The Essais of 1580: Moral, Political, and Military Discourses
In 1579, the Huguenot leaders met with their Catholic counterparts at Nérac. In accord with the latest edict of pacification, the king decided to grant the Protestants several strongholds. This step did not produce the hoped-for results; instead of calming people down, political and religious recognition actually increased the hostility between the two camps. The Catholic extremists had no intention of accepting the slightest compromise, and Henry III found himself more isolated than ever. Faced with the failure of this meeting, the king of Navarre had a declaration in the form of a protest published, in which he explained the necessity of taking up arms to defend Protestant churches in France.1 The Protestants claimed that Henry III’s edict had not been fully executed, notably in Bordeaux, where violent acts aimed at Protestants had increased in number. Thus in Langon, six leagues away,
after the king of Navarre had caused the meeting to take place, evacuated all the foreigners, and that the lord of Saint-Oreux had resumed his functions as seneschal, the inhabitants, trusting in the public faith, were attacked at night by armed men using ladders …, as many as two or three hundred of them, the most conspicuous being from Bordeaux; fifteen or sixteen people were killed, women were raped, and all the goods were pillaged; without any compensation being received.2
The southwest was prey to this kind of settling of accounts in an infernal atmosphere of unrest and terror. Fighting had just begun again in Guyenne, and the lieutenant governor advised the king to reply with military force. He insisted that the men at arms be paid, “and not engage in robbery and extortion … without imposing any further trafficking on the great crowd of the poor.”3 Too much ravaging and pillaging had thrown the population into a state of near famine, and the region was being reduced to a disaster zone where insecurity prevailed. In this context of human suffering and deep hatred between Protestants and Catholics, Montaigne published his first Essais in Bordeaux in 1580.
In February 1580, the king received contradictory reports on the political situation and the unrest in Guyenne. A memorandum written on February 26 by Armand de Gontaut, baron of Biron and marshal of France, insinuated that the monarch had been deceived by the reports from the Court of Nérac, and that the situation was much more worrisome than they suggested. Looting and murder were becoming more frequent in the region, and a number of cities were in imminent danger of falling into the hands of the Huguenots.4 We have to resituate the first edition of the Essais in the local context of Bordeaux and Guyenne to grasp the work’s political dimension. On April 21, 1580, Catherine de Medici wrote to Henry of Navarre: “My son, I cannot believe that it is possible that you desire the destruction of this kingdom, as will occur, along with yours, if war begins; and I beg you to consider what you are and what good you could derive from the ruin of this state.”5 On this same date, Henry of Navarre addressed a manifesto “To the gentlemen of the Nobility,” in which he gave the reasons that had led him to take up arms on April 15.
In early 1580, things were moving toward an inevitable confrontation between the two Henrys, and Guyenne had suddenly become the center of this conflict between the royal party and the Huguenots. The first Essais printed in Bordeaux appeared in a climate of religious hostility and political maneuvering. It could even be suggested that the 1580 edition is an occasional work that was necessarily read in the context of the Wars of Religion. It was supposed to serve as a springboard for a career that Montaigne envisaged—a career not in writing, but in politics. He could believe that his book offered a new approach to post-Machiavellian politics, and many of the chapters in the first two books stressed their political, diplomatic, and military orientation.
Montaigne’s geographical situation placed him at the heart of the religious discords of his time. We must never lose sight of the deep anchoring of the Essais in the episodes that punctuated the Wars of Religion in southwest France. The Essais have rightly been called a mirror and a critique of their time,6 but the book also shows—at least in its first version—Montaigne’s participation in the political debate and in political life. Far from being detached from the events of his time, Montaigne contributed to them in his own way. The particular circumstances of a private life were transformed into advantages on the public chessboard, not only in Guyenne and Gascony, but also, more generally, in Aquitaine. Montaigne may have been approached as an ideal mediator between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. His political conceptions made him a faithful servant of the king, and he was irreproachable on the religious level, but he was also welcome at the Court of Nérac and had succeeded in winning the esteem of the Gascon gentlemen who had rallied to the cause of Henry of Navarre.
His trips to Paris between 1575 and 1578 allowed Montaigne to remain close to the center of political power. His nobility had recently been confirmed, but he was not considered a courtier or a royal favorite. Moreover, unlike most of his contemporaries, Montaigne did not display religious ardor. He soon joined the camp of the centristes and politiques, even if he always proved independent and refused to be associated with any pressure group. He listened, reported, and seldom took sides. He created the persona of a moderate, simple man who was always frank; in short, his behavior contrasted with the political practices of the late sixteenth century. Imbued with a rusticity that made him more credible, he used his first Essais as a mirror reflecting the essential qualities of a confidant in the service of the king. He took his role seriously and considered pursuing a career in diplomacy, where his political perspicacity could best serve the royal cause. His models in the early 1570s continued to guide him.
“A Discourse on My Life and Actions”
The first edition of the Essais was printed with haste in Simon Millanges’s shop, and the result shows it. The two volumes have print of different sizes, there are numerous misprints, the pagination is faulty, and the general presentation is uneven because the sizing was imprecise and the page format was changed in the course of the printing.7 The typographical composition by plates required a meticulous assessment of the manuscript copy provided by the author to determine with precision the number of pages that were to appear on each of the printer’s sheets. This imposition method was necessary to make it possible to fold the printed sheet in accord with the format chosen. This way of printing demanded rigorous sizing. However, we know that the work done by the compositor was faulty and that the printer had to modify the justification (the length of the lines) repeatedly as the book was being printed. Montaigne—who always accorded great importance to the book as an object—could not have been satisfied with the visual aspect of his work.
It has been suggested that the 1580 edition of the Essais was not intended to be distributed solely in the Bordeaux area, since the books Millanges printed were sold nationally, or at least in Paris, which amounted to the same thing.8 In my view, this suggestion is anachronistic, because it presupposes Montaigne’s later literary career. We might, for example, be surprised that he chose Millanges as his printer had he truly thought that his book would be distributed nationally. As early as the 1570s, he had several contacts in the milieu of Paris booksellers, and he could easily have sought out a Parisian publisher for his Essais. For instance, he had used printers in the capital for his translation of Sebond’s Theologia naturalis and his edition of La Boétie’s works.i It is certainly possible that it was Montaigne’s father who found the printer for the Theologia naturalis, but Montaigne seems to have known enough about the Parisian publishing world to be capable, in 1580, of getting himself published in Paris—especially at his own expense! For his book, he deliberately chose a local printer, no doubt in order to root his reflections in their regional context and thus to show that he belonged to a tradition of learned Gascons. I have already indicated that François Foix-Candale may have encouraged him to proceed in this way. Furthermore, the decision to publish his book in Bordeaux had nothing to do with the fact that Montaigne became mayor of that city, because when he began to write the first chapters of his book, or even when he set out to find a printer for it after 1575, he could not have known that he would later hold that office.
