boarding student had to pay the teacher and the director of the room where he was lodged the sum of four écus (twelve livres) per trimester for his bed, linens, heat, candles, and the recital of his readings. The annual salary of the regents varied between thirty and sixty livres a year for the most popular teachers, such as Nicolle and Zébédée. However, an exception was made for master Guillem, who was by far the best-paid professor, since he received ninety-two livres per annum. Discipline was an integral part of the education given the children, and on this point Gouvéa had set up a less punitive system that was essentially based on the model of the College of Sainte-Barbe. The principal had the authority to punish and discipline the children “in the Paris manner,” that is, “decently and humanely.” In 1533, the college had eighteen rooms with fifteen regents and three public readers. The number rapidly rose to twenty-one regents. In addition to the boarders there were the day pupils, who were called “martinets.” The teachers did not give lectures, but rather “readings,” and were for that reason hired as public readers in accord with the practices current in Paris and with the model of the royal readers.
In the Essais, Montaigne speaks on several occasions about his stay at the college, which he judges “the best in France,” and in particular about André de Gouvéa, whom he also considers “incomparably the greatest principal of France.”74 He nonetheless admits that he completed his studies at the age of thirteen without having really acquired any practical knowledge. His knowledge of Latin before entering the college had allowed him to skip two grades—perhaps three—and to finish his studies of grammar in seven or eight years rather than ten. On the whole, Montaigne’s assessment of his time at the College of Guyenne is rather negative; he declares that he derived from it “[not] any benefit that I can place in evidence now.”75 If the educational program left something to be desired, Montaigne judged more positively the college’s readers and the teaching staff. Among the teachers, he especially liked Turnebus, who had, however, left Bordeaux in 1547 after accepting the chair of Greek at the College Royal in Paris. At the end of the year 1549, a plague epidemic forced Jean Gelida—the college’s administrator after Gouvéa left for Portugal—to send his pupils away from the college and dismiss his teachers. Gelida wrote to La Taste, his contact in the capital, to ask him to recruit a new grammar teacher. He explained that Horstanus, Montaigne’s tutor, did not want to continue to teach his class, being too frightened by “the calamity of the times.”76 In the end, Horstanus agreed to remain in Gelida’s service for another year. He may have been Montaigne’s tutor but, contrary to what has been suggested, certainly not when he was a little child. Having arrived in Bordeaux after Montaigne’s entrance into the College of Guyenne, Horstanus was not the German tutor Montaigne talks about, telling us that he became a famous doctor in France. On the other hand, it has been shown that Horstanus was indeed the house tutor of Montaigne’s brothers Thomas and Pierre, and perhaps Michel’s as well, but only toward the end of his studies at the College of Guyenne. Another letter from Gelida dated October 1 encourages Horstanus to come back to the college “with his Montaignes.”77
We know little about Montaigne’s early childhood, and any attempt to describe his youth can be no more than speculation. But we know in detail the curriculum of the College of Guyenne at that time, and we can reconstruct quite precisely the pupils’ school day for each grade. In his Schola Aquitanica (1583), Élie Vinet sketches a rather complete picture of the instruction Montaigne might have received. These formative years had a major influence on the conception and development of the Essais. It is therefore useful to examine briefly the educational program that Montaigne experienced in Bordeaux from 1539 to 1547.
Instruction at the College of Guyenne was divided into ten grades. Between 1534 and 1583, the number of years of teaching varied between nine and twelve. The school day began at 8:00 a.m., with lessons from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m., from noon to 1:00 p.m., and from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. on days when school was in session. All the morning and afternoon lessons were followed by half an hour of “disputations,” or debates, which at the time were considered the means of instruction most effective for training young minds, and which over the years occupied a growing part in the program of studies. Saturday was a school day like the others, but classes were given only in the morning and from noon to 1:00 p.m. The fourth and fifth grades were generally divided into “advanced” and “less advanced” sections, fifth grade receiving the most advanced students.
The children began their studies in “tenth grade” (Decimus ordo), at the age of six. The beginners’ class was called that of the alphabétaires, because in it they learned essentially the twenty-three letters of the sixteenth-century alphabet. It was by far the largest class, and pupils frequently had to repeat it. Élie Vinet tells us that parents sent their children to the college to learn Latin letters, “because the principal object of this school was the knowledge of the Latin language.”78 The college’s goal was not to provide practical training but rather to teach its pupils humanist principles and prepare them for debating in the Latin language. Those who envisaged an administrative or judicial career considered the program Gouvéa offered to be the best possible training for their children, because they were destined, when the time came, to take over the responsibilities and offices that their parents had acquired. Two school booklets were used to teach pupils the rudiments of spelling. The cursus for this first year concentrated on learning the alphabet on the basis of the paternoster and the seven penitential psalms.
The classroom had ten benches arranged in rows, and the most gifted pupils sat in the first row. At noon and 3:00 p.m., the same subjects were recited in the same order. Each lesson lasted one hour. As soon as they knew the alphabet, the children learned to copy the letters in a notebook. To do that they had to buy a writing case. Toward the end of the first year they were given a few examples of Latin declensions and conjugations; that was the subject of the second manual, Livret des Enfants. Although classes were taught chiefly in Latin, the young pupils were allowed to speak French during their first year at the college. Those in the advanced classes had to express themselves in Latin to the children in the first two classes, and then translate into French what had not been understood.
