“Witness My Cannibals”: The Encounter with the Indians of the New World
Montaigne was twenty-two years old and the religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in France had not yet broken out when, in 1555, the Knight Hospitaller Nicolas de Villegaignon sailed into the bay of Rio de Janeiro and took possession of Guanabara, a small island situated at the entrance to the bay.1 This colonial expedition to “Antarctic France”—the name given it by Villegaignon and popularized by the cosmographer André Thevet—strongly marked the imagination of Renaissance France. French territories in America were even described as a “second earthly paradise,”2 despite the lack of potable water. With this exotic space of the New World, people soon associated the image of the Indian of Brazil: the Cannibal. Although the French occupation of this part of the world was short-lived, the writings of André Thevet and Jean de Léry immortalized the French and Protestant encounter with the natives of Brazil.
André Thevet was a major figure in the construction of the image of the inhabitants of the New World. His experience among the Cannibals, though very brief—hardly ten weeks—nonetheless allowed him to write a copious description of the manners and customs of the Tupinamba Indians. It was first in his Singularitez de la France antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique: et de plusieurs Terres et Isles descouvertes de nostre temps (1558), and then in his Cosmographie universelle (1575), that this rope maker turned cosmographer described the everyday life of the Cannibals. His idealized depiction of the Indians of Brazil influenced the writing of the famous chapter “Of cannibals” (I: 31), which appeared in the first edition of the Essais in 1580. Montaigne made many references to the Cannibals in the third book of his Essais published in 1588, especially in the chapter “Of coaches” (III: 6). Each time, the inhabitants of Brazil lead him to wonder about the morality of his time and to relativize customs that have their own cultural logic.
A long passage in the chapter “Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law” (I: 23) provides the foundation for a cultural critique proceeding on the basis of the notions of custom and variety. The idea of custom is an essential theme for Montaigne; it appears in the titles of three chapters in the Essais: “Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law” (I: 23), “Of ancient customs” (I: 49), and “A custom of the island of Cea” (II: 3), or even four if we consider that the word usage, “Of the custom [usage] of wearing clothes” (I: 36), is frequently used as a synonym of coutume. The discovery of the New World, through the accounts given by Spanish, Portuguese, and French travelers in various cosmographical and topographical works, as well as by eyewitnesses (chiefly French sailors who had returned from expeditions to Brazil), allowed Montaigne to acquire a considerable knowledge of the peoples recently “discovered” on the other side of the Atlantic.
Montaigne was enchanted by the customs of the Indians of the New World. What caught his attention was the diversity of habits and manners, and their difference from European practices. He does not discuss social or political divergences in detail; on the other hand, bodily habits strike him, particularly the Indians’ sexuality. The writer who would like to show himself “wholly naked” (“To the Reader”) describes at length the naked bodies of the inhabitants of the New World. While the body—with the pleasures and suffering it produces—had occupied a preponderant place in ancient philosophy (in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for example), the way of using the body in the New World was marked by a difference so great that it could not be theorized or reconciled within a Western vision of man. The customs of the Cannibals could be described only in the infinity of their variations and in accord with an essentially anthropological procedure. Habits and customs are inseparable from societies and are always determined by local experiences. By definition, customs are relative with regard to the foreign observer’s conventions and morality. Comparing cultures would be a waste of time, because it would consist of establishing an order of cultures on the basis of the principle of civilization, whose points of reference are exclusively Western. As Montaigne understands, barbarity is always the other, in a definition perfectly suited to the time of the civil wars. The author of the Essais offers a critique of modernity via the practices of Cannibals.
Cannibalism takes different forms and has multiple faces. It is best to describe it as exhaustively as possible, using an approach that always seeks to avoid the traps of moral prescriptiveness, chiefly Christian. Montaigne thus limits himself to a depiction that is itself “savage,” that is, outside human rationality and outside any religious considerations. Freed from the constraints imposed by reason, the imagination follows its course and naturally flourishes. In this sense, the New World—on the basis of the materiality of the examples reported—produced an image that was liberating with respect to the social and moral constraints of the Old World’s own civilization. To describe the other in its culture is also to imagine oneself virtually in the other’s society. The inversion is salutary, because it elicits an analytical astonishment. Montaigne was struck dumb on reading travelers’ accounts of their experiences among the Indians of Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. In turn, he imagined himself among the Cannibals the better to observe them from within. Divesting himself of his judicial robes, Montaigne transformed himself into a Cannibal.
A logic emerges from the examples he chooses when he discusses the New World. Since 1580, Montaigne had taken an interest in the Indians’ sexual practices and in the role of women in the domestic life of Cannibal societies. Lineage, filiation, and kinship in general occupy an important place in his remarks. Thus family ties and the institution of marriage among the Indian tribes interest him, especially in the chapters “Of the affection of fathers for their children” (II: 8) and “Of the resemblance of children to fathers” (II: 37), where these themes are taken up again to illustrate cultural variations. Although the Cannibals have many of the qualities of nobility, they seem little concerned with their genealogy. Food is also a constant preoccupation in Montaigne’s observations. For example, in the first edition of the Essais, Cannibal customs are defined this way: “Here they live on human flesh.”3 Montaigne and his contemporaries were fascinated by the idea that humans could live on the bodies of humans. While anthropophagy always represents a necessity, cannibalism refers to a ritual comparable to Christian rites, and particularly to the sacrament of the Eucharist offered during the mass,4 as if the cultural practices of the most remote societies had necessarily to be interpreted in the light of Christian rites.
Montaigne read more and more about the Indians of the New World and rapidly accumulated a long list of their peculiar customs that were completely opposite to Western practices. The testimonies (derived from books or from direct experience) regarding the New World were precious because they expressed differences in attitudes and social behaviors that served Montaigne as a mirror to shed light on Western customs that were too often perceived as universal. The observations reported by travelers naturally generated reflections on his time, because the New World led him to question the conventions and traditions of the Old World.
The New World became a phantasmal space where everything was possible, an oneiric land that allowed the most daring and improbable comparisons to be made. This liberation of the mind led to a critical examination of the Old World, which was tearing itself apart over obscure points of religious doctrine. However, there was no question of overidealizing the image of the “noble savage”; on this point, Montaigne does not challenge the political functioning of his own society. Cultural criticism and “public government” must not be confused with each other. For him, the New World remains an outside world, the expression of cultures that are worthy of esteem, but so distant from Western practices that it would be absurd to take them as a model. Montaigne could not be clearer about the theoretical and physical separation of these two worlds:
And indeed all those imaginary, artificial descriptions of a government prove ridiculous and unfit to put into practice. These great, lengthy altercations about the best form of society and the rules most suitable to bind us, are altercations fit only for the exercise of our minds; as in the liberal arts there are several subjects whose essence is controversy and dispute, and which have no life apart from that. Such a description of a government would be applicable in a new world, but we take men already bound and formed to certain customs.5
A new world is not the equivalent of the New World, even if this world provides extraordinary wealth for the human spirit. A “description of government” would be welcome, but this description can be no more than decorative on bodies already shaped by custom. One cannot make oneself a Cannibal so easily, and the outside observer can only give his impressions of these societies. Montaigne maintains the critical distance that relativizes his assessments of these peoples. Description is ephemeral, an exercise—or an “essay”—that has to be constantly repeated when talking about others. “There are peoples where …” remains an unfinished painting, always waiting for another brushstroke, another touch, a new example. The Cannibal is permanently under construction.
The New World symbolizes a model of the political that contradicts the practices of Montaigne’s time. The Indians’ government is adapted to the political situation and translates a pragmatic vision of power. Montaigne notes this lesson in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy (that is, after his own experience in politics); there are places where “they depose the king when it seems good, and rely on elders to hold the tiller of the state, and also sometimes leave it in the hands of the people.”6 When the leaders of the Brazilian tribe first disembarked at Rouen in 1550, Montaigne himself had no political competence. However, in the Essais he recounts his meeting with the Cannibals, even affirming that he asked them several questions of a political and military order. As a detractor of purely bookish knowledge, he accords great importance to direct testimonies that he can relate to his own readings about the New World. Nevertheless, there remain several obscure points in this famous encounter between Montaigne and the Cannibals.