Montaigne may have chosen Simon Millanges simply to accelerate the production of his book, and also the better to supervise the foremen and compositors in the print shop. Publishing in Bordeaux had many advantages.9 The proximity of the printshop would save time for someone who accorded great importance to the presentation of his book, and who had set a publication date that he intended to respect. A volume corresponding to the material and graphic requirements the author imposed had to be produced rather quickly, even if the abrupt omission of the Discours de la servitude volontaire gave rise to unexpected problems.
It is likely that the bookseller’s activity, in which Millanges also engaged, was secondary in Montaigne’s view. Let us not underestimate, either, the fact that Millanges had specialized in publishing books that were new and “on trial” (à l’essai), such as those of Pierre de Brach and Guillaume du Bartas. The privilege accorded the Essais of 1580 (kept in the 1582 edition) authorized him, for example, to print “all new books,” provided that they had been approved by the archbishop of Bordeaux, Antoine Prévost de Sansac, or his vicar, as well as by one or two doctors of theology.10 Montaigne’s friendship with the bishop of Aire, Christophe de Foix-Candale, naturally made it easier for the printer, who also worked for the city’s civil and religious institutions, to obtain the required privilege. In addition to his eclectic publications, Millanges had specialized in works that deviated from the beaten paths and did not fit into the usual categories of publishing.
In 1580 Montaigne was preoccupied with publishing a book, but he had little interest in the distribution of his work; only the printing itself seems to have really concerned him. We shall see that he probably knew his reader in advance—at least, that is what he hoped—and did not yet foresee the possibility that his book would be a “literary success.” In accord with the principle of personalization, such a work necessarily had to include its author’s name in its title: Essais de Messire Michel seigneur de Montaigne.ii Moreover, in the 1580 and 1582 editions, the emphasis is put on the word “MESSIRE,” printed in capital letters far larger than the rest of the title. This honorific denomination reserved for great lords (notably the knights in the Order of Saint Michael) sheds light on this first edition’s literary project: it was without doubt a noble gentleman’s book (figure 7).
In their octavo format with the two books bound in a single volume, the Essais of 1580 consisted of about 180,000 words.11 It was only in 1588 that Montaigne added a third book composed of thirteen chapters. We note a major imbalance between the two books of the princeps edition (fifty-seven and thirty-seven chapters, respectively), a disparity that is, however, hardly visible because the font used for the second book is smaller in size and the printed page has fewer lines per page. The two books were printed on different presses, the sign of hasty production that resulted in a lack of consistency between the two volumes. One chapter stands out from the others by reason of its length: the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (44,300 words). Montaigne composed the great majority of this chapter before 1580, that is, for the edition published by Simon Millanges in Bordeaux. The “Apology for Raymond Sebond” contains only 8,000 additional words in the 1588 edition, whereas Montaigne was to add nearly 13,000 new words to it after 1588. The first version of 1580 thus constitutes 68 percent of the final text of II: 12, whereas the additions of 1588 constitute only 12 percent of the final text and the additions made between 1588 and 1592, 22 percent. If we set aside this important chapter of the second book, we see that the two books are of about the same size—70,000 and 72,000 words respectively. The chapter devoted to the defense of Raymond Sebond thus represents a book within a book; modern editors have often published this chapter as a separate text. The first edition of the Essais was far from being in a noble format; its principal function was to get into print the first book published by Montaigne as an author.
In 1580, Montaigne believed in political action. His book is a collection of observations not only on his life but also on his actions. It bears on questions of politics and diplomacy. Montaigne’s first translators into Italian and English were clear about this, since they chose to render the title of his book by a longer description that corresponded better to the content they considered essential in the first edition of the Essais in 1580. Thus in 1590, when the author of the Essais was still alive, Girolamo Naselli gave his Italian translation the following title: Discorsi morali, politici e militari (figure 8).12 We owe this very fragmentary translation, made on the basis of the first Paris edition of the Essais published in 1587, to a gentleman in the service of the duke of Ferrara. During a trip to France—between March and May 1589—Naselli discovered the Essais and undertook the translation of a few selected passages as soon as he returned to Italy. He had greatly admired the work of the French gentleman for its moral, political, and military reflections on Antiquity and the sixteenth century. Dedicated to Cesare d’Este, Naselli’s translation of the Essais includes only half the chapters, and numerous passages were omitted or regrouped in other chapters.13 A few years later, in 1603, the first translator of Montaigne into English, John Florio, also considered it necessary to explain what was meant by the word “essais.” The title he gave his translation retains “Essayes,” but he clarifies the term: Essayes or Morall, Politike, and Millitarie Discourses.iii These titles connected with the first reception of the Essais emphasize the political character of Montaigne’s book.14 In its thematic presentation—especially if we consider the first twenty chapters of Book I—the Essais accords considerable importance to political and moral questions rather distant from introspection and Montaigne’s later preoccupations regarding the form of his book.
The initial reception of the Essais was largely associated with the genre of moral, political, and diplomatic discourses, which corresponded to the spirit of the time and was concerned chiefly with problems of governance, the art of war, embassies, and civic morals. In her preface to the 1595 edition of the Essais, Marie de Gournay defines Montaigne’s book as a “record” of his actions, comparing him to Blaise de Monluciv and François de La Noue:v “After all, have not Messieurs Montluc and La Noue in our own time described and represented themselves also by the record of their actions, which they have presented to their country? They are worthy to be thanked twice for this: once, for their effort; secondly, for having applied it to this subject; for they would not have been able to write anything more true.”15
Montaigne had made himself familiar with the tradition of these political “discourses,” but he decided not to use the term in his title, though he did consider it for a time.16 Many other chapters in the 1580 edition can also be explained by reference to the interests of Henry III, as seen in the subjects debated and the speeches delivered at the Académie du Palais between February 1576 and September 1579.17 Among the themes of moral and intellectual virtues and the nature of the emotions Montaigne took up, he also considered “Of sadness,” “Of idleness,” “Of constancy,” “Of fear,” “Of virtue,” and “Of anger.”18 Numerous other chapters in the first two books of the Essais may have been intended to engage and participate in the philosophical and moral debates that enlivened the Académie created by Henry III.
The book finally emerged from Simon Millanges’s presses in April or May 1580, later than planned. The same year, Millanges published eleven works (compared to nine in 1579). Among the books printed in 1580 in his shop, let us mention the following authors and titles: Élie Vinet, Eutropii Breviarium historia Romana …; Renoul, La Mort aux vers ou traité nécessaire, utile, et salutaire au corps humain contre les vers; Virgil, Georgicorum liber I; Arnaud de Pontac, Constitutiones promulgatae a reverendissimo D. Arnaldo de Pontac; Andrea Palladio, Liber de Architectura; Ausonius, Burdigalensis, viri consularis …. He also printed two works on Greek grammar and the Greek alphabet, as well as two books of ordinances and “remonstrances” addressed to Henry III.