Second grade students were introduced to an entirely new space, with the intention of socializing them. Instruction took place in a large hall, the aula. Second-year pupils were thus called aulani. They occupied only part of this vast hall that was also called the theater, because it was supposed to resemble an ancient theater. Built of wood, this hall made it possible to gather the pupils together in an enclosed space. It had eleven tiers of seats and enabled pupils to become familiar with various forms of representation and staging, both theatrical and social. The declared goal of this grade was to learn to read and write “well and rapidly in Latin and in French.” The pupils were also introduced to the first Elements of grammar using a Latin edition accompanied by a French translation. They learned to recite longer and longer speeches by Latin authors.
In third grade, pupils studied Cicero’s letters, a few scenes from Terence’s comedies, and Mathurin Cordier’s Colloquies on the Holy Scriptures. These three works were divided into lessons to be learned by heart. The children had to buy all the books used in the courses as well as a blank notebook. They began to learn the conjugation of Latin verbs in the present indicative, the imperfect, and so on for all the moods and tenses. At the end of the year, the teacher introduced the pupils to figures of speech on the basis of a few Latin examples. After six months, if the teacher noticed some students who were more advanced than the others, he notified the principal of the college, who, after checking, might send them directly into fourth grade. Montaigne’s good knowledge of Latin must have gotten him exempted from third grade. In his Essais he congratulates himself on having completed his grammar classes at the age of thirteen (in fact, probably fourteen).
The pupils in fourth grade spent most of the year studying Cicero’s Letters to His Friends (Epistulae ad Familiares). They were asked to explicate selected passages. They were also taught the basics of commentary and copied out passages of the Latin author in their notebooks, leaving a space of at least half an inch between the lines where their grammatical explication could be written in French. The teacher then explained the different parts of speech. This exercise took place in the morning. The students read their explications out loud in class, before their schoolmates. They were also trained in translation (chiefly from French into Latin). At noon, they learned the gender of nouns according to Despautère,xxv two or three points in his grammar book being explained each day.
The purpose of fifth grade was to consolidate the knowledge gained in fourth grade, and the most gifted pupils, including Montaigne, might be permitted to pass directly to sixth grade. The college’s regulations stipulated that “each one, depending on his progress, will move up or fall back, or remain in the same grade, pursuant to our order, in accord with the result of the examination that we have given him.”79 Cicero continued to be the main object of study. The texts chosen for the morning were memorized during the day and recited in the afternoon or the next morning, if the teacher’s text explication had taken place the preceding day. The pupils continued to work on genders, declensions, the perfect tense, and Latin syntax in their copies of Despautère. The cursus was the same in sixth grade: Cicero in the morning, Despautère at noon, and a comedy by Terence at 3:00 p.m. At the end of the year, the pupils studied selected texts by Ovid.
In seventh grade, the pupils began their day with Cicero’s Letters to His Friends or his Letters to Atticus. Despautère’s genders, declensions, and various other matters were quickly reviewed. The teachers introduced one of Cicero’s simpler speeches and a few summaries of rhetoric. At noon, the pupils were introduced for the first time to the art of versification and tried their hands at composing verses. At 3:00 p.m., they read a comedy by Terence and then moved on to Ovid’s Tristia. The Latin compositions became more numerous and longer. Eighth grade resembled seventh but accorded a greater place to rhetoric.80 The pupils also read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and recited by heart whole pages of Cicero and Ovid. The teachers then favored poetry for compositions. In ninth grade, the teacher explicated in the morning a speech by Cicero and the parts of rhetoric. In the afternoon, he made the pupils familiar with ancient history, and at 3:00 p.m. he asked them to read Virgil, a few passages from the Metamorphoses, or extracts from Lucian’s Pharsalia. At 5:00 p.m., the tutor handed out the subject for a text in verse that had to be submitted before the end of the day. During this year the pupils were introduced to declamation, in private and in public.
This education, which was very structured and representative of humanist values, led to the final year of grammar classes. In this class, almost the only subject was rhetoric and Latin grammar, based on texts by Suetonius. In the morning, the pupils studied the rules of the oratorical art according to Cicero and Quintilian. Starting at 9:00 a.m., they analyzed a speech by Cicero to check whether they had learned the rules they had studied earlier; they also put them into practice by trying their hands at public speaking, which allowed the best minds to display their skills at eloquence. We know that these oratorical competitions were not Montaigne’s strong point. At noon, they were read ancient history according to Livy, Justin, Seneca, and Pomponius Mela. At 3:00 p.m., the tutor gave them a lesson in poetics on the basis of texts by Virgil, Lucian, Juvenal, Horace, Ovid, and Persius, “but in the places where they respect morals.”81 At 5:00 p.m., the pupils received a passage in verse that they had to translate before the evening was over.
Public exercises were given priority, especially on Saturday morning, when the pupils in tenth grade had to address an audience composed of pupils in the lower classes. The celebration of Ludovicales—August 25—marked the end of the school year. This day, Saint Louis’s feast day, was an opportunity to show the progress made during the year. The Ludovicales allowed the best pupils to display their brilliance. Speeches in verse and prose were hung on the walls, and a theatrical representation completed this festive day. Prizes were awarded and the pupils were granted a vacation until October 1 for the grape harvest. During the Ludovicales of 1547, Montaigne played one of the main roles in a tragedy by Marc-Antoine Muret, Julius Caesar,82 during Antoine Gouvéa’s brief term as principal. Gouvéa’s brother, André, had left in March 1547 to found a college in Coimbra at the behest of the king of Portugal, John III, taking with him almost all his teaching staff, including Buchanan, Grouchy, and Guerente. The College of Guyenne’s apogee coincided with the end of Montaigne’s studies in the grammar classes, probably in 1547.