On Wednesday the first and Thursday the second of October 1550—that is, five years before the French established themselves in “Antarctic France”—in the framework of Henry II’s royal entry into Rouen with his wife Catherine de Medici, fifty Brazilian natives who had recently disembarked, accompanied by some two hundred naked sailors, their faces and bodies painted so that they, too, could pass for inhabitants of the New World, undertook a reconstitution of everyday life in America, including a simulated battle between neighboring tribes. For the occasion, a Tupinamba village was reconstructed.7 Everything was done to make this staging of the Cannibals in their “natural” habitat as verisimilar as possible. Tiered seating was set up to accommodate the Court and high-ranking visitors. The highlight of Henry II’s royal entry into Rouen, this Cannibal tableau had been conceived to be striking and strengthen the image of a benevolent king who had inherited the throne only three years before.
The king, his gentlemen, ambassadors from all over Europe, the clergy, and a significant number of humanists and magistrates occupied the best seats to witness this extraordinary spectacle worthy of the world expositions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To reproduce Brazilian exoticism, a strip of land along the Seine river had been planted with several species of trees and bushes, such as “broom, juniper, and box,” to create a dense copse. The organizers of this event—mainly rich ship owners in Rouen—went so far as to paint the trunks of the trees, to whose tops box branches had been fastened, “representing fairly closely the natural appearance of the leaves of trees in Brazil.”8 Other bushes were loaded with fruits of various colors, imitating almost perfectly the “natural appearance” of South American forests. A bit of wild nature had been reconstructed on the banks of the Seine.
Huts had been built at each end of this area, their roofs covered with reeds and leaves, “fortified with a surrounding palisade instead of a rampart, or boulenerd, in the form and manner of the mortuables and habitations of the Brazilians.”9 An engraving from the same period depicts quite faithfully the setting built for the Cannibal festival in Rouen. Released to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space, exotic birds flew over the heads of the astonished spectators. They included parrots, aras, conures, toucans, and other brightly colored birds from America. Marmots, tamarins, and various other animals that were unknown in Europe and had been brought back in the holds of Rouen’s merchant vessels populated this strip of Brazilian land along a French river. A veritable colonial transposition from one continent to the other was presented to spectators delighted by this unexpected change of scene. Whereas French camps had been constructed on the banks of the rivers of the New World, one could now witness (for a few hours) the everyday life of a Brazilian colony transplanted to the heart of the kingdom. All this had been conceived so that spectators might have the feeling of having been transported to Brazil. They had become actors.
The general idea of this staging was to recreate a world in which the abundance of nature allowed 250 “Indians” to cohabit peacefully with one another and with Westerners as their neighbors, at least during the first act of this idyllic tableau recounted by the citizens of Rouen for the king and his Court. It was, in fact, the beginning of the story. Everything begins with peace, quiet, and civility in what we might describe as the “Rousseauist moment” of an irenic and tranquil world. Nature was in harmony with man, and Indians and European sailors merged:
Here and there, throughout the area, as many as three hundred men, completely naked, tanned and bristling, were rushing about. Without covering at all the parts that nature commands [us to cover], they were made up and equipped in the manner of the savages of America whom the Brazilian forest supports, [and] among their number were about fifty natural savages just brought from the country, having in addition to the other simulations, decorated their faces by piercing their cheeks, lips, and ears, and inserting into them longish stones, the size of a finger, polished and rounded, enamel white and emerald green in color.10
On the banks of the Seine, Catherine de Medici went into raptures over the savages’ “playing and simulated battles.” Everything seemed peaceful in early October 1550. The civil wars had not yet begun in France, and this pleasant tableau of conviviality and brotherhood transcended the political and religious troubles that were already brewing. It was then noted that the sailors from Rouen imitated the language and gestures of the Indians so well that it was impossible to tell the true from the false savages. The Western sailors had completely “cannibalized” themselves for the occasion. Humanity merged with the state of nature. Men hunted with bows and blowguns, a few savages ran after monkeys, while others swung in hammocks suspended from trees or simply lay on the ground, in the shade of a bush, resting. A few Indians were cutting wood, and a group was busy constructing a kind of fort along the river. From the banks of the Yguarassu to those of the Seine, the reduced space along the river served as a microcosm of the European (Portuguese and French) conquest. It authorized the most daring comparisons.
But these marvelous and paradisiacal scenes were only a prelude to the violence that was soon to break out like a thunderclap. Interrupting this initial bucolic tableau, a savage tribe appeared: “And at that point, here came a troop of savages who called themselves, in their language, Tabagerres, according to their parties, and who squatted on their heels around their king, whom they called Morbicha.”11 The chief of the Tabajaras suddenly began to harangue the Indians who had assembled around him. He started gesticulating and waving his arms in a “passionate gesture” and in a Brazilian language. The Tabajaras abruptly abandoned the civility that had hitherto prevailed. At some point, the essential activity of the Cannibals that had been reported by Western visitors and idealized by Montaigne had to be represented. According to the description given at the time, the assembly reacted promptly and obediently, and the Tabajaras “came to attack violently another troop of savages who called themselves, in their language, Toupinabaulx.” Thereupon followed a merciless battle of an extreme ferocity, in which arrows and blows with war clubs were exchanged. The battle between the Tupinambas and the Tabajaras was clearly the theme of this Cannibal second act theatricalized in the extreme. Peace naturally followed the war.
The abrupt battle that took place before the king and the members of his Court was won by the Tupinambas, who valiantly resisted the Tabajaras’ sneak attack, forcing them to flee. The aggressors had lost the war in a moment. Order could be reestablished. The camp of those who had fled was burned, as if to remind others of the consequences of an unjust aggression. The Tupinambas (most of whom were sailors from Rouen) emerged victorious from this confrontation between the good Cannibals (the Tupinambas) and the cruel Cannibals (the Tabajaras). The commentator on this rather successful staging (successful, at least, for the assembly that witnessed it) gave this description of it:
The aforementioned simulated battle was performed so close to the truth, as much by the natural savages who had mixed among them, as by the sailors who in the course of several voyages had trafficked with the savages and lived for a long time with them, that it seemed true, and not simulated, and the proof of this is that several people of this kingdom of France, in sufficient number, having long frequented the country of Brazil and the Cannibals, sincerely attested that the effect of the preceding figuration was a certain simulacrum of the truth.12
This “simulacrum of the truth” or true psychomachia, naturally reminds us of the passages in which Montaigne describes the two highlights that regulate Cannibal life: repose and war. This rhythm of life soon came to mark France during the eight civil wars that devastated it and gave Montaigne reason to inquire into these simulacra of peace punctuated by truces and reconciliations that were impossible to respect.
The representation of Cannibal life in Rouen in 1550 was the object of numerous descriptions and was widely commented upon during the years following the event. An engraving from the period put its stamp on people’s minds and established the image of the Cannibal that was quickly transformed into a cultural infatuation. It was all there: scenes of hunting and fishing, men climbing trees, dancing in the middle of a superabundant nature, or relaxing in hammocks. Not to mention the battle between opposing tribes that was raging in the foreground. These moments of war and peace are inseparable (figure 5). The West was able to capture in a single image what was to form the essence of its fantasy regarding the New World. Montaigne did not witness this reconstitution of a Cannibal day. He may have been in Paris at that time. We can imagine his amazement and wonder had he been present. In the Essais, he tells us that it was at the same place, in Rouen, that he met the Cannibals twelve years later, on the occasion of the siege of that city by the royal armies of Charles IX, at the very beginning of the Wars of Religion. He even had the good luck—still according to him—to be able, thanks to an interpreter, to question some of the Brazilian “captains.”