The omission of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude from the first book of the Essais might have led Montaigne to seek a new title (Essais) if he had originally the intention of giving an even more political connotation to his book (Political Discourses). Since the Discourse no longer was part of the Essais, it was better to find a title that avoided all controversy. The emphasis could now be put on the author’s classical erudition and on his judgments in the form of essays. Moreover, the word “essai” (“try-out,” “attempt”) corresponded rather well to Montaigne’s conception of the politician as an intermediary who tried to bring together parties divided on questions of belief and governance.
In 1584, in his Bibliothèque françoise, La Croix du Maine presented Montaigne’s work as “so sufficient to testify to his great learning and marvelous judgment, and also to his diverse lesson, or the variety of authors he has read, that there is no need to speak further about it here.”19 The first Essais of 1580 displays a knowledge of Antiquity and ancient authors, but it also shows a good understanding of the political events connected with the Wars of Religion. However, Montaigne chose to distance himself from the genre of the discourse to stress a form better adapted to a more modest goal. La Croix du Maine offers this commentary on the title Montaigne chose: “In the first place, this title or inscription is very modest, because if one wants to take this word Essais to mean tryout or apprenticeship, that is very humble and unassuming, and has nothing proud or arrogant about it.”20 Paradoxically, the author of the Essais presents with competence and candor his expertise and “learning” on various political questions, but he is also able to reserve his own judgment and avoid falling into the didactic and pretentious flaws of the discourse. Whereas the discourse is by definition peremptory and allows no maneuvering room for negotiation, the essay requires a certain respect for the different positions set forth. Here we come back to the motto engraved on Montaigne’s token: “I abstain.” Unlike the discourse, the essay seeks to present the ideas concerned and compare them; it retains a form of instability of judgment that is inherent in it.
In 1580, Simon Millanges obtained a privilege for “innovations” (nouvelletés) and undertook to sell Montaigne’s work and to present it as an exceptional book, unprecedented in the history of publishing. Montaigne must have known about this choice his publisher made. Moreover, it is surprising that a work famous for being “consubstantial” with its author was presented as an “innovation,” whereas Montaigne repeatedly claims that he detests innovations: “I am disgusted with innovations, in whatever guise.”21 This is a political assertion par excellence, because it certainly bears on the historical situation. Montaigne is no rebel; he is satisfied with what tradition offers him: “For whatever appearance of truth there may be in novelty, I do not change easily, for fear of losing in the change. And since I am not capable of choosing, I accept other people’s choice and stay in the position where God put me. Otherwise I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly.”22
In 1588, Montaigne indicates that this fashion of novelties goes back “twenty-five or thirty years,” that is, to between 1558 and 1563, precisely at the beginning of the religious conflict in France. He maintains that it is useless to “shake up a state,” because ultimately one arrives at the same point. The first chapter of the Essais stresses the paradox of innovation: “By diverse means we arrive at the same end.” An emblematic threshold to the Essais that sets the tone for the book, this chapter also serves as a profession of loyalty to the established regime. It praises political inaction and an acceptance of the status quo that is to remain, despite the new religion and its political opposition, a guideline throughout the book.
As if he wanted to define the political field of his discourse, Montaigne takes a local example as the first historical reference point of the Essais, the case of Edward, Prince of Wales and regent of Guyenne. After taking Limoges, Edward halted the massacre of the city’s women and children only when he witnessed the incredible boldness of three French gentlemen who were continuing to resist his victorious army. Consideration and respect for their military virtue aroused his mercy, not only for the three brave combatants, but also for all the residents of the city.23 This spontaneous act of clemency, which was contrary to the military practices of the period, shows that in politics it is difficult to argue on the basis of examples grouped together as models. The exceptional, anachronistic, and anecdotal are also important when making political decisions. In 1580, Montaigne already had a relativist conception of human beings and their judgments: “Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.”24 Of course, this observation applies to kings and princes as well.
The essay situates itself in a perspective seeking to redefine political and diplomatic service; Montaigne offers a writing style better adapted to his period, one that takes into account political practices after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in light of the endless religious conflicts. The first chapters of the 1580 edition of the Essais, all of which are very concise, are part of a paean to brevitas, a virtue emphasized by Erasmus and humanism at the beginning of the Renaissance, but they are no longer adages, aphorisms, or apophthegms, strictly speaking. Far more than the expression of a particular style, the Essais are a guarantee of proximity and truth. Speech being naturally direct and disconnected, the form Montaigne chose was bound to imitate the open and fluid way of saying things plainly, as they are seen. Rather than a rhetorical procedure, it was a matter of effectiveness. The first essays have often been seen as centons,vi with elements taken from other works and rearranged to form a new object. Although Montaigne was fond of patchworks and things that were pieced together, his project was not initially literary, but instead sought to present a concise form of political expression very different from the long discourses typical of the parlement. Far from being stylistic experiments, the first essays are more like the constitutive elements of a political project that remains to be more fully defined. The short chapters in the 1580 edition do not herald the form subsequently taken by the Essais; instead, they simply denote another Montaigne who is quite different from the later image of the essayist as a master of introspection and the depiction of the self.
The Montaigne of 1580 participates in a political conversation whose principal objects are the governance of a country torn apart by civil wars and the representation of royal power in foreign Courts. In his first Essais, Montaigne adopted, like most of his contemporaries, an anti-Machiavellian moral position,25 without however sharing the anti-Italian feeling that prevailed in France at that time. Innocent Gentillet’s Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume ou autre principauté (1576) had greatly contributed to a negative perception of Machiavelli in France.26 Montaigne’s denunciation of Machiavelli was not as radical, and he found Gentillet’s followers just as dangerous: “Machiavelli’s arguments, for example, were solid enough for the subject, yet it was very easy to combat them; and those who did so left it no less easy to combat theirs.”27 In the course of a generation, Machiavelli had become one of the symbols of “Romanism,”vii whereas before he had been considered an ally of the Gallican party. Machiavelli’s success among Protestants as a theorist of political science had to do with the fact that he gave history a certain autonomy with regard to theology and to conventional moral judgments. It was not only the absence of a theology, but more precisely the absence of a Catholic theology, in Machiavelli’s work that initially attracted French Protestant historians.28
Of course, the Wars of Religion, and the bloody night of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, were to reverse this perception forever and put the Italian author on the side of the Catholic extremists and of Catherine de Medici, who was accused of being an avid reader of Machiavelli. The best example of this turnaround in the opinion of Machiavelli is found in Jean Bodin. In 1566, referring to the governance of states in his Methodus ad facilem historarium, Bodin declared that Machiavelli was “the first, in our opinion, who has written on this subject after about twelve hundred years of universal barbarism.”29 Ten years later, in his Six Livres de la République (1576), Bodin has apparently changed his mind about Machiavelli, since he now held him responsible for all of France’s ills—including syphilis—with a tone and vehemence that leave no doubt regarding his anti-Machiavellianism. Soon it was rumored that the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, had made The Prince her Bible, and that she had had the idea of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre while reading Machiavelli during one of her walks. Henry III was also said to keep a copy of Machiavelli’s works in his pocket. In his Contre-Machiavel, Gentillet accused Machiavelli of teaching the French “Atheism, Sodomy, perfidy, cruelty, usury, and other similar vices.”30 Machiavelli was given a diabolical mask and his name was systematically connected with all kinds of political intrigues.