Montaigne claims that around 1544–46 he was the pupil of Nicolas de Grouchy, Guillaume Guerente, and George Buchanan, who had left the college in 1543,83 and also of Jean Binet.84 Although he had a low opinion of the instruction he received, he held his teachers at the College of Guyenne in high esteem. He mentions in particular: “Nicholas Grouchy, who wrote De Comitiis Romanorum, Guillaume Guerente, who wrote a commentary on Aristotle, George Buchanan, that great Scottish poet, my private tutors, have often told me that in my childhood I had that language so ready and handy that they were afraid to accost me. Buchanan, whom I afterward saw in the suite of the late Marshal de Brissac, told me that he was writing on the education of children and that he was taking my education as a model.”85 Muret is not on this list in 1580; only in the 1588 edition of his Essais did Montaigne add his name, explaining in the Bordeaux Copy that “France and Italy recognize him as the best orator of his time.”86 Montaigne was proud to have listened to the readings of these famous tutors and places himself on an equal footing with them when he boasts of having been as fine a Latinist as they were.
After ten years of grammar classes—probably eight for Montaigne—the pupils followed an intermediate cursus for two years: they entered the Faculty of Arts run by the College of Guyenne, a sort of preparatory program preceding the university. The students no longer belonged to a class, and instead of being under the authority of a teacher, they received instruction by the most famous teachers at the College of Guyenne, one after the other. The two teachers of philosophy dealt with the students leaving tenth grade. The first-year students were called “dialecticians” or “logicians,” while second-year students were called “physicians.” This distinction was based on the progression in the philosophy program. The courses generally began with Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics, Physics, and On the Heavens. Only Aristotle’s treatises, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and Nicolas de Grouchy’s Préceptes de la Dialectique were explicated. Starting on October 1, the students attended public lessons, as at the College Royal founded by Francis I. They acquired basic knowledge of Greek. The professor explained the Greek grammar book by Théodore de Gaza (Introductivae grammatices libri quatuor) or that of another author of his choice. Demosthenes and Homer were read in Greek. Montaigne never excelled in Greek, even though he had an adequate competence in writing it. Although he had complete mastery of the Latin language, his acquaintance with Greek remained rather rudimentary, and he went so far as to admit that he had “practically no knowledge at all”87 of it. However, we have to qualify that claim. In fact, despite his linguistic shortcomings in that language, Montaigne’s library contained a respectable number of books in Greek.xxvi Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diogenus Laërtius, Cassius Dio, Eusebius, and Strabo were among his readings in Greek. 88
Montaigne completed his grammar classes in August 1547. In October he began his first year as a “dialectician.” In 1548, the year of the salt-tax revolt in Bordeaux and the terrible repression that followed it, he probably studied philosophy under Mathieu Béroalde the Elder, who was Vatable’s nephew and a famous Aristotelian. In addition, he attended the classes given by Marc-Antoine Muret and by Jean Gelida, a Spaniard from Valencia who had become the principal of the college after Gouvéa’s departure. Gelida also came—like Gouvéa and Buchanan—from the prestigious College of Sainte-Barbe in Paris. We know almost nothing about the end of Montaigne’s studies, except that in January 1549 he bought a Latin edition of Virgil published in Venice, on which he wrote down his age. The same year, he also purchased, for 19 sols, a Caesar in the edition by Vascosan and Roigny. Montaigne seems to have spent time reading Latin authors, perhaps at the château in the company of his brothers Thomas, Pierre, and Arnaud, who were fifteen, fourteen, and eight years old, respectively.
In 1583, forty-four years after the beginning of his studies at the College of Guyenne and while he was mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne saw to it that the College of Guyenne’s cursus proposed by his former professor, Élie Vinet, was adopted by the municipality. For the occasion, the mayor had brought together in the city’s common building the jurats—Geoffroy d’Alesme, Jean Gallopin, Pierre Régnier, Jean de Lapeyre, and Jean Claveau—as well as the prosecutor-syndic, Gabriel de Lurbe, and the secretary of the city, Richard Pichon. In accord with the custom, the prosecutor-syndic presented the cycle of instruction recommended by Vinet. The members of the council, supported by Montaigne, adopted the proposed program unanimously and decided to publish it “as soon as possible, in order that the rule observed up to the present day in their College of Bordeaux might be well known and never easily altered.”89 In fact, as the city officials emphasized, the College of Guyenne’s program of teaching had hardly changed over half a century. The main role of this institution was to receive and train the Bordeaux elite that had been sending its children there for half a century to establish their social status and thus show that Bordeaux could compete with the best colleges in Paris. In 1583, the accent was put more than ever on a general education in Latin that could lead to a career in the magistracy, the track preferred by the class—the robins—ennobled by their parlementary responsibilities. However, in 1583 humanism was in decline and its pillars—notably Aristotle and Cicero—had lost some of their splendor.