The Cannibal festival of 1550 shows us that if one cannot have a Cannibal at home, it will always be possible to find a sailor who can be confused with one of them. The sailors who went to Brazil knew the natives so well that they could imitate them perfectly. That was the lesson learned from the reconstitution carried out in 1550. Montaigne noted that he had such a man in his service: “I had with me for a long time a man who had lived for ten or twelve years in that other world which has been discovered in our century, in the place where Villegaignon landed, and which he called Antarctic France.”13 Twelve years spent in Brazil is no meager experience, though one may doubt this figure, which is twice that of the very short existence of Antarctic France (November 15, 1555–March 15, 1560). Montaigne probably exaggerated the length of his servant’s stay among the Indians. Nonetheless, he needed the authority of a direct witness to validate his knowledge of the cultural practices of the Indians of the New World.14 His readings on the subject could not suffice for a person who gave spontaneous speech priority over academic erudition. His encounter with the Cannibals is situated in the logic of a narrative authority that allows the author of the Essais to report direct experiences. As has been suggested, Montaigne’s interview with the Cannibals is mainly part of the topos.15
Let us consider the sources on the New World and the Cannibals that were available to Montaigne. In addition to Thevet’s and Léry’s “testimonies,” we must add the secondhand accounts produced by professional writers like Sébastien Munster; Urbain Chauveton, the translator of Benzoni; and François de Belleforest, a prolific author whose Cosmographie universelle (1575) enjoyed a resounding success in Montaigne’s time. The author of the Essais preferred to-pographers to cosmographers; he liked descriptions of things observed in the field, even in the form of simulacra, insofar as they corresponded to a reality close to lived experience, such as the ones provided by his servant who had resided in the New World, or, better yet, a conversation with the Cannibals themselves. The conversation with the Cannibals thus acquires an entirely essential importance in his discourse on the New World. Montaigne’s face-to-face meeting with the Indians symbolizes a necessity that, just like the testimony of the sailor who worked for him, had to be reported. But this time Montaigne experienced the cannibals at first hand, without intermediaries.
FIGURE 5. Engraving representing the Cannibals in Rouen in 1550. It is the Narrative of the sumptuous order of pleasing spectacles and magnificent theatres set up and exhibited by the citizens of Rouen … Rouen: R. Le Hoy, 1551 (private collection).
At the end of the chapter “Of cannibals,” when he has already commented at length on Cannibal culture, Montaigne buttresses the authority of his personal judgment by describing a personal meeting with the Brazilians. He begins by declaring that he has met “three of them” before witnessing a long discussion between the king and these three Indians: “The king talked to them for a long time”; then another interlocutor addressed them: “After that, someone asked their opinion”; finally, Montaigne’s turn comes: “I had a very long talk with one of them, but I had an interpreter who followed my meaning so badly, and who was so hindered by his stupidity in taking in my ideas, that I could get hardly any satisfaction from the man.”16 Several remarks need to be made regarding this series of conversations reported by Montaigne. First, while the king talked with the Indians “for a long time,” Montaigne had a “very long talk with one of them.” We may, however, have doubts about the quality of this exchange. For Montaigne, the point was not to obtain precise information—he already had that, thanks to Jean de Léry, André Thevet, and Urbain Chauveton, who remained by far his most important sources—but rather to prolong a moment that validated his own experience of the Cannibals. The Indians of the New World are often called upon in the Essais. They serve as witnesses for the prosecution in all kinds of criticisms and accusations: “witness my Cannibals,”17 Montaigne writes—without, however, developing what he means by that.
Montaigne’s interview with an Indian chief is one of the highlights of the Essais. It authorizes him to play the topographer in his turn. Rouen is assumed to be the port closest to the New World in the sixteenth century, a colonial transposition that validates the objectivity of the information gleaned in this second land of the Cannibals. Montaigne deliberately places his conversation with the Cannibals on the level of orality and proximity. He introduces this meeting with the help of a remark on the language of the Indians, which he perceives as “a soft language, with an agreeable sound, somewhat like Greek in its endings.”18 Only a direct witness could make such a remark. Moreover, this association of the Brazilian language with an ancient language (Greek) creates a link of community between civilizations that, had they coexisted in history, would have been able to understand each other. If the Athenians are the founders of Western civilization and modern forms of government, the Cannibals also have a language with the same humanistic and political potentialities. Montaigne’s ear is worth more than all the eyewitnesses who were able to accompany Villegaignon to Brazil. The tonality of the cannibal language makes these people the equivalent of the Greek citizens of Antiquity.
Although we can agree that there was an interview between Montaigne and some Cannibals, we still need to be sure as to when it might have taken place. The author of the Essais admits on several occasions that his memory often fails him. When he reports his “cannibal conversation,” we are in 1579, seventeen years after his interview in 1562, the date critics usually give for this famous face-to-face encounter with the Indian chiefs. Montaigne’s interview with the Cannibals has been associated with his possible sojourn in Rouen during the siege of that city. The king, who had recently turned thirteen, accompanied his mother, Catherine de Medici, to witness the taking of the city, which was in the hands of Protestants commanded by Count Montgomery. The rebel city was sacked by the royal troops, and the event was not accompanied by any ceremony likely to include a parade of the Indians of the New World. For that reason, it is possible to wonder exactly where this interview, which is capital for Montaigne, actually took place. In fact, we have no other testimony to such an encounter between him and Cannibals at the end of October 1562. The siege of the city makes a royal audience and a parade of Cannibals implausible; no text attests to such events after the siege of Rouen, despite the declarations made by Montaigne, who describes, seventeen years later and in considerable detail, his conversation with Indian “captains” who had recently arrived from Brazil—even though he acknowledges that he forgot the third remark the Cannibals made to him.
Montaigne declares that he met the Cannibals in Rouen while Charles IX was in that city. If he did, it could only have been in his capacity as a member of a parlement. A mission had already been entrusted to him by the parlement of Bordeaux on November 26, 1561, because in the parlement’s records he is described “going to the Court for other affairs.” According to these same records, Montaigne was back in Bordeaux in February 1562. He returned to Paris on June 12. This second mission for the parlement might thus have allowed him to go to Rouen in late October, but only as a private individual, since it is hard to imagine a member of parlement witnessing a military operation. Montaigne’s two careers must not be confused. An amalgam is often made between the Montaigne of the parlementary period and the Montaigne-gentleman after his admission to the Order of Saint Michael in 1571. In 1562, Montaigne was not in a position to be part of the king’s entourage and even less to participate in one way or another in the siege of the city in his capacity as a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux. Thus we have to consider other scenarios for this meeting with the Cannibals.
Following the pacification edict of Amboise, Charles IX went back to Rouen in August 1563 after witnessing the fall of Le Havre, which had been held by Ambrose Dudley, third Earl of Warwick. Brantôme wrote that the city had recovered part of its former prosperity after being sacked the preceding year and had undertaken great expense in preparation for the royal entry. Did Montaigne witness Charles IX’s entry into Rouen on Thursday, August 12, 1563? Did he represent the parlement of Bordeaux five days later, on August 17, during the lit de justice held at the parlement of Rouen, where the king’s majority was proclaimed—he had just celebrated his thirteenth birthday—and thus his accession to the throne? In conflict with the Paris parlement, the chancellor, Michel de L’Hospital, and the queen mother had chosen Rouen “to spite the parlement of Paris, and to reduce its authority and preeminence.”19 To put the final touch on the provocation for that parlement’s members, Charles IX took advantage of his stay in Rouen to confirm the edict of Amboise with a second edict of pacification. Michel de L’Hospital sharply criticized the parlements and accused them of interpreting royal edicts as they pleased, an old rebuke that had often been repeated by a royal government that was not happy about the growing political autonomy of the regional parlements and its courts of justice. Since the advent of Charles IX in 1560, most of the king’s and the queen mother’s initiatives had been systematically blocked by the Paris parlement, which considered itself the sole legal tutor of the minor king. The 1563 lit de justice constituted revenge taken on the parlement of Paris after three years of mutual suspicion. In the eyes of the members of the Paris parlement, the convocation of the lit de justice in a provincial parlement and not in Paris was an additional affront, and they contested its legality. However, they lost the battle, and their parlementary supremacy was greatly diminished. Charles IX took advantage of the precedent set in Rouen to hold two other lits de justice, in Toulouse in 1564 and in Bordeaux in 1565.20 If Montaigne had been present in Rouen in 1563, we may wonder how he would have felt about these admonishments directed against the members of his profession while he was laboring to make a place for himself in the hierarchy of a parlement that was soon to be, in its turn, the object of the chancellor’s wrath.