In this context, around 1575, the neologism machiavélique became a common expression. The precise meaning of this term was defined by Agrippa d’Aubigné, whose phrase “Our Kings who have learned to machiavelize”31 reflects a redefinition of politics and of the way of governing states. Despite the scathing criticism of Machiavelli among Protestants, a certain fascination with his work prevailed in France all through the sixteenth century. Although he had many detractors, he also had defenders, among whom Jean de La Taille is certainly the best known. La Taille published Le Prince nécessaire (1573), which he dedicated to Henry de Bourbon, the future Henry IV.32 Between 1572 and 1580, a political polarization occurred that put Machiavelli and his detractors at the center of all political reflection. Montaigne’s conception of politics in the 1570s was more nuanced, because it did not make Machiavelli’s thought incompatible with the exercise of power. Thus, in a way that is certainly exaggerated, people have spoken of Montaigne’s “Machiavellianism,”33 but Montaigne did not participate in the polemic and prudently made few references to Machiavelli in his Essais. He could have exploited this fashion of discourses for and against Machiavelli, but he chose a very different approach to the subject of politics, preferring to pave the way for a veritable ethos of political prudence.34
Imitating the motto of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thélème, the Essais begin with an inscription that guides the reading of the work: “This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory.”35 This makes it clear: Montaigne will resolutely keep public considerations out of his book. Neither servant nor master, without ambitions for his fame or glory—at least that is what he claims—Montaigne has written the Essais to leave a private portrait for his family and friends. It is as if his experience and the image that others may have of him in everyday life are not enough or do not correspond to reality. Did Montaigne really think that his family and friends knew him so little that they needed a book to discover another man, different from the one alongside whom they lived? And if he did not, then what was the purpose of this work? A portrait amplifies the memory of great men and writers, but this remark also has to be understood in the context of the first edition of the Essais in 1580. Posterity means little to Montaigne in 1580; when he began to write his Essais, he had not yet accomplished anything. He had given up his office in the parlement and had not yet acquired the public and political dimension that would allow him to write memoirs retracing the path of a rich and remarkable career. The genre of the Essais as it was worked out in 1580 offers few hints that would allow us to understand Montaigne’s future reputation, at least on the basis of literary criteria. However, the book may have been conceived as a means to other ends.
So we must inquire into what this book represented in 1580. It contains a total of ninety-four chapters (a considerable number), most of which deal with commonplaces and subjects connected with contemporary political and moral concerns. These political topoi developed in the first edition of the Essais contrast with the personal motivations the author invokes in his preface to the reader. To give a few examples: “Whether the governor of a besieged place should go out to parley” (I: 5); “Parley time is dangerous” (I: 6); “Ceremony of interviews between kings” (I: 13); “A trait of certain ambassadors” (I: 17); “Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law” (I: 23); “Of a lack in our administrations” (I: 35); “Of sumptuary laws” (I: 43); “Of the battle of Dreux” (I: 45); and many other chapters that are far from the depiction of the self Montaigne announces. Even a chapter like “Of liars” (I: 9), placed near the beginning of the Essais, has to be understood as a reflection on the fundamental difference between lying and not telling the truth, a subtle difference investigated at length in the Essais. It is difficult to see in this semantic variant a simply private concern. However, the linguistic distinction Montaigne draws is more pertinent on the political and diplomatic level, and it is necessary for a representative of the king on assignment abroad. This chapter on liars is followed by another key chapter in this first version of the Essais: “Of constancy” (I: 12), which praises a quality indispensable in a servant of the king who wants to rise at the Court.36 We could, for example, relate constancy to etiquette and see in this quality a way of controlling the behaviors necessary for the formation of a Court society. Examples of this kind are numerous in the first edition of 1580.
In his preface to the reader, Montaigne creates the illusion of a disengagement and clear separation between public life and private life, whereas a significant number of chapters in this first edition put the accent on the governance of states, military strategies, diplomatic interviews, and the moral values of the nobility of the sword. It is therefore not toward private life that we should turn, but rather toward public life and political action.
In 1580, Montaigne’s goal was to please the king and his high-ranking servants by highlighting his personal qualities (moderation, candor, affability, fidelity, honesty), all of them applicable to public service and political action. But he did not conceal his defects, as he emphasizes in the preface to the reader: “My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form.” Nevertheless, this concern for transparency encountered the limits of decorum and formal propriety: “as far as respect for the public has allowed,” Montaigne adds. Such a judgment on social limitations is also a quality required in the exercise of public offices. Montaigne’s book is indeed a private portrait, not so much for his friends or relatives as for the great people who, by reading his book—especially the first chapters—will gain a good idea of the man who seems to be offering them his services. The author of the Essais sketches the portrait of a devoted, loyal man, one who shows both discernment (in public) and naturalness (for his reader) in military and diplomatic matters. Under the last Valois, ambassadors were essentially recruited for their loyalty and allegiance in a relationship (a form of friendship) of absolute confidence. For Montaigne, it was a question of exhibiting certain particularities of his private life in order that the man might be associated with his book. The king could form an idea of the character of his potential servant far better than during a brief royal audience; thus the book did have as its goal to reveal the man in depth, not for himself, but rather in a way preparatory to public service.
In the first edition of the Essais, Montaigne foregrounds his concise, direct style, appropriate to the straightforward and laconic speech of the “briefs” dictated or written by ambassadors. He seeks to demonstrate that he would be capable of transmitting reports that would get to the heart of the matter, without beating around the bush or rhetorical effects. Montaigne thinks he has mastered this simple, frank way of writing and is convinced that his Essais demonstrate this. His writing has an efficacy equal to that of the letter. As a matter of fact, the essay is supposed to represent a logical evolution of the letter, combining description and judgment in a single document. The short form of his first chapters corresponds to the synthetic turn of mind expected of ambassadors, whose main work consists in extracting the essence of their interviews with the princes and high officials with whom they meet.viii His experience as a councillor in the first Chambre des Enquêtes can even be considered an advantage. We recall that Montaigne made many extracts in studying cases for which he was responsible as reporter. He not only served for ten years as a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux, but also succeeded in distancing himself from lawyerly language to develop a style that corresponded better to the career he had in mind. This distinction inevitably involved the depiction of his character and temperament.
Montaigne’s intention of presenting himself to Henry III as a man in whom he could have confidence to defend the interests of the kingdom and the crown explains the presence in the Essais of 1580 of these two levels (private and public) that are apparently contradictory but are in fact complementary. The depiction of private life could help him land a public office because such decisions were based above all on a sound knowledge of the servant. In Montaigne’s case—that is, in view of the new career he desired—the knowledge of a future ambassador’s private life was an essential condition for his nomination by the king. The first version of the preface to the reader in 1580 could not, however, directly identify its (royal) audience, and Montaigne preferred to remain in the background, concealing himself behind the presentation of a “book written in good faith.” The emphasis on the fact that this book’s intention was in no way to “seek the world’s favor” is rather revealing of a constant posture that consists of stressing his interests while at the same time seeming to neglect them. It was not the world’s favor that concerned Montaigne in 1580, but rather the king’s favor.