The Balance Sheet of a Humanist Education
Montaigne does not say a word about his university studies, and perhaps for good reason. Although he gives the names of his professors at the College of Guyenne, he mentions only Turnebus and Sylvius among those with whom he studied in Paris. Specialists have always wondered if he did his university studies in Paris or in Toulouse; there is little evidence either way. Both these cities had many famous professors, but there was no law cursus in Paris, except for public lectures and readings by famous jurists who were at the parlement of Paris or were passing through the capital. However, these lectures and readings were always given in the faculty of theology. So if Montaigne studied law—and that remains to be proven—it was probably in Toulouse, where there was a rich, long tradition of instruction in the subject. A large number of the members of the Bordeaux parlement had been trained in Toulouse. For example, Montaigne’s uncle had studied in that city, and his mother still had family there. Even if he intended to study in Toulouse and had been able to begin his study of law there, Montaigne seems not to have completed it. Moreover, the entrance examination at the Cour des Aides in Périgueux did not require any diploma, only a good knowledge of Latin and of ancient authors. On that point, Montaigne’s education at the College of Guyenne was amply sufficient. Montaigne’s silence in the Essais regarding his training in law, or the lack of it, can be explained in two ways: first, because he rejected a tradition of the robins, which he preferred not to mention after 1570, since he had abandoned that profession; or second, because he did not finish his studies and became a councillor without having a diploma in law. Thus he would logically have preferred not to comment on this period in his life.
In 1546, after finishing his studies at the College of Guyenne, Montaigne registered for the course for artiens (the first two years of study preparatory to entering the university) that was offered in the quarters of the College of Guyenne. Whereas his brothers were still boarders at the college, the young Michel could stay at the château. He had completed his course of studies in two years, that is, during the summer of 1548, four days before the feast of Ludovicales. Revolt was brewing in Bordeaux. Francis I had increased the salt tax to 24 livres per hogshead in 1542, and then two years later raised it again to 48 livres. Tristan de Moneins, a Basque gentleman, governor of Navarrenx and sénéschal of Béarn, had been called to Bordeaux as lieutenant general to make sure that the fiscal measures decreed by the king were carried out.
Taking advantage of the revolt against the salt tax, rebels had slipped into the city, and Moneins tried to meet with them. The insurgents assassinated him. Other royal officers were hunted down, and the building where they had taken refuge was set afire. Moneins’s body suffered the insults of the people, who, in mockery, filled it with salt. Bordeaux had risen in revolt, and the bourgeoisie was considered responsible for this, because it had taken part in the rebellion and had not taken action to free Moneins, even though it controlled the city’s police. Looting ensued, and the city was taken over by a raging mob.
Royal repression was not slow in coming, and the Constable of France, Montmorency, was ordered to punish the city and those responsible for the riots. He had part of the city walls demolished in order to enter the city. The bourgeois had to lay down their arms, and an inquiry into the murder of Moneins was begun. Montmorency had also forbidden the parlement to meet, and its president, La Chassaigne, was arraigned before the parlement of Toulouse to answer to the accusation of high treason. Pierre Eyquem certainly preferred that Michel take refuge in the security of the family château, far from Bordeaux and the political tumult. The College of Guyenne was indirectly affected by the revolt, and most of the pupils were sent home. It is possible that this revolt of October 1548 upset the young Montaigne’s plans, and that he decided, perhaps at his father’s behest, to occupy himself with the education of his brothers immediately after completing his artiens courses in late summer 1548.
The people of Bordeaux were judged guilty of the crime of lèse-majesté, the city’s privileges were canceled, and the right to elect jurats and to assemble was suspended. The parlement could no longer exercise any jurisdiction and its future was uncertain. On October 26, 1548, in reprisal for the revolt of the people of Bordeaux, royal commissioners passed judgment on the “Commune of Guyenne in Bordeaux” and deprived the city of its “privileges, city hall, jurats, and council, common purses, seal, bells, justice and jurisdiction, artillery, and arms.”90 The judgment against the city mentioned “rebellions, disobediences, crimes of lèse-majesté, seditions, popular uprisings at the sound of the warning bell, murders, and homicides.”91 The letters and charters of privilege were even burned, and the city hall was razed and replaced by a chapel. The punishment the king ordered was disproportionate with regard to the events, and more than five hundred people were condemned to death and executed. The people of Bordeaux had to make amends, and history (that of the first historians of the city) tells us that the jurats were forced to exhume Moneins’s body with their own hands in order to give him a burial more worthy of a representative of the king.92 Henry II did not pardon the assassination of the lieutenant general of Guyenne, and the Bordeaux oligarchy that had held the reins of the city and the parlement since the departure of the English paid a high price for having rebelled against its sovereign. The extreme violence of Montmorency’s repression marked people’s minds, and the Bordeaux political class withdrew wherever it could in order let time repair its image. It was a bad time to begin studying law, and Montaigne certainly felt the repercussions of this political crisis.
We know next to nothing about Montaigne’s life between 1548 and 1556, a period that has been called “Montaigne’s lost years.”93 We know that he read the ancients and that he probably did not travel between 1548 and 1550. Similarly, his interest in medicine is undeniable, and he seems to have been sufficiently familiar with anatomy and physiology to allow us to say with certainty that he had probably read and studied several treatises on these subjects. In addition, the Essais contain many references to physicians of his time, notably Jean Fernel, Pierre Pichot, and Jacques Dubois, known as Sylvius.