We have detailed knowledge of Charles IX’s entrance into Rouen in 1563 because every ceremony, procession, and public event was meticulously recorded and described.21 We also have all the speeches that were made there.22 However, nothing attests to any presence of Cannibals on August 12. Moreover, if we look attentively at the dates of Charles IX’s travel to Rouen and Montaigne’s schedule in Bordeaux, we see that Montaigne could not have been present in Rouen during the summer of 1563, either.
In his letter on the death of La Boétie published in the Mesnagerie de Xenophon in 1571, Montaigne gives a detailed chronology of his presence in Germignan, a village near Bordeaux, where Richard de Lestonac, his brother-in-law, owned a house. We have already recounted these extraordinary days, which Montaigne reported in great detail. We learn that Montaigne returned from the Palais de Justice on August 9, when he found his friend ill and advised him to leave Bordeaux and go to Germignan. He then made several visits to La Boétie’s bedside until August 18, the date of his friend’s death. Thus Montaigne could not have been present when Charles IX made his entrance into Rouen, or attended the lit de justice held in the same city on August 17. Charles IX left Rouen on August 19, the day after La Boétie’s death. Furthermore, documents in the archives prove that during most of July, Montaigne was working with La Boétie on several cases being appealed to the parlement. In fact, we have a ruling of the parlement, signed by Montaigne and dated July 24, concerning Jean Vernet and Pierre Viaut, appellants before the judges of the présidial court in Saintes, on the one hand, and Matthieu Salesse, a merchant from Hiers, in his own name and as assignee of Christophe de Vignoles, the appellee, on the other hand.23 Thus it is impossible that Montaigne attended the accession of Charles IX in Rouen or the lit de justice that followed it in August 1563. He spent the whole summer in Bordeaux, and also made visits to Germignan and a few stays in his château.
The description of the royal entry into Rouen in 1550 and the staging of the New World on the occasion of this event made it possible to establish the image of the Cannibal, but Montaigne probably did not meet the Indians in that city, as he implies he did. On the other hand, the presence of Cannibals in Bordeaux in 1565 is attested. Everything suggests that Montaigne’s meeting with them actually took place in Bordeaux. In fact, Indians from Brazil paraded in Bordeaux in 1565 on the occasion of Charles IX’s entrance into that city. Abel Jouan, Charles IX’s servant, wrote an account of the royal tour through France.24 Let us follow his itinerary in southwest France.
On Sunday, April 1, 1565, the king sailed down the Garonne to spend the night in Bordeaux. On April 2 he arrived at the little château of Thouars, one league from the city, where he stayed for six days, long enough to prepare his royal entry. On the occasion of his entrance into Bordeaux on April 9, 1565,25 three hundred men-at-arms paraded, leading twelve foreign captives, including Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Canarians, and “American and Brazilian savages,” who were harangued by their chiefs. Interpreters translated the king’s speeches when the Cannibals passed in front of him as a sign of submission.
This other way of representing Cannibals, more servile than in Rouen—the subjection and allegiance of the Indians to the king of France—was chosen for the reception of Charles IX in Bordeaux. It corresponded more to the political climate of the royal visit during the grand tour of France carried out between January 24, 1564, and May 1, 1566. The sovereign and the Chancellor of France wanted to reassert their authority during this stop in Bordeaux and had the Cannibals and the magistrates march in the same procession, perhaps in a spirit of concord and obedience. Militarily the year 1564 had been fairly peaceful, and a relative calm prevailed in Guyenne. The winter of 1564 had been among the harshest in a generation, and the rivers had frozen, as well as the grapevines and the wheat. In the spring, the king wanted to take advantage of the thaw and the lull in the religious conflict to get to know his kingdom and listen to his people’s grievances. Obedience and submission were the two key words of his passage through Bordeaux. The similarity between the experience Montaigne describes in Rouen and the account Theodore Godefroy gives of the speeches delivered by the Brazilian chiefs three years later in Bordeaux26 is striking.
Montaigne was definitely in Bordeaux at that time, and he participated in the festivities organized by the municipal authorities and the parlement, which had begun in mid-January 1565 to prepare for a reception of Charles IX with great pomp. Their preparations were the object of bitter and turbulent discussions within the parlement and the jurade. The king’s formal entrance into the city required the councillors of the parlement to be present at the various official ceremonies; like other members of the parlement, Montaigne was personally involved, even down to small details, in the organization of this event that was to effect a rapprochement with the chancellor, who did not spare his criticisms of the kingdom’s parlements. It was also an opportunity to pledge allegiance before the supreme representative of the kingdom’s judicial system. In the course of a session orchestrated by the parlement’s first president, Montaigne spoke along with twelve of his colleagues:
Wednesday January 24 … the aforementioned Eyquem said that in speaking to the king, he had to be made to see, by means of convincing reasons, how fitting it was for a good King to make frequent visits to the lands of his subjects, and how that benefited the affairs of his domain; that the low esteem and disorder of the judicial system came from the infinite number of officers of justice that are involved in it; from the bad order in which they are chosen and from the fact that everything is venal; that it is necessary to request that all these defects be rectified and eliminated from our justice system; that no request must be made that tends to increase or augment the profit that we derive from our offices.27
We seem to be listening to the chancellor himself. We can imagine the unpleasant surprise of the members of parlement, who must have wondered what side Montaigne was on. All of them were subject to the king’s orders, but between that and denouncing the corruption of a venal parlement, there was, of course, a limit that could not be transgressed. Montaigne paid the price for this moment of bravery as a righter of wrongs.
Five weeks later, on Sunday, April 1, 1565, the king dined at the home of the Foix-Candales in Cadillac. He spent Monday in Bordeaux; on Tuesday he went to Thouars, where he stayed from April 3 to April 8 because of the rainy, windy weather that was raging in Bordeaux. Finally, on April 9, 1565, Charles IX made his entrance into Bordeaux in a ceremony that had been rehearsed at length. Many members of the parlement openly opposed royal authority and wanted to use the king’s passage through their city to show their discontent. Some had even prepared “remonstrances,” but it was deemed inappropriate to antagonize once again the chancellor, who was making this visit a personal matter. The members of the Bordeaux parlement—like many of their colleagues in the kingdom’s other courts—demanded loudly and clearly their independence and tried to free themselves from the power of the parlement of Paris. Although it was in the hands of the Catholics, the parlement of Bordeaux demanded its autonomy with regard to the capital’s interference in its functioning. The members of the parlement balked at registering the letters patent relating to the edicts of pacification, not necessarily because they disapproved of them, but because they did not like having to ratify what had been decided elsewhere.
In 1565, the religious conflict was gathering force in the region, and a group of moderate members of the parlement—including Montaigne—recommended doing everything possible to avoid displeasing the sovereign. For Montaigne, the arrival of Charles IX in Bordeaux was to be an opportunity to reaffirm the parlement’s submission to royal authority. It was to be one of the highlights of his career as a councillor. Nevertheless, his colleagues were far from unanimous in supporting this position.
The parlement’s Registres secrets report at length several debates on what would be said in the king’s presence. On January 17, there was a debate regarding what “remonstrances” should be made to the king “for his service, the good of his domain, and the relief of his subjects.”28 A week later, several councillors proposed “diverse things” while others declared that “they wished to say nothing.” Finally, it was agreed to reaffirm that the parlement had always been submissive to the monarch’s authority and fully intended to keep the city of Bordeaux obedient to the king. That was Montaigne’s position.