We could ask whether the essay as a form is really based on a separation between the public and the private. Can the mayor and Montaigne—and especially Montaigne after his terms as mayor (1581–85)—really have been two different men? In several passages of the Essais Montaigne ponders the pleasures of private life: “I love a private life because it is by my own choice that I love it, not because of unfitness for public life, which is perhaps just as well suited to my nature. I serve my prince the more gaily because I do so by the free choice of my judgment and my reason.”37 This passage refuses to establish an exclusive distinction between private life and public life. Serving the prince would thus be a choice, rather than an obligation. This declaration allows Montaigne to make room for both his private life and his public life. He does not really commit himself to one side or the other.
This affirmation must however be taken with a grain of salt, because it appeared only after a period of political disillusionment that followed his service as mayor of Bordeaux. The celebration of private life came later and does not correspond to the character or the content of the Essais of 1580. It should be noted that the addition “without personal obligation” at the end of this sentence on the Bordeaux Copy marks a definitive break with public life, which was, in the Renaissance, based on the principle of obligation, indeed, of servitude. This a posteriori clarification regarding public life reveals a change in attitude with regard to Montaigne’s expectations after 1588. Serving one’s king by the “free choice” of one’s judgment, as if a friend were concerned, is a strange notion. Such an idealization of public life (exactly as if it were a continuation of private life) is far from corresponding to reality, and Montaigne could not have been unaware of that. Once again, his discourse is based on the model of friendship (incarnated by La Boétie), but it became untenable over the years and in the course of his own experiences in politics. The prince’s exercise of power is not a choice, but a requirement, indeed, a constraint. The same goes for a person who counsels the prince. Politics involves obligations that must be assumed, and serving the king amounts to obeying him, without ulterior motives. This duty of obedience and allegiance is constantly present in the Essais of 1580, that is, at a time when Montaigne fully assumed the responsibilities that might be incumbent upon him. As we see, the author is playing on two levels at once: he is an essentially private man who would be capable of assuming a public office were he asked to do so.
The First Reader of the Essais
A book presupposes readers, and the Essais does not escape that rule. Although the reader of the first edition of the Essais is presented as one of Montaigne’s familiars, the social instability and political reversals that took place during the twenty years of writing and publication of the Essais led to several redefinitions of the reader and new conceptions of the notice to the reader that serves as a preface. Montaigne had given much thought—in the course of the various editions—to an ideal reader, and he always tried to predict the ideal reader’s reactions. The notion of a reader had been an integral part of his thought ever since the first edition of the Essais in 1580. The famous preface “To the Reader,” placed at the beginning of the first book and dated March 1, 1580, reflects an awareness of the very indeterminate nature of the reading audience at that time. The ambiguities and contradictions of this short text have to be interpreted in the context of the first publication of the Essais. An a posteriori reading of this preface would lead us to all sorts of conjectures, notably that of a Montaigne who was in perfect control of his text and was playing ironically with his reader. The author’s insecurity with regard to a hypothetical audience is in no way ironical, since in 1580 it is likely that the book was addressed to a small number of individuals: relatives and friends, but also, perhaps, an unidentified person who was more capable of helping him pursue his political ambitions.
Préface, avis, avertissement, introduction: Montaigne’s short text that serves as a discourse preliminary to the Essais has been called by various names. Marie de Gournay opted for the term préface, which she also used for her own introduction to her “adopted father’s” book, published after his death in 1595. Montaigne himself made no decision about this, because his foreword refers to a single, generic dedicatee: simply “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”). This form of address is assuredly a topos, which is also found, for example, in Ronsard, but in Montaigne it also expresses a certain ambivalence toward an ideal or real reader who changes over time. It is an introduction by the author (Montaigne) for a reader (both nameless and particular because of the choice of the singular), which he has judged necessary to explain how to approach the following text. It is not addressed to just any reader, nor is it a mere editorial convention, since Montaigne speaks elsewhere of an “able reader,”38 and also of a “candid reader.”39 These two qualities—intelligence and candor—are also foregrounded in the preface to his book.
The reader capable of understanding Montaigne’s way of proceeding in the Essais must not be confused with the common reader. In fact, Montaigne puts the common reader in a category that is more general and, shall we say, uncritical, which he later calls “most readers.”40 Several references to the bad reader can be found in the Essais. Montaigne defends himself against such readers who fail to follow him: “It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.”41 In the heavy seas of the Essais, Montaigne needs a reader who is a good swimmer: “To which may be joined what a certain Crates said of the writings of Heraclitus, that they needed a good swimmer for a reader, so that the depth and weight of Heraclitus’s learning should not sink him and drown him.”42 It is no coincidence that we find the image of the swimmer painted on one of the walls of the tower of Montaigne’s château where he wrote part of his Essais. This later allegory of the reader-swimmer inscribed in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy represents the end result of a long journey in search of the ideal reader. It is not easy to navigate among the chapters. The reader is in danger of drowning on every page of this profound text full of hazards.
We should take literally what Montaigne wrote in 1580. It was difficult to foresee the reception and success or failure of a book that lay outside booksellers’ conventional channels in the period concerned. Montaigne’s coup d’essay (which Cotgrave’s contemporary French-English dictionary defined as “a tryallpeece, or maister-peece”) sought chiefly to leave a trace of himself at a time when the absence of a male descendant, and thus of the continuity of his lineage and the transmission of the name “Montaigne,” began to be perceived by the author as a real problem. It was equally difficult to speak about his own experiences before 1580. Although he had a few titles, they were all recent. So why did he publish this work, and consequently this generic but singular foreword to the reader?
The Au lecteur is constructed in accord with the most familiar rules of classical rhetoric,43 but the effect sought went far beyond mere literary conventions. Montaigne wrote for a reader imagined on the basis of ancient models, but he also refers to more specific readers connected with the publishing history of the Essais and their hoped-for first reception. The question is therefore exactly what reader he was addressing in 1580. This foreword to the reader was not reworked in the course of the following editions, although Montaigne did reread it attentively, going so far as to change the date. This prologue to the Essais is supposed to provide keys for reading and to set the reader on the right path, while at the same time Montaigne is well aware that any advice is doomed to fail, because it is contrary to the very nature of the essay: open, full of digressions, and constantly changing direction. Montaigne repeatedly declares that he has gotten lost in his own text, and after 1588 he is rather proud of this. The message is both simple and unusual: look out, reader, you too are in danger of getting lost and wasting your time. This exordium was, however, normal for an author who was still unknown. Outside the chapters, which are all numbered, this foreword serves in 1580 as a warning, and indicates for everyone the way to proceed.