Given the absence of documents regarding his university career, we can only suppose that he followed a track similar to that of other men of his time, origin, and rank. We would like, for example, to find evidence that Montaigne studied in Toulouse, whose university then enjoyed a great reputation. The most elevated servants of the state had studied at the prestigious Faculty of Law in that city. Henri de Mesmes, Paul de Foix, and Guy du Faur de Pibrac all studied there. Montaigne probably spent some time there as well, and he seems to have known the city fairly well. Later, in 1560, he attended in Toulouse the famous appeal proceedings in the case of the imposter Martin Guerre. He mentions this trial in the chapter “Of cripples” (III: 1). The case had had a great impact on the kingdom. While he was already a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux, this famous case of the usurpation of identity that ended with the condemnation of the imposter, Arnaud du Tilh, symbolized a “textbook case” sufficiently interesting to cause Montaigne to make the trip to Toulouse. However, his presence in Toulouse in 1560 in no way proves that he sojourned there in the early 1550s. Moreover, in a rather strange way, Montaigne begins his account of the appeal proceedings with the expression “In my youth,xxvii I read about the trial of a strange case …” whereas he was already twenty-seven years old at the time.94 As we see, the dates of his passage through or stay in Toulouse remain rather vague.
On the other hand, it has been established that Montaigne attended some kind of public course in Paris, where he is supposed to have stayed several times in the early 1550s. His uncle, Raymond Eyquem de Bussaguet, might have taken Montaigne with him when he went to the capital in the spring of 1551, where he remained for forty days as a representative of the parlement of Bordeaux. At that time, the parlement was trying to regain from the king the trust it had lost in 1548, and members of the Bordeaux parlement were often sent to deliver messages of submission and goodwill to the king. Montaigne bought a copy of Michel Beuther’s Ephemeris historica there in 1551, proving his presence in the capital; the book had just been published by Michel Fezandat and Robert Granion (“In Taberna Gryphyiana”).xxviii Montaigne used it as a record book and noted in it all kinds of family episodes: births, marriages, the deaths of children, relatives, and friends, and memorable events that affected him directly.
Five of the entries in his Ephemeris are written in Latin, the language that Montaigne preferred to use at that time. They were certainly all written between 1551 and 1555. Montaigne wrote down in this almanac—retroactively—the important events in the history of his family, and also the recent deaths of princes and great intellectual figures of the time. He registered, notably, the deaths of François Vatable (March 16, 1547) and Jacques Toussaint (March 31, 1547) as well as the death of Margaret of Angoulême, queen of Navarre (December 21, 1549). At the same time, Montaigne also attended the lectures on Galenic medicine given by Jacques Dubois, a reader at the College Royal of Paris between 1550 and 1555.
It was perhaps at this same time that he translated Sebond’s Theologia naturalis for his father, since he had no other full-time activity and seems not to have pursued with assiduity any university cursus. From 1548 to 1556, we imagine that he divided his time between Paris and his father’s château. He probably sojourned in Paris several times between 1551 and 1556. Buchanan’s poem dedicated “To Michael, Thomas, and Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne, from Bordeaux” in memory of his pleasant stay at the château de Montaigne in the company of Michel and his two brothers was perhaps composed in Paris on the occasion of an encounter with Montaigne during which they recalled the years they had spent together at the College of Guyenne and at the château de Montaigne. Buchanan had returned to France in 1552 after an unhappy period in Portugal, where he had narrowly escaped prosecution by the Inquisition. He remained at the College of Boncourt until 1554 and could have met Montaigne in the capital and written his poem on this occasion. It is also possible that, back in Bordeaux, the Scottish humanist visited the three young Montaignes on their estate between 1554 and 1556.95
Montaigne at this time may have frequented the salon of Jean Morel and Lancelot de Carle, a relative of Estienne de La Boétie. This salon was also attended by Aymar de Rançonnet, Élie André, Paul de Foix, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, Arnaud du Ferrier, and Guillaume de Lur Longa, a group of Gascon intellectuals who had immigrated to Paris.96 Lur Longa had recently taken up residence in the capital after accepting a post of councillor-clerk, ceding his place in the parlement of Bordeaux to Estienne de La Boétie, who, to celebrate Lur Longa’s departure for Paris, dedicated to him a “declamation,” soon to be known under the title of Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The nomination of Lur Longa as well as the composition of La Boétie’s Discourse have been studied in the context of the battle over of the edict of the Semester (April 28, 1554). Henri de Mesmes, who had recently been named maître des requêtes; Guillaume de Lur Longa, who had just joined the parlement of Paris; and Estienne de La Boétie, who was entering the parlement of Bordeaux, were each in their own way the object of political and professional pressure to commit themselves to the king’s party, which was trying to regain control over councillors who were demanding more and more independence from royal authority.97 We know that Lur Longa was a personal friend of Montaigne’s uncles.
Pierre Eyquem was already foreseeing a parlementary career for his son. Knowing that Michel was very strong in Latin, and to keep him from losing his competence in this subject, he asked him, probably around this time, to translate into French the Theologia naturalis of the Catalan theologian Raymond Sebond. This book had been given to him ten years earlier, in 1542, by Pierre Bunel, a scholar from Toulouse whom he had put up at his château. A translation of this kind would be well regarded by Montaigne’s examiners, when the time came, if he entered the magistracy. This translation exercise, considered as a good apprenticeship for the profession of councillor, was above all a “study assignment” imposed by a father concerned about his son’s future.
What remained to Montaigne from his humanistic education? More than a simple veneer, contrary to what some have said. His education at the College of Guyenne and the courses he attended in Paris as a “free auditor” allowed him to gain confidence in his own judgment and to be less dependent on the authority of the ancients. Montaigne was to continue to cite Greek and Latin authors throughout his life, but only as decorations to frame and illustrate his own reflections. He moved from the gloss to the quotation with a disconcerting ease. His way of reasoning became mainly comparative and critical. The “debates” from his time at the college turned out to be not very effective in a political world in transition where it was less and less advisable to lay one’s cards on the table and keep one’s word. Montaigne preferred to develop a model of knowledge founded on experience rather than on authority. But with time he realized that even the best arguments rarely make it possible to change people’s minds.