Nonetheless, on March 21, following another debate, the court assigned the presidents La Chassaigne and Roffignac, assisted by councillors Vergoing, Malvyn, Gaultier, and Guilheragues, along with the presidents at the Chambres des Enquêtes Alesme and La Vergue, “to look into and consider other things.” The officers were unable to agree on the words to be used to reaffirm the parlement’s submission, and a revolt was organized with a few recalcitrant members. It was finally decided to send representatives of the parlement to meet the king before he entered the city, and each councillor was advised to “promptly” buy himself a “scarlet robe” if he did not already have one. It was also decided that during the king’s sojourn in the city, “the Presidents and Councillors entering the Palais shall wear suitable robes with tippets, and not chamber robes, nor large trousers and garters, small, pointed hats, low-cut shoes, nor slippers and shoes of velvet.”29 The councillors decided to wear their red robes and a fur-lined hat. The parlement got dressed up to receive the monarch and to display the signs of its privileges.
To please the young king—he was then fifteen years old—and to conform to the ritual of the sovereign’s authority over foreign territories (including Antarctic France) another “Cannibal exposition” had been arranged in the form of a procession through the streets of Bordeaux. It was chosen to exhibit prisoners. In the public procession, which brought together all the notables of the city and the parlement, and following the Cannibals and other captive people, the municipal officials paraded in front of the king. The members of parlement—including Montaigne—rode through the center of the city on horseback and in ceremonial garb, wearing red robes with hoods for the councillors who had earlier dined at the Palais at the king’s expense.30 Montaigne, in the same way as the Cannibals, was part of the cortege that passed in front of the king in Bordeaux on this April 9, 1565. He was richly dressed; the Cannibals were naked. After the distinction drawn in 1550 between the Tupinambas (Indians allied with the French against the Portuguese) and the Tabajaras (enemies of the Tupinambas and thus of the French), we can conclude that because they were captives, the Indians who marched through the streets of Bordeaux were Tabajaras—at least in the rather confused image of the representation of Indian nations in Brazil. Montaigne chose to remain silent about these Cannibals who had been defeated and enslaved by the French and their allies the Tupinambas. His conception of Cannibal wars without either victors or vanquished was perhaps not in conformity with his encounter with Cannibals in Bordeaux.
La Popelinière reports that during Charles IX’s ceremonial entrance into Bordeaux, spectators saw “three hundred men at arms leading twelve captive foreign Nations, such as Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Egyptians, Taptobanians, Indians, Canarians, Moors, Ethiopians, savages, Americans and Brazilians; whose captains spoke before the King each in his own tongue, understood by the translator who interpreted for his Majesty.”31 Thomas Richard, the printer of one of the descriptions of the royal entry into Bordeaux, regrets not having been able to reproduce the speeches that were delivered to the king by the twelve foreign nations, each in its own language, “which diversity of language is very familiar to Bordeaux sailors.”32 In his Histoire universelle, Agrippa d’Aubigné also recounts the presence of Brazilians in Bordeaux. He speaks of “twelve bands” of foreigners, including “Cannibals, Margajats, and Thaupinambous; who were represented by their chiefs.”33 His description (of the presence of the king, the interpreter, the speech) is not very different from Montaigne’s in the Essais. Thus we can consider that Montaigne probably met the Cannibals in Bordeaux. If he had already talked with them in Rouen in 1562, it would be surprising that he did not mention his second interview with the Indians of the New World in Bordeaux, three years later. Must this be considered a vagueness of his memory or is there a political explanation of this omission or confusion?
In both cases—Rouen and Bordeaux—it would have been impossible for Montaigne to hear the translation given by the interpreter. This is a matter of the physical distance between Montaigne, on the one hand, and the king and the interpreter, on the other hand. His rank as a simple councillor in the parlement did not allow him to be near the king or the numerous other nobles, ambassadors, prelates, and high state officials. The protocol of these meetings (conceived in the specific ceremonial of royal entries) is set forth in precise and detailed sixteenth-century descriptions.34 Protocol was always followed to the letter, and a simple councillor in the parlement obeyed the rules that governed the formation of corteges and interviews. Montaigne could not have been close enough to the Cannibals to hear them when they addressed the king. His private conversation with them could certainly have taken place both in Rouen and in Bordeaux, but in that case the chronology given in the Essais poses a problem. It could not have occurred between 1560 and 1563.
The royal entry into Bordeaux was also an occasion for the members of parlement to parade before the inhabitants in order to show them that they represented the only royal justice, a justice that the jurats and the city also claimed the right to dispense in numerous cases. Their cortege was led by Louis de Pontac, a comptroller at the chancellery.35 The clergy conducted the procession before the king, followed by a large number of soldiers, royal sergeants, members of the présidial courts, of the university faculty, and representatives of the parlement with its councillors in red robes who paraded “with great gravity,” on horseback or on mules.36 Little children on horses, dressed in white and holding small flags painted with the arms of France, passed in front of the platform where the king sat. At the end of the procession, the jurats and the master of the mint preceded three hundred soldiers leading the twelve foreign nations, each dressed “in its way”: the “Taprobains in the Taprobain way; Americans in the American way; Indians in the Indian way; Canarians in the Canarian way; savages in the savage way; Brazilians in the Brazilian way …”37
The parade lasted four hours. Each captain of these nations made a speech in his language “which was translated by an interpreter.” The presidents and councillors marched two by two. The presidents wore their mantles, with mortars “on their heads”; behind them came the councillors and four bailiffs, then thirty lawyers with their fur-lined hats, and finally twenty prosecutors wearing their hoods with bourrelets. Montaigne remained standing during the speech addressed to the king, who was sitting across from him on a red velvet chair placed on a platform erected for the occasion; the monarch was surrounded by the prince of Navarre, the Cardinal of Bourbon, the lords of Lansac and Nemours, the Cardinal of Guise, and several foreign ambassadors.
The four presidents of the parlement, the clerk, and a bailiff knelt on the ground in front of the king, their heads bared. Benoît Lagebaston, first president of the parlement, spoke first, giving a long speech. Seeking to please both the king and the members of the parlement, who had expressed the sharpest criticisms of the presence of the royal Court in Bordeaux, he delivered a discourse that went round in circles and lacked substance. The king, annoyed, got angry and brusquely interrupted him to show his displeasure. Godefroy relates this incident:
The King was irritated by the speech given by Maistre Jacques Benoist, First President, and cut him off, and without waiting until he had finished said to him: I praise my Justice for the good duty it has done, and if there is someone who still has arms in his hands, I shall render such a Justice that it will be an example to the others; and after he rose from his seat, the aforesaid Presidents, the Clerk, and the Bailiff all lined up on the platform waiting to see the Companies of the City pass before them.38
The protocol that had been elaborated over more than two months was suddenly suspended. The young king’s ill humor, displayed before members of parlement who were a little too sure of themselves, had spoiled the celebration. We can imagine the coolness that followed. The king rose and the members of parlement, paralyzed by the situation, did not budge. The procession continued and it was the turn of the representatives of “each foreign Nation,” Greeks, Turks, Egyptians, Moors, Tartars, Indians, and Savages “dressed in accord with the aforesaid Nations” to express themselves. At 6:00 p.m., everything was over and the king went off to sup after everyone else had silently gone away.39 The royal entry was far from a success.
The king reprimanded the members of the parlement, through the intermediary of the chancellor, Michel de L’Hospital, during a lit de justice held on April 12. The councillors of the Great Council were associated with the councillors of the court of the parlement of Bordeaux. The chancellor reminded the members of parlement that justice did not belong to them and that it emanated from the king, in accord with his legitimate orders. He admonished them, emphasizing the fact that their personal judgments remained closely bound to the laws (astricta legibus).
Displeased with the magistrates’ behavior, the king found many faults in his parlement of Bordeaux, going so far as to accuse its members of an “infinity of murders, plunderings, and instances of public violence that have been committed in your jurisdiction.”40 L’Hospital reported that he himself had “received many complaints about your seditious people and public quarrels.”41 The parlement was compared to an “ill-regulated” household in which great disobedience to the king prevailed. Royal orders were often ignored or even rejected.