The first sentence of the preface to the reader reveals the three essential elements of the essay as a genre: the book, the author, and the reader. The author disappears behind his book, which addresses itself directly to the reader: “This book was written in good faith, reader.” The book rapidly becomes an autonomous, independent object. Everything begins (in the second sentence) with the use of the familiar tu form of address, not by Montaigne, but by the book, which speaks about itself. Montaigne’s familiar way of approaching his reader — through the book—presupposes a proximity, but once again it is not the proximity of the author, but that of the reader, as if the book were expressing itself independently of its author. Montaigne later underlined, in the third book, the Essais’ self-sufficiency: “Reader, let this essay of myself run on, and this third extension of the other parts of my painting.”44 He has been able to create a distance between himself and his reader, who can no longer demand anything from him: “Do not blame me, reader.”45 This is a matter between a book and its reader, in which Montaigne puts himself out of play. At least, that is what he clearly announces in his foreword in 1580.
Critics almost always approach the Au lecteur as if the meaning of this text did not change over time. I am not referring to the text itself—that is, its minimal reworkings—but rather to what it necessarily expressed for the reader in 1580, 1582, 1588, and 1595. In reality, this foreword’s meaning could not be interpreted in the same way by either Montaigne or his reader at the time of the three editions of the Essais published during Montaigne’s lifetime, not to mention the Paris edition of 1587, which he did not review, or the missing edition, called as the “fifth edition,” or the posthumous edition of 1595. The Montaigne of the first Essais, who held no political office, had not yet made the journey to Germany and Italy and was on the verge of publishing, at his own expense, a book whose title distanced it from existing literary categories. In 1580, Montaigne imagines a hypothetical reader who still escapes him. And yet he addresses him (in the singular) and seems to know him. This reader could verify in person not only the author’s good faith but also that of the book.
Good faith is located on the side of the printed object; it is dissociated from the subject and objectified in the book. The threshold of the book is thus truly a warning:ix “It warns you from the outset …” that this singular, innovative work founds a genre that minimizes the place of the author, at the price of making him the object of the book. People do speak of the “Essays of Michel, lord of Montaigne.” Just as the noble name of Montaigne cannot exist without the land that is attached to it, the proper name undergoes an objectification by the book that incarnates the space in which the author will move in his turn, like a lord on his lands. The Essais are a fief. By publishing his book, Montaigne makes a noble land his own. We are moving in a private and noble space (associated with the château), and this is reaffirmed at the beginning of the foreword: “I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one.” The Essais’ original discourse certainly has a strong aristocratic connotation, that of a noble family whose name has been known for several generations. In Guyenne, people knew that Montaigne’s ancestors had held administrative offices in Bordeaux and in the region. The Essais reaffirmed a name and a lineage that had enjoyed social and political recognition for more than a century.
In a relatively unexpected way, Montaigne then amuses himself by making the reader whom he had addressed disappear. This reversal of the situation may seem surprising. In fact, Montaigne suddenly declares that he has had “no thought of serving either you or my own glory.” Here the generic aspect of the reader is canceled because the author returns to a more traditional model of the noble and familial dedication: “I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my relatives and friends.” The reason Montaigne mentions “for not seeking a broader public” is supposed to have to do with his mental or physical condition: “My powers are inadequate for such a purpose.” There is no apparent calculation in this text that claims to be a portrait in which people will be able to “recover” after his death, “when they have lost me (as soon they must),” “some features of my habits and temperament.” Montaigne claims to have written his book without ulterior motives, without truly expecting a “return on his investment.” This work for posterity is a sort of “memory” of a new kind, which is not a memory of events or of a period, but the memory of Montaigne in the history of a great family: “and by this means [they may] keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive.” The generic reader fades away, and the family occupies the foreground. But all this is clearly stage setting, and it is very probable that by means of these effects that tend to detach the book from himself, the author is giving himself something to fall back on in the event that the book is poorly received by the reader with whom he is concerned at this point.
Montaigne emphasizes that there is no other way to read his text: the reader has to be in the private and proximate world of the author. However, this may be doubted. The precedent set by the publication of La Boétie’s works in 1571 clearly demonstrates that Montaigne knew how to use a book to approach the great men and women of the kingdom. In the Renaissance, when a book was given, it had a precise social function that implied duties and obligations. Giving a book made it possible to envisage a benefit in return in the form of a favor.46 It was on the basis of this logic of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” that Montaigne presented a copy of his translation of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis to his neighbor, Germain-Gaston de Foix, marquis of Trans.47 But maybe we need to look higher. When Montaigne offers his book to an anonymous reader, we can imagine another very real reader whose name does not need to be mentioned and raises the essential question of the Essais’ horizon of expectation in 1580. Is Montaigne’s potential reader a friend or relative, or is he a public person? The author anticipated the question and responded to the reproaches that would not fail to be directed against him: “If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture.” To what do these verbs in the pluperfect subjunctive correspond?x They express a condition that is not realized and an effect that is not sought. What assertions to distinguish oneself from ordinary petitioners!
By publishing the Essais, Montaigne’s goal was no longer to occupy a place among the intelligentsia of the robins, because such a book did not have a sufficiently elevated level of erudition to make a reputation as a learned savant. His audience was quite different. Similarly, although his goal was to be recognized by the nobility, the essay is not the best of genres, either, because it accords genealogy only a secondary place. Many aristocratic values are certainly represented in Montaigne’s book, but the priority given to present experience at the expense of tradition and custom runs counter to an aristocratic conception of politics. On the other hand, if it is a question of creating a strong image of himself and promoting that of a man who offers an innovative analysis of politics and public service in an unprecedented language, but who nonetheless abides by the conventions of the world, then Montaigne’s book has a definite interest for a privileged reader who is able to recognize the author’s talents and reward him. The private portrait drawn in the foreword thus has a primordial importance that seeks to make him better known and possibly to obtain a political favor, perhaps even a post as advisor or a diplomat. The Essais of 1580 can be read as a kind of curriculum vitae, in which Montaigne displays his knowledge of history and politics while breaking with the traditional image of the counselor or diplomat.
In the Au lecteur, Montaigne distances himself from the established genres, but immediately takes the measure of this personal and idiosyncratic introduction by indicating its limits: “I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice.” Here he is praising a form of truth, the truth of the ordinary man, with a dose of deliberate and well-considered naïveté, beyond overrated forms of knowledge. Montaigne is a man of good sense who takes responsibility for his exhibitionism insofar as he can. The Au lecteur serves him, so to speak, as a kind of calling card. This transparency—which is still not equivalent to the consubstantiality developed later on—is reinforced by the famous “it is myself that I portray.” The portrayal of the self follows the rules of the schools and manners of the time. However, it must not be confused with exhibitionism and ostentation: “My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed.” Montaigne introduces for the first time a public and social component into the presentation of his personality. His book attains another dimension: he underlines that the author pays attention to his time; he knows how it works and what its decorum is, and that is necessary at the Court and in embassies. Montaigne’s naïveté is not for everyone, but solely for a small circle of close friends, and it is thanks to this clarification that we understand that it is reserved for a limited entourage, not private—in the strict sense of family and intimate friends—but public.