Montaigne began his studies at the College of Guyenne not long after Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) launched the anti-Aristotelian movement in France. To gauge the import of Ramus’s criticism, let us recall what he said at the Sorbonne in 1536: “Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse” (“everything Aristotle said is mere falsity”). In his turn, Montaigne judged the father of Western philosophy with skepticism. Although always invoked when philosophical questions were involved, Aristotle was no longer regarded as an infallible authority. His method was questioned and it was rapidly perceived that numerous premises of the corpus aristotelicum no longer corresponded to the lived experience of people at the end of the Renaissance. However, despite these critical examinations of the very foundations of the knowledge drawn from the ancients, the Aristotelian order still survived. Montaigne’s education is located precisely at the crucial intersection between the challenge to the Aristotelian system of knowledge and the introduction of new methods of investigation based on dialectics, on the one hand,98 and on the constant negotiation of the idea of truth, and especially the idea of jurisprudence, on the other. It is in this sense that Montaigne declares that when he was young he never gnawed his nails “over the study of Plato or xxix Aristotle.”99
Montaigne remained outside philosophical quarrels, taking an interest in more concrete questions such as the art of governing. The situation in Bordeaux, where his father participated in the everyday management of the city, probably allowed him to form a more realistic and more practical idea of the influence of politics on human relations. During the Renaissance, Aristotle’s texts had been disseminated by Scholastic authors, thanks to compilations augmented by commentaries. In the Essais, these “savants” of the Middle Ages repeatedly provoke Montaigne’s irony: “Anyone who does not know Aristotle, according to them, by the same token does not know himself.”100 He also mocks those who run everything through the étamine (a cloth used as a sieve or filter) of Aristotle. Montaigne compares Aristotelian philosophy to a mercantile operation, desacralizing it and making it seem banal; he takes philosophical argumentation as “a coin which human stupidity readily accepts as payment,”101 adding after 1588 that “the learned employ, like conjurors, [this coin] in order not to reveal the vanity of their art.” This anti-intellectual view, often present in the Essais, is perhaps the sign of a truncated or unfinished education.
Montaigne systematically criticizes the Aristotelianism he encountered in his schooling, but remains deeply influenced by Aristotelian morality, for lack of a better one. His rejection of philosophy nonetheless reveals a profound respect for studies that he had not been able to complete. This kind of autodidactic work remains frustrating when one secretly continues to harbor ambitions to succeed. Aristotle and most of the other philosophers are always present, even if they are roundly criticized in the Essais. When one sets out to struggle against the abuse of the ancients’ authority, there is no more perfect example than Aristotle: “The god of scholastic knowledge is Aristotle; it is a religious matter to discuss any of his ordinances, as with those of Lycurgus at Sparta. His doctrine serves us as magisterial law, when it is peradventure as false as another.”102 The definition Montaigne gives of Aristotelianism as a “Pyrrhonism in an affirmative form”103 produces an oxymoron that reflects rather well his view of the Greek philosopher after his years of study at the College of Guyenne and in Paris. From his education and his apprenticeship in logic and the human sciences, he retained the memory of a “clatter of so many philosophical brains.”104
The humanistic education Montaigne received at the College of Guyenne and in Paris was out of sync with the scientific and ethical transformations of his time. Montaigne was exposed to all sorts of questionings that undoubtedly favored his skepticism and relativism. What is lacking in the thinkers of this period—and what distinguishes them, for example, from the authors of the eighteenth century—is a powerful awareness of the relativity of all knowledge. The humanist movement merely strengthened the fixity of Western knowledge by advocating a moral and political universalism. After successfully combining Aristotelianism with religious dogma, the sixteenth-century intellectual began in turn to produce facile glosses on the ancients. On this point, the College of Guyenne’s cursus is revealing. It sometimes departed from Aristotelian doctrines but hardly dared to distance itself completely from the corpus aristotelicum. The questioning of the purpose of all knowledge inevitably involved the destruction of the two great specters of the Renaissance: Aristotle and the dogma of the Catholic Church. All truth, whether ecclesiastical or secular, was inevitably inspired by these two dogmas, which limited any criticism and any judgment.
The works of Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, Thomas Digges, and Giordano Bruno contributed to the collapse of Aristotelian ideas, advanced the heliocentric conception of the cosmos, favored the idea of an open-ended world, and eventuated in the acceptance of a universe in permanent movement. These successive stages led to what has been so judiciously called the “dissolution of the cosmos.”105 When Montaigne was writing his first essays, this dissolution was not yet complete, but the process was advancing and our essayist easily discerned the first cracks in the Aristotelian edifice. That is probably why Montaigne declares science to be unstable, “useless,” “sterile or thorny,” and sees in it only “dreams and fanatical follies,” “fantasies,” “twaddle and lies,” preferring for his part a form of empirical and even experimental knowledge.