In Bordeaux, the members of the parlement had to grin and bear it, and the councillors were more “split up into diverse factions” than in any other parlement. The youngest councillors at the bottom of the hierarchy—including Montaigne—had to choose their camp in order to have any hope of advancing their careers and someday being promoted according to their political alignment. After consulting the registers, the chancellor told the members of the parlement that they too often succumbed to insults and did not hesitate to “resort to violence without having respect for either yourselves or the place where you are.”42 Not mincing words, he urged them to keep their “hands clean” and to rise to a higher level to recover some of their dignity. While the chancellor considered the councillors of the parlement of Paris too “serious,” he considered those of the parlement of Bordeaux too “familiar,” and a national shame for this lofty profession.
The chancellor then accused them of numerous judicial dysfunctions: they were slow in registering royal orders, and too many protests emanated from this rebellious parlement. He chastised the parlement for its excessive resistance to the execution of royal orders and said that he was dismayed that justice had not been administered with as much exactitude and impartiality as it ought to have been. The members of the Bordeaux parlement too often put their personal interests before the king’s, he said. Justice was for sale, particularly to the Bordeaux bourgeoisie, which distributed generous bribes to the councillors. L’Hospital also questioned their competence and accused them of being fainéant and dishonest, even liars: “In this body there are some who are lazy and serve only a few times a year, and yet always sign their debentur and certify that they have served.”43 L’Hospital expressed his indignation at the avarice of magistrates who took “gifts to give audiences” and thus became “great thieves”44 of the court. The chancellor’s public admonishments marked people’s minds, at least for a time. This warning shot was taken as a slap in the face.
We can imagine Montaigne, silently savoring his victory; he could be satisfied to have committed himself against his colleagues and to have denounced the trafficking in influence and the financial malversations that were corrupting from within a system closed in on itself. Michel de L’Hospital’s speech before the Bordeaux parlement was unchallengeable on that point, since it pertained to political and financial collusion between the robins and the bourgeoisie: “there is something else that I have been told, that there are, in this chamber, those who lend their money to merchants at interest, and they should take off their robes and become merchants: perhaps they would do better; for today there is nothing that spoils commerce so much as too great communication with the people of the long robe: because as soon as a merchant has something, he has to make his son a lawyer or a councillor.”45 On May 18 of the same year, the chancellor reprimanded the parlement once again, castigating the councillors for their excessive familiarity and their tendency to “communicate too much with the parties.” He accused the members of the parlement of being too “dissolute in their lives, conversation, and dress.”46
Montaigne witnessed these calls to order in due form; and we can imagine his reaction, given that he was counting on pursuing a career in the Bordeaux parlement. He could have spoken out—and perhaps he did in private conversation with the chancellor—but he must also have thought about his future. Once the king had returned to Paris, things would resume their usual course in the parlement, and it was better to treat one’s enemies carefully. Since La Boétie’s death, the network of Montaigne’s allies had considerably diminished, and to be able to envisage a promotion, he had to make friends. Fifteen years later, when the first edition of the Essais was published, Montaigne preferred not to recount his participation in Charles IX’s royal entry into Bordeaux in 1565. His memory of it might have been too painful, and an encounter with the Cannibals in Rouen—rather than in Bordeaux—on the occasion of the reconquest of the city from the Protestants sounded a much more appropriate note.
In the early 1560s, the intransigent Catholics found Charles IX’s concessions to the Protestants outrageous, and the edicts of pacification were no longer applied in Bordeaux. The Huguenots missed no occasion to complain to the king.47 At first, Charles IX replied favorably to the Protestants’ demands and granted them letters patent that authorized them, for example, to sing psalms in their homes or to sell the Bible in French. Protestants—including members of the parlement—were also to be allowed to hold public offices in the city—a well-intentioned but inapplicable rule. For example, the parlement of Bordeaux had refused to register the letters patent sent by the chancellery. Finally, these letters were confirmed not by the parlement but directly by the seneschal of Guyenne, an unusual formality that weakened the application of their content and made it possible to revoke several articles favorable to the Protestants. Montaigne’s position with regard to the edicts of pacification in the early 1560s is not very clear. A fervent Catholic and not much inclined to conciliation, he nonetheless considered himself a representative of the royal power and was not prepared to join the rebellion that was shaking the unity of the Bordeaux parlement.
The significant fact about Charles IX’s stay in Bordeaux was precisely this call to order issued to the parlement at the lit de justice that followed the king’s entrance into the city and the procession of the captive peoples. In 1580, when the Essais were first published, and while Henry III was still having the same problems with the parlement of Bordeaux, this reminder of Charles IX’s visit to Bordeaux could have been misinterpreted. For Montaigne, it was a matter of recognizing an embarrassing incident that it was better to keep silent about. In 1565, Montaigne was still a member of the parlement of Bordeaux, and to make reference to the king’s irritation before the members of parlement was also to refer to the fact that, in the 1560s, he belonged to the world of the robins. Charles IX’s displeasure and Michel de L’Hospital’s reprimands were addressed to Montaigne as well, as a member of parlement, even if he was not necessarily as rebellious as some of his colleagues. Esprit de corps among people in the same profession prevailed at that time, and Montaigne assuredly preferred to avoid mentioning Charles IX’s not very memorable visit to Bordeaux. It seemed to him far better to refer to the young king’s presence in Rouen for the siege and the conquest of that city by the Catholics, which became a bastion of the Catholic League after 1584.48
After the king’s departure on April 20, 1565, the prince of Navarre, accompanied by his uncles, the Cardinal of Bourbon (1523–1590) and Charles of Bourbon (1515–1565), prince of La Roche-sur-Yon, appeared in turn before the parlement to take possession of his government of Guyenne. All the councillors were summoned for the occasion. A document from the period informs us that on May 2, “Eyquem de Montaigne” received instructions to go to Saintonge.49 Montaigne was definitely in Bordeaux in April 1565. That is where he met the Cannibals.
“Their Warfare Is Wholly Noble and Generous”
The word Montaigne chose to describe the exchanges between the New World and Europe is “corruption”—a term that cannot fail to remind us of the discourse the chancellor Michel de L’Hospital delivered before the members of the Bordeaux parlement in the very year in which Montaigne encountered Indians from the New World—an irreversible contamination that led the three “Cannibals” he met to their ruin. They had “let themselves be tricked by the desire for new things,”50 Montaigne writes. Here we find a theme that was to be repeated by Rousseau in the eighteenth century: the harmful influence of civilization. The Cannibals were shown Western customs, which Montaigne calls “our way,” such as the pomp of the king’s court—but to make this point, the royal entry into Bordeaux would be a much better example than the more private encounter in Rouen in 1562. For Montaigne, the Indians’ contact with Europe initiated an irreversible process. The Brazilian natives did not yet know the price they were going to pay for having traveled to the old continent. Their nudity made them simpler, more naive, and thus less corrupted, the exact opposite of the members of the Bordeaux parlement scolded by Michel de L’Hospital.
Montaigne also liked to strip himself naked and paint himself in a very particular way, with a certain “original naturalness,”51 or a “naturalness so pure and simple.”52 As for his “public acts,” they are supposed to be unpremeditated, and claim to follow the natural movement of the unspoiled body associated with the Cannibal. Reproducing the battle staged between the two Cannibal tribes in Rouen in 1550, the Wars of Religion—especially after 1572—also defy any rational explanation. In the Western world, conflicts were henceforth based on constant political bargaining that deprived them of any nobility. On the other hand, the nobility of the Cannibals was founded on the feudal organization of their society. The tribal chieftainship led Montaigne to draw a parallel with the role of the feudal lord and to demonstrate the superiority of a society dominated by virtue. He agreed with Pierre d’Origny, an ardent defender of the nobility, when he declared that “to be truly noble is to follow virtue.”53 The principal duty of the chief consists first of all in teaching virtue and then in ensuring his people’s material life, and he is responsible for the accumulation of foodstuffs and their distribution. War represents the moment when virtue becomes visible. Glory and honor are the two essential qualities in battle: “Their warfare is wholly noble and generous,”54 Montaigne writes. From their enemies, the Cannibals want to derive nothing but honor and virtue.