In his foreword addressed to a reader who will have the privilege of knowing him in his innermost nature, Montaigne clarifies several points. He is not an idealist and in no way seeks to transgress cultural rules, because he is aware that the established power is always conservative. His role is to innovate while at the same time to recognize immutable values: that is more or less the task Montaigne set himself in the Essais of 1580. Montaigne was born French; he is a citizen of the Old World and cannot paint himself entirely naked, because social conventions do not allow him to do that: “Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you that I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.” Montaigne respected this interdiction in the name of a civil modesty. Here he shows that reason, and particularly public reason, frequently takes priority over personal considerations. In this preface we note two contradictory forces that oppose each other: a procedure that consists in distinguishing himself from others and exhibiting his difference, on the one hand, and on the other an attitude that reminds the reader that this difference has limits the author will not violate.
Although at the beginning of the foreword the author disappeared behind the book, Montaigne soon recovers his grip on his book: “Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book.” This is indeed the lord of Montaigne, gentleman of the king’s chamber, who finally reveals himself. Consubstantiality replaces transparency; the book and the man coincide to the point of becoming indistinguishable. Anyone who loves one loves the other. One is not judged without the other, the book is Montaigne and Montaigne is summed up in his book. At the end of the foreword the game is over. The author has retaken possession of his discourse and the Essais henceforth serve as a professional calling card, a way of presenting the future royal servant.
Thus we are confronted with an equivocal warning. Although Montaigne has accepted the idea of a generic reader, he declares that the generic reader should not read his book: “you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” Unless, of course, reading is a form of leisure. The reader of Montaigne has other things to do. The author knows that his reader has little time for him, and that it would be importunate to impose on him the reading of such a peculiar book. Therefore, he has to go straight to the heart of the matter and reveal in the first chapters the spirit of the book and the project it symbolizes. Montaigne’s book, in its first version of 1580, serves to distinguish its author by presenting his judgment of situations which are mainly military and diplomatic. This first Montaigne is presented in a kind of teaser that foregrounds not only his knowledge of the Ancients, but also his competence in matters that concern the functioning of the state and its government. The reader, even if he is not explicitly named, would then be an individual known to everyone, to whom Montaigne offers his services by giving him an advance sample of his competencies; this reader being in a position to judge the book and thus the man.
The 1580 edition was conceived by Montaigne to be given rather than sold. This in no way prevented Millanges from selling as many copies as possible if the opportunity presented itself. The risks were lower for the publisher, because the author paid part of the expenses, Montaigne having provided the paper. Millanges had revenues guaranteed by his publications for the colleges as well as for the local religious and political authorities. Thus the first publication of the Essais was not bound by commercial logic. Several elements support such an interpretation. The first known forms of the title page show that Montaigne insisted that his titles as seigneur, chevalier, and gentilhomme (lord, knight, and gentleman) appear prominently.xi The goal of such attention was to produce an effet de cour (courtly effect) to which Henry III and his entourage could not remain indifferent. The title page plays a considerable role in the reader’s first assessment of a book; Montaigne’s titles, which are duly reported, speak for themselves and lend credibility to the following foreword addressed to the reader. Montaigne’s “courteous”—and personal—presentation of his book to an important figure was certainly intended to favor his access to the royal Court; the Essais served him literally as letters of nobility. This interpretation allows us to understand better the clarification in the Au lecteur. Isn’t it possible to think that this short preface was written at the last minute to express the author’s reservations concerning the bookseller’s commercial initiatives? It was considered in good taste for a gentleman to take his distance from the world of “commerce” (what the author of the Essais calls mercadence). The discomfort Montaigne expresses concerning a random and uncertain reader would then also be a warning against the commercial operation envisaged by the publisher.
When Montaigne published his first Essais in 1580, he did not yet enjoy the fame that was soon to make him one of the best-known authors of the French Renaissance. In the first days of 1580, Montaigne had delivered to Simon Millanges a very unusual manuscript, and the time had come to give it to its addressee. The religious and military schisms in southwest France led Montaigne to emphasize that he was not dogmatic and fanatical like many of his neighbors. In February 1580, the king had received contradictory reports concerning the political situation and the unrest in Guyenne. Henry III was looking for solutions. The 1580 edition of the Essais was supposed to offer Montaigne a chance to introduce himself at the Court and to make himself better known to members of the king’s inner circle than he had been able to do in 1571 with the edition of the La Boétie’s works.
All the ambiguity maintained with respect to the reader rests on an unacknowledged expectation. Montaigne was not a beggar, and the contradictions in the Au lecteur served to shelter him from the accusations—especially of being arrogant and ambitious—that might be made against him in the event of failure. When Montaigne refers to his relatives and friends, we should perhaps understand this as the Court, that restricted group of gentlemen united by bonds of blood, members of the high nobility who liked to call each other “friends” and “cousins” when they were at the Court. Finally, the Essais of 1580 were no doubt intended less for a genuine audience—the genre hardly lent itself to that—than for individualized presentation to a prince or great lord. We have two examples of these private presentations of the first edition of the Essais in sumptuous bindings: one is De Thou’s copy in a gilt vellum binding with its first owner’s coat of arms, and the other that of Queen Elizabeth I of England. The binding of the copy presented to Queen Elizabeth includes her sign and heraldic emblem. This binding was doubtless made in England, but its exact origin remains unknown. It has been suggested that this book might have been given to the Queen of England by the duke of Anjou, the king’s brother and the heir to the throne of France.48 The idea of a book dedicated to a prince also corresponded better to Montaigne’s aristocratic conception of writing, at least so far as the first edition of his book is concerned. With his Essais, Montaigne was targeting a single reader, Henry III, whom he must have impressed in 1580 and who received his book in the form of a gift in early July 1580, at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. We will return to this royal presentation later.
The table of contents in the first book of the Essais published in 1580 shows a typographical error, a lapsus that reflects the turmoil of the Wars of Religion. The title of the chapter, “Of the battle of Dreux” (I: 45), was transformed into “Of the battle of Gods” (De la bataille de Dieux [sic]). This slip-up, which can be blamed on the compositor who set type for the table of contents, tells us much about the political unconscious of the last quarter of the sixteenth century. If we put ourselves back at the end of the 1570s, the printer’s error seems extremely appropriate when we consider more closely the content of this short chapter, which was left almost unchanged later on. The Battle of Dreux was one of the most frequently discussed episodes of the civil wars. We find descriptions and analyses of this famous battle in Théodore de Bèze, François de Lorraine, in Coligny’s Mémoires, La Noue’s Discours, Condé’s Mémoires, Brulart’s Journal, Michel de Castelnau’s Mémoires, Mézeray’s Histoire de France, and many other authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The iconography of this battle is also very rich, because we have several series of engravings that illustrate the successive phases of the day, December 19, 1562. These images have immortalized the charges carried out by the Catholic and Protestant forces. The series of six engravings by Tortorel and Perrissin, published in 1570, gave the battle a spatial dimension and allowed it to leave a lasting impression on people’s minds. These prints divided the battle into distinct phases that were the object of numerous commentaries and military analyses.49
As almost always when discussing events of his own time, Montaigne was very discreet regarding this battle, and we have to recognize that his analysis of it is very thin. He does not mention the chief actors, with the exception of the duke of Guise. The initial commentary on this battle that prefigured the carnage of the civil wars remains on the whole rather technical and never leads to reflection on the nature of the Wars of Religion, or even on the religious questions that were, however, the principal crux of the conflict between the Huguenots and the Catholics. A short addition made to the 1588 edition, offering a comparison with a battle that occurred in Greek Antiquity, even allowed Montaigne to distract the reader’s attention by diluting this battle in a broader historical system that now included ancient history. The Battle of Dreux—one of the best documented and most discussed events of the Wars of Religion—remained, all through the various editions of the Essais, a kind of textual embryo and was even, through its lack of development, dissolved in a military topos that caused it to lose its historical specificity. We wonder why Montaigne conceived such a chapter without really developing it in the course of the three editions published during his lifetime, or in the Bordeaux Copy.