The ideas set forth by Copernicus in his De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (1543) slowly spread, but as early as 1560 the notion of a heliocentric cosmos was already sufficiently well known to allow Montaigne (who had no scientific pretensions and shared the views most common in his time) to make reference to it in his Essais. Imagine Ptolemy and Aristotle, who had been pillars of Western civilization for more than fifteen centuries, suddenly being shaken; it was the whole humanistic edifice that was about to topple. Montaigne was a witness to his time: “Ptolemy, who was a great man, had established the limits of our world; all the ancient philosophers thought they had its measure.”106 Everything collapsed in a moment. So who should be believed? What can we know? These two questions constantly recur in the Essais. Montaigne’s scientific relativism is almost always situated in an opposition between bookish knowledge and the concrete experiences it pleases him to adduce. His education had given him only an indirect knowledge of human beings and the world; the Essais ended up concentrating on their author’s own experience.
In the 1550s, Copernicus’s ideas also raised other problems of a religious nature. How could man and God be situated in an infinite universe? If man was no longer the center of the universe, what became of the divine relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm? If the Earth was a planet just like the other planets, it was no longer a privileged place. Were these other planets inhabited? If they were, were their inhabitants also children of Adam and Eve? How could they have inherited original sin? If the universe was infinite, where would the throne of God be located? These were all awkward questions for the ecclesiastical authorities, who took no official position until 1616, when Copernicus’s theory was deemed dangerous and harmful to the faith, and Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition for promoting it, and then again in 1633, when it was finally forbidden to teach or believe that the sun was the center of the universe and that the Earth was a planet. Although during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it had been possible to integrate Aristotle and Ptolemy into Catholic dogma, by the end of the sixteenth century the questions Copernicus and his followers raised had become unacceptable to the Church and met with even more violent opposition among Protestants.
After challenging Aristotle’s physics, metaphysics, and ethics, the Renaissance found itself facing a void. The Aristotelian idea of the “natural place” in a finite universe, where everything had its place and where there was a place for everything, was now obsolete. Ernst Cassirer observes that after Copernicus “there is no absolute ‘above’ or ‘below,’ and, therefore, there can no longer be just one direction of influence. The idea of the world organism is here expanded in such a way that every element in the world may with equal right be considered the central point of the universe.”107 Things wander about in an infinite cosmos, everything is in motion, and man himself is astonished by his ontological nakedness. Everything has to be done over. Montaigne is once again a witness to this time and offers a pessimistic assessment of the state of scientific knowledge: “there is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that of objects. And we, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.”108
The man of the late Renaissance was credulous; the world was suddenly falling away under his feet, and he was ready to believe all sorts of things. People marveled at the discovery of the New World, and fabulous stories were told about the human beings and animals living on those lands. Montaigne shared this interest in the marvelous. To use Alexandre Koyré’s expression, the man of the Renaissance was the prisoner of a “magic ontology”;109 he got lost on countless paths that led nowhere. This apparent disorder nonetheless allowed a multitude of ideas to arise and develop on the basis of a critique of the ancients. This skeptical questioning constituted the ground on which it became possible to construct the science and philosophy of the seventeenth century. It is in the middle of this transition between two conceptions of the world that Montaigne and his Essais are situated. His education served to open his eyes, so to speak. The Essais became a disillusioned testimony to a period that was tired of being Latin and ancient. People doubted because they could no longer do otherwise, and relativism was not yet a philosophy but simply a necessity.
Montaigne nonetheless refused to adhere to Copernicus’s ideas and those of his disciples. After all, “who knows whether a third opinion, a thousand years from now, will not overthrow the preceding two?”110 Science did not really interest him, because he considered it “in motion” and, especially, he never had the means to reconstruct a fallen order. This position has rightly been called “ignorance.”111 In fact, Montaigne declares that “there is nothing I treat specifically except nothing, and no knowledge except that of the lack of knowledge [inscience].”112 Montaigne’s inscience may have its origin in his conception of chance and fortuity. Moreover, what point is there in taking an interest in science, since any explanation will always be only provisional? Edifices, which fall victim to the erosion of time, end up disappearing sooner or later, as do political systems.
From the years he spent at the College of Guyenne, Montaigne derived a single precept that soon established itself as a method: “What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it.”113 The instruction in politics he received from his father during the salt-tax revolt made him understand that society can pass from stability into chaos at any moment. No system can last very long without undergoing profound upheavals that are intrinsic to it. The Wars of Religion are probably the best example of this. From that moment on, any perception of human beings and the world could only be relative. History, science, and truth acquired a previously unknown malleability. Reason manifested itself only as a flexible and distortable artifice: “I always call reason that semblance of intellect that each man fabricates in himself. That reason, of which, by its condition, there can be a hundred contradictory ones about one and the same subject, is an instrument of lead and of wax, stretchable, pliable, and adaptable to all biases and all measures.”114
Why is Montaigne so little inclined to talk about the years following his study at the College of Guyenne? Probably for the same reason that he does not talk about his experience at the Cour des Aides in Périgueux or at the parlement of Bordeaux. The Essais is a book written by a noble, and Montaigne preferred to keep silent about his first career as a member of parlement and the education that led to that profession. Montaigne’s memories of his years as a student were bitter and even negative. We know the recommendation he gave Diane de Foix regarding the choice of a tutor capable of instructing her child: “I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.”115 However, he was able to benefit from his studies; this humanist education, challenged by his own experiences and observations, led to the feeling that knowledge was unstable and relative and to a salutary doubt. Much later, in 1588, he admits that at first he regarded education as a means of showing off before later returning to a more playful conception of knowledge and teaching. But he adds that he never saw his studies as a way to succeed and earn a living: “In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, for recreation, never for gain.”116 It remains to be seen what use he made of his education during his initial career in the parlement. One thing is certain: despite what he says, this education made it easier for him to obtain an office. The Eyquems’ social ascent led Montaigne to hope he had a bright future in the parlement.