Fourteen years later, in 1579, Montaigne tried to recall this encounter, which clearly marked him, but which he seems not to remember very well. He recalls having heard the Brazilian captains make only three judgments concerning his own society, but he is incapable of recollecting the third one. We have to inquire more fully into this faulty memory, which affects the factual truth of the experience reported. Montaigne’s memory flags, but he tells us the essential point: the fact that tall, strong, bearded men (the Swiss guards) submitted to obey a child (Charles IX). The Cannibals were also astonished by the great social differences prevailing in France, with, on the one hand, “men full and gorged with all sorts of good things,” and, on the other hand, “beggars at their doors, emaciated by hunger and poverty.”55 In fact, they did not understand a political and social system founded on inequalities accepted by a large part the population that neither rebelled nor took “the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”56 This last remark is luminous and has numerous political implications at the end of the sixteenth century. Without exaggerating the political import of the cannibal chiefs’ observations, and despite Montaigne’s opinion regarding the mediocre performance of the interpreter put at his disposal, we have to recognize that the truchement was able to express a social problem that is not so easy to understand (in another language) and still less to translate (so economically).
We may also examine two other examples Montaigne reports. He declares that he was able to question a Cannibal directly concerning the number of warriors he commanded in Brazil. The Cannibal is supposed to have replied by pointing to “a piece of ground, to signify as many as such a space could hold.”57 This image seems to be taken directly from the speech given by Michel de L’Hospital on April 25, 1565, before the parlement of Bordeaux. L’Hospital reported how the kings of Macedonia and Epirus sent two explorers who, perched “high on a hill,” were able to evaluate the size of the Roman armies by the space they occupied. Similarly, at the beginning of the chapter “Of cannibals” Montaigne repeats almost verbatim a remark made by L’Hospital and drawn from Livy and Plutarch, to the effect that, “That army was not at all a barbarous army but a Greek [army].”58 Strange similarities. It is as if Montaigne had not wished to reveal the fact that it was actually in Bordeaux and not in Rouen that he had encountered the Cannibals. L’Hospital’s speech before the Bordeaux parlement might also have allowed Montaigne to apply the chancellor’s examples to the Cannibals.
The sociological analysis made by the Cannibals, who had just arrived from the New World, refers us to a question that is not only relevant today but also permits us to look into the political foundations of the society that Montaigne knew. This relationship of dependency between the poor (beggars) and the wealthy is not based solely on a power relationship or on fear and repression, but also has to do with what La Boétie calls voluntary servitude. This bold sense of the term “servitude” is reflected upon in the chapter “Of cannibals,” though it claims to be simply repeating a commentary made by the Indians in Montaigne’s presence. The reference to La Boétie in a parenthesis introduced by the author of the Essais reveals a political reflection that goes beyond Montaigne and the Wars of Religion: “(they have a way in their language of speaking of men as halves of one another).”59 Here we find again the definition that Montaigne later gave to his exceptional friendship with La Boétie. Is that a simple coincidence? The Indians extend this definition to society as a whole, believing that private interest must yield to the common good. Both the needy and the privileged are “halves” of each other in a mutual and necessary interdependence that reflects a model of society. One of the most important political lessons offered by Montaigne in this real or imagined exchange with the Indians of the New World is the importance of not cutting oneself off from one’s other half.
The Cannibals’ statements and Montaigne’s commentary on the social organization of the Old World have to be placed in the political and religious context of the time. The royal edict of January 17, 1562, gave Protestants the right to assemble. In response to that concession, the Paris parlement decided, on June 6, that its members had to make a public profession of their Catholic faith. In Guyenne, the disturbances were becoming more intense; Catholics and Protestants were waging a veritable war of propaganda—before that war became a very real one. In July, Monluc challenged the Protestant troops in Targon. In Bordeaux, Catholic reaction was organized in the parlement while the jurats promised an equal fidelity to the king and to the “old religion.” Montaigne, who was in Paris at that time, spontaneously presented himself at the parlement on June 12, asking that he also be asked to make an oath of Catholic faith.
The parlement’s clerk, Du Tillet, reports Montaigne’s action in terms that suggest his astonishment:
On that day, Maistre Michel de Montaigne, councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux, paid his respects to the Court and asked, so that he might have a vote in the court’s audience, to be allowed to make a profession of faith, in accord with what he had been informed had been ordered by a ruling of this same court on the sixth of this month, which he did.60
This supplication is difficult to understand, since this profession of faith was in no way required of members of the parlement of Bordeaux. It is true that as a member of parlement, that is, an official in the service of the king and the Christian religion, Montaigne might have felt concerned. But this hasty step tells us a great deal about his political convictions in the early 1560s. Montaigne deliberately chose to side with the king and thus distinguished himself from the great majority of his Bordeaux colleagues, who were more inclined not to obey what might be decided in Paris. But what did he have to gain from this gratuitous demonstration? This spontaneous proof of allegiance to the Catholic religion and the king is all the more remarkable because Montaigne was absolutely not obliged to present himself before the Paris parlement, or to submit to its injunctions, even though he was subject to it administratively, like every other member of a parlement in the kingdom. This unaccustomed zeal on his part expressed a personal choice.
If he decided to make a public profession of his Catholic faith in 1562, it could only be as a result of a personal political conviction or a career choice—the two not being incompatible, moreover—that is, in order to situate his commitment in a well-defined ideological framework. Paris could count on him, even if he belonged to a rebellious parlement. This impulsive profession of faith has been seen as a fanatical act motivated by a desire to win the king’s favor.61 That interpretation no doubt goes too far, but it is true that the Catholics’ religious intransigence was far stronger in 1562 than it was to be two or three years later. It was not a time for compromises, and it is in that context that we must understand the political position taken by Montaigne, who on this point shared the views developed by La Boétie in his Memorandum on the January edict.
This manifestation of allegiance to the Catholic religion expresses a clear political choice, and that is why Rouen (and the meeting with the Cannibals) acquires an important symbolic meaning in the opposition between Catholics and Protestants. Montaigne took care to situate the Cannibals in a heroic culture that had disappeared in his age.62 That culture had to be protected, just as the Roman church had to be defended. It was an ancestral custom that had to be preserved at any price. Montaigne notes that in his time religious commitment accorded disproportionate importance to political efficacy, to the detriment of the noble values incarnated in the faith. After 1572, he was confronted with a new political reality that would force him to modify his views on the religious question. The political response to Machiavellianism—given by Innocent Gentillet soon after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the first civil wars—criticized precisely the corruption of the ancestral values of the government in their most honorable and heroic form.
The imaginary journey to Rouen at the time of the siege of the city in 1562 was a notable political act that expressed a clear commitment (in 1562, but it was recounted in 1580) to the Catholic side, at a time when it was not yet fashionable to make concessions to the Protestants. If Montaigne preferred to have seen the Cannibals in Rouen, it was perhaps because his presence alongside Charles IX on that occasion is the manifest sign of his adherence to the Catholic religion at the very beginning of the denominational conflict. The Wars of Religion had not yet officially begun at the time of his supposed sojourn in Rouen in 1562; the siege of that city could be interpreted as an important victory won by the Catholic party at that time. Montaigne’s political attitude is in reality rather close to, if not identical with, the one La Boétie had expressed at the end of 1561. By 1580, speaking retrospectively of the 1560s had become rather delicate. In 1580 Montaigne might have seen in this early commitment to the side that he repeatedly calls “our religion” a considerable advantage in the political career that was opening up to him.