i Roughly, the city council; its members were called “jurats.” [Trans.]
ii Under the Old Régime in France, the parlements were provincial appellate courts (not legislative assemblies). They heard cases of all kinds, especially relating to taxation, and the Crown’s laws and edicts were not official in their respective jurisdictions until the parlements had granted their assent by publishing them. [Trans.]
iii The oldest text of this Coutume was printed in Bordeaux in 1528 by Jean Guyart. The Coutume was reprinted by Simon Millanges in 1611 and 1617, and again by Jacques Mongiron Millanges in 1661 and 1666. A new, more rigorous and systematic edition was published in the eighteenth century by Alexis and Delphin de Lamothe, Coutumes du ressort du Parlement de Guyenne; avec un commentaire pour l’intelligence du texte, et les arrest rendus en interprétation. Bordeaux: Chez les Frères Labottiere, 1769.
iv A blue dyestuff and/or the plant from which it is made. [Trans.]
v A legal term referring to the right to something on the ground of long-established use. [Trans.]
vi The term noblesse d’épée was rarely used to qualify nobility and became widespread only in the seventeenth century, almost always in opposition to the noblesse de robe. Here this expression will nonetheless be used as a social category valid in the time of Montaigne, because it illustrates quite well the structural difference that opposes the “nobles de race,” that is, those who carried a sword, from the “nobles de service,” who wore a long robe and were associated with a parlement or occupied an administrative office they had received or purchased.
vii A payment due by a vassal to his lord in order to obtain his approbation before a sale.
viii In sixteenth-century France, a “universal heir” was not (as is today the case) the sole heir, but rather the “principal heir.” [Trans.]
ix A sworn municipal magistrate. [Trans.]
x Not to be confused with “nobleman”; noble homme designated a broader social category. For details, see below. [Trans.]
xi The municipal council in Toulouse. [Trans.]
xii The cens was a fee payable to a landlord. [Trans.]
xiii Adherents to theories of rhetoric, logic, and pedagogy based on the work of Petrus Ramus, a Huguenot convert who was murdered in 1572 during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. [Trans.]
xiv Before Michel, Antoinette de Louppes had given birth to two children who died in infancy.
xv Jeanne was beatified in 1900 by Pope Leo XIII and canonized in 1949 by Pius XII.
xvi A franc-fief was a fief owned by a commoner, with the concession and permission of the king, contrary to the usual rule that reserved fiefs for nobles. [Trans.]
xvii A right that allowed a lord to appropriate the property of a foreigner if the foreigner died on the territory the lord ruled. [Trans.]
xviii Under the Old Régime, the noblesse de robe consisted of aristocrats whose rank was based on holding judicial or administrative posts. They were commonly called (usually pejoratively) robins. In this translation, robin will be used in this sense. [Trans.]
xix In the municipal law of Bordeaux, the title of soudan indicated a rank equivalent to that of count, viscount, or baron.
xx From his first marriage to Catherine de Lescours, Geoffroy de La Chassaigne had had five children: Joseph, Nicolas, Guillaume, Lucrèce, and Adrienne. Catherine died in 1556, and shortly afterward Raymond Eyquem married the rich Renée de Belleville, viscountess (vigière) of Cosnac, in Saintonge. Raymond Eyquem died in 1563, the same year as Estienne de la Boétie. He had named his two brothers, Pierre Eyquem, lord of Montaigne, and the other Pierre Eyquem, lord of Gaujac, as the executors of his will. Estienne de la Boétie, Michel de Montaigne, and Jehan de Saint-Maure had served as witnesses.
xxi A historical province in central France; its capital was Bourges. [Trans.]
xxii An estate associated with a soudan (see note above). [Trans.]
xxiii In the French system, which began with tenth grade, these are huitième or septième respectively.
xxiv Twenty years later, on March 10, 1555, the principal of the College of Guyenne came to present the Statuta gimnasii aquitaniae before the parlement to have them approved. The ties between the college and the parlement had grown permanently stronger.
xxv Born around 1460 or 1480, Jean Despautère was a Flemish grammarian who wrote in Latin and had published Commentarii grammatici in 1537. This book served as the basis for teaching Latin in the colleges of Montaigne’s time and continued to be used until the eighteenth century.
xxvi Of the hundred books that have been found up to this point with Montaigne’s signature (ex libris), sixteen are entirely or partially in Greek.
xxvii “dans mon enfance.” Montaigne’s text suggests that he read about this trial while still a child.
xxviii Michel Beuther was born in Carlstadt and died in Strasbourg in 1587. A German philosopher, man of letters, and theologian, he studied under Luther and Melanchthon. Later he taught history in Strasbourg. The work he published in 1551 in Paris is in reality a perpetual calendar, a kind of almanac or ephemeris, 432 pages in length. The historical memento of this work occupies page 1 to 382, that is, one page per day with a title page for each month and a few blank pages. The top of each page includes chronological indications, the month of the year and date, with their correspondences for the Latin (in calends, nones, and ides), Greek, and Hebrew calendars. This ephemeris could be used for any year. On most of the pages there is also a list of the most remarkable events that occurred on that day of the year, whether they are past facts, contemporary events, or even biblical episodes. Some pages have only a few lines, while others have summaries that fill almost three-quarters of the space.
xxix The words “Plato or” were deleted on the Bordeaux Copy, and thus do not appear in Frame’s translation. [Trans.]