Whether he wished it or not, because of his office as councillor, Montaigne was associated de facto with the recalcitrant parlement of Bordeaux. Thus it is in this context that we must understand Montaigne’s hesitation to refer to his interview with the Cannibals in Bordeaux—and consequently to remind the reader of his presence in Bordeaux at the time of the famous lit de justice held there. In his Essais, he says relatively little about his first career as a robin. Following the king to Rouen situated him in another social order to which he was proud to belong after 1580; no longer that of the robins, but that of gentlemen. The king’s presence in Rouen in 1562 was essentially military and thus much more appropriate for situating the lord of Montaigne’s experience with the Cannibals, which he reported in writing in 1579. It is probable that, in 1579–80, Montaigne preferred to forget his first career as a member of the parlement and hence to mention only his presence alongside the king, in the restricted circle of the members of the nobility, and within earshot of the Cannibals and their interpreter in a context that celebrated a Catholic victory over the Protestants, far from Bordeaux. In a way, Montaigne ennobled his encounter with the Cannibals.
During the extravagant staging of Cannibal life in 1550, the sailors had two choices: they could be Tabajaras or Tupinambas. Their war was a civil war, a violent confrontation between incomprehensible beliefs leading to barbarous acts. The victims of aggression (the Tupinambas) ultimately emerged victorious from the conflict that had suddenly broken out before the king and his Court. One could, like Montaigne, compare this Cannibal conflict with the Wars of Religion. In an effort to make peace between the denominations, the edict of January 1562 and Michel de L’Hospital had wanted to propose realistic solutions that were adapted to the situation on the ground. Catholic zealots could not accept what they saw as a first step toward the establishment of the reformed religion in France. The Memorandum on the January edict looked like a response to the compromise proposed by the French chancellor. It also reflected Montaigne’s political position in the early 1560s. As we have seen, the massacre at Vassy, provoked by extremists to demonstrate the nullity of the edict, marked a decisive political turning point. The Protestants called for a popular uprising. They seized Rouen and Dreux, cities that at that time incarnated the people’s revolt. However, the Catholic party quickly regained control of the situation after the siege of Rouen on October 26, 1562, and that of Dreux on December 19, 1562. These two cities have an important place in the Essais, not only through the encounter with the Cannibals in Rouen but also through a short chapter titled “Of the battle of Dreux” (I: 45).
We see that the dates of these possible meetings (imaginary or real) with the Cannibals are closely linked to Montaigne’s political career and religious commitment between 1560 and 1565. Without being an intransigent Catholic, Montaigne shared with La Boétie a conception of religion rigid enough to reject compromises that in his opinion weakened sovereignty and threatened to plunge the country into social and political chaos. He became much more conciliatory in the late 1570s. His memory of the Cannibal parades contrasted two cities that were opposed politically and religiously: Rouen, which had been in the hands of the Protestants, and Bordeaux, which had remained faithful to the king in matters of religion, but whose parlement was administratively rebellious. The lesson of the Cannibals has to be understood in this complex relationship, which is both spatial (Rouen and Bordeaux) and temporal (1550, 1562, 1563, 1565, 1575–80). Montaigne had not allowed himself to be “deceived” by the sirens of religious “novelties” at a time when many of his neighbors and even members of his family had chosen the reformed religion, often simply out of political opportunism. Whereas the Cannibals had fallen into the Old World’s gilded traps, Montaigne had resolutely opted for tradition, from the very beginning of the religious conflict. For him it was better to be a gentleman among the Cannibals than to be a simple councillor before the gentlemen of the court and the parlement. That is why his encounter with the Cannibals had to be private and outside any ceremony, whether it was in Rouen or in Bordeaux.
It is clear that in his account of his encounter with the Cannibals, Montaigne also projected his bookish knowledge onto the New World. These two experiences of the New World—a minimal direct testimony and detailed bookish knowledge—complemented each other, somewhat as in the Brazilian festival of 1550, where it was very difficult to distinguish the real Indians from the sailors disguised as Cannibals. The simulacrum was so perfect that the distinction between the savage and the Westerner was almost entirely effaced. In 1580, Montaigne played the Cannibal in his turn, after having so thoroughly come to know them through texts and through the stories he had been told about them, and when he was capable of understanding them and conversing with them. He almost spoke their language. He too, had traveled to the other side of the Atlantic, at least in his head. If we accept the fact that Montaigne’s communication with the Cannibals was extremely brief—but long enough, Montaigne adds—we have to recognize that it could not have taught him much that he did not already know through his readings or the stories transmitted by his house employee, the sailor who had traveled around Antarctic France.
The quality of the information provided by this former sailor who had lived “in that other world,” and who might have participated in the festival at Rouen in 1550, was certainly superior to that provided by the interpreter who officiated during the brief encounter with the Cannibals and who no doubt lacked imagination. But that is not the key point. The conversation with the Cannibals involved an experience that was mainly political, and not only cultural. Memory is often selective and depends in part on the dominant ideology of the moment. Confronted by memories that were not very glorious on the level of his new career projects, Montaigne displayed a duty to forget that may have conveniently forced him to prefer, consciously or unconsciously, a new political space (Rouen instead of Bordeaux) the better to explain his affinities with the inhabitants of the New World and thus to highlight a social and political system that he considered closer to the noble ideal.
Montaigne emphasizes the fact that his knowledge of the Cannibals’ way of life was transmitted to him at first hand by “a simple, crude fellow” who had formerly lived in Brazil. This companion of Villegaignon’s was worth more than all the narratives of Thevet and Léry, because he was less tempted to deform the truth. “A simple, crude fellow—a character fit to bear true witness,”63 the former sailor in Montaigne’s service also played the role of a Cannibal in a perfect simulacrum. Speaking of his eyewitness, Montaigne adds: “Such was my man, and besides this, he at various times brought sailors and merchants, whom he had known on that trip, to see me. So I content myself with his information, without inquiring what the cosmographers say about it.” 64 These travelers—the sailors and merchants who had gone to Brazil—allowed Montaigne to enter a group of privileged witnesses who lent credence to his own descriptions of the Cannibals and his judgments concerning them.
Montaigne almost always bases his authority on the physical proximity of his sources: “from what I have been told,”65 “according to my witnesses,”66 “I had a very long talk with one of them.”67 The truth results from a legal judgment after an oral hearing of the witnesses. That is what judicial experience had taught him during more than ten years at the Bordeaux parlement.68 In 1565, he saw his Cannibals as witnesses, just like those who had been heard during investigations in the law court. His office as councillor amounted precisely to verifying and “extracting” the testimonies of the appellants and appellees during an appeal in the parlement’s first investigative chamber. He had learned his trade as a reporter in Guyenne and was just applying it to the New World. Used to writing “briefs” that were supposed to sum up oral testimonies, Montaigne had to remain as close as possible to the experiences naively reported by “simple, crude” witnesses. Travelers who had become servants were ultimately not so unlike Cannibals. Despite their cultural differences, a sailor imitated a Cannibal so well—in his gestures and his language—that the two merged. The same was true for Montaigne in 1580: to pass for a Cannibal, all he had to do was make the necessary gestures, strip himself naked, and cover himself with paint. While this simulacrum necessary for the comprehension of the New World and its social organization was rather delicate in 1562 or 1565, it was fully conceivable and accepted in 1580.
Could the Essais be the particular expression of a sciamachy, a battle against an imaginary enemy? At the beginning of the chapter “Of liars” (I: 9), Montaigne admits that he has a very bad memory: “There is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognize almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient.” 69 Should we see this as a confession? For Montaigne, there is a difference between lying (mentir) and “telling a lie” (dire mensonge). This truer truth or “simulacrum” does not go “against his conscience” and cannot be described as a lie. The Cannibals are above all the result of a labor of imagination, and for Montaigne their existence is certainly more symbolic than real. It is important to report a real encounter, but the time and the place count for little. The word “sciamachy,” which is derived from Greek, represents a kind of exercise or test. In Antiquity, this kind of combat against oneself served as training for a fight to come. In this sense, the Essais are a “simulacrum of the truth” in which the gentleman and the Cannibal merge. One takes the place of the other: no longer “a Cannibal in breeches” but a gentleman as a Cannibal.