When Montaigne set out to write a book in the early 1570s, less than ten years after the Battle of Dreux, analyses of this episode in the Wars of Religion were a subject of conversation in salons. Naturally, the analysis made of the Battle of Dreux depends on the ideological and political position of the commentator. But none of this appears in the first draft offered by Montaigne. For him, the Battle of Dreux was an unavoidable commonplace that could be reduced to a technical discussion of the art of war. It is, in a way, a textbook case. When he finally settled on a book divided into fifty or sixty rather brief chapters, it was completely logical that the battle should occupy one of these chapters, because this clash between two armies was still very present in people’s minds. The chapter dates from 1572–73, that is, from the beginning of the writing of the Essais. We can imagine Montaigne intending to comment on this battle in a work that initially had more to do with military and diplomatic discourses than with the genre of the essay, with which we are now familiar and which created his literary persona. Thus this chapter probably occupied an important place in the notion of the book he had conceived before he began writing it. Like “Parley time is dangerous,” (I: 6), “Ceremony of interviews between kings” (I: 17), “Of a lack in our administrations” (I: 36), and “Of sumptuary laws” (I: 53), this chapter is firmly anchored in its time and gives a political dimension to Montaigne’s writings. It could be affirmed therefore that in 1580 Montaigne took up questions involving current affairs, but he did so obliquely. However, it proved difficult to speak of this battle without taking sides, and this chapter helps us understand how Montaigne deals with the Wars of Religion in his Essais.
A first observation: “Of the battle of Dreux” is an important chapter in the 1580 edition, not by its size, but by the fact that it refers to a current subject. Before seeing how Montaigne approaches this battle, let us briefly summarize its high points and reversals. All the commentators, whether Protestants or Catholics, agree in minimizing the role played by chance and in underlining the tactical aspect of the combat: strategy and the value of military decisions, not chance, led to François de Lorraine’s final victory. It is also a battle in which appearances were deceiving, because the victory, initially attributed to the Catholics, then, in an incredible reversal on the field, to the Huguenots, was soon transformed into a defeat for the Protestants, thus lending a psychological dimension to the belated but decisive charge ordered by the duke of Guise.
The battle took place near the city of Dreux, between the villages of L’Épinay, Nuisement, Blainville, and the Maumusset valley with its windmill.50 The Catholic forces were commanded by Constable Montmorency, Marshal Saint-André, and François de Lorraine. The Protestants were led by the Prince of Condé, Louis I of Bourbon, the king of Navarre’s brother; Admiral Coligny; and Théodore de Bèze. It is difficult to imagine a better cast. We find here all the great military leaders of the first Wars of Religion. The Protestant forces consisted of 9,000 foot soldiers (4,000 German mercenaries and 5,000 French) and 4,500 cavalrymen (3,000 Germans and about 1,500 French). They had five cannons. The forces of the Catholic Triumvirate were composed of 16,000 foot soldiers and only 2,000 cavalrymen, but they had 22 cannons. The vanguard was led by Marshal Saint-André, but the duke of Guise was the overall leader of the troops without, however, assuming official command over them. On the Protestant side, the vanguard was led by Admiral Coligny. Coligny was the subject of controversy, and the Catholic pamphleteers raged against him, because the German mercenaries, these “Goths, Ostrogoths, Vizigoths, and Huguenots,”51 as Ronsard called them, were seen as invaders of the kingdom and barbarians to boot.
After a brief period during which the two camps observed each other, the Protestant forces moved out on December 19, and the leaders of the royal forces decided to attack them immediately in order to block their access to Dreux. Marshal Biron was sent as a scout. After a short preliminary engagement, the Prince of Condé, sensing that he was too close to the Catholic battalions to escape them, decided to throw himself fully into the battle. He recalled Admiral Coligny to aid him. Thus the admiral was in the first line, with 500 horsemen, supported by two squadrons of German mercenaries. The Prince of Condé was on the admiral’s left, flanked on the left by 800 German mercenaries. On the right wing, the Protestant troops were in position near the windmill. The Protestants’ charge began around 11:00 a.m., and the Catholic regiments were overwhelmed. The Catholics’ cannons were all taken at once. The first phase of the battle quickly turned into a disaster for the Catholics, and their defeat seemed inevitable. Many Catholic soldiers were run through with swords. The royal army’s horsemen and infantry fled. Then the constable tried to rally his troops, but his horse was shot out from under him. He was seriously wounded in the face and taken prisoner. This first episode of the battle is known under the name of “the first charge.” Its significant element was the Protestants’ capture of the constable. The defeat was turning into a debacle.
The dukes of Damville and Aumale attempted a countercharge to help the constable, but they were also put to flight by the German mercenaries. During this second charge, the constable’s fourth son, Gabriel de Montmorency, lord of Montbiron, was killed, and the duke of Aumale, thrown off his horse, was taken prisoner. During all this time, the duke of Guise made no sign; prudently and patiently, he was waiting to see what was going to happen on the field. The mercenaries, who thought the victory was final, began pillaging the baggage abandoned by the Catholic forces. Marshal Saint-André and the duke of Guise remained impassive. Before he was wounded and taken prisoner, the constable had asked the duke of Guise for help, but the duke of Guise had not moved. This not very chivalric attitude—which was, however, perfectly adapted to a war that was more strategic than heroic—was noted in most of the commentaries on the battle.
Louis I of Bourbon, Prince of Condé, led the Protestant companies on the third charge (figure 9), but he in turn fell into the hands of the royal troops. Gaspard de Coligny then took command of the Huguenot forces. But the 2,000 German mercenaries quickly abandoned their position. The duke of Guise finally decided to direct operations for the Catholics and launched a charge that scattered the mercenaries. There remained no more than a thousand horsemen under the command of Saint-André and the duke of Guise, which was very little to cope with 4,000 Protestant horsemen. The Prince of Condé and the admiral were unable to regroup their regiments, which were disorganized after having thought they had won. Coligny rallied the mercenaries who had taken refuge and brought them back to the field, while the Prince of Condé sought to do the same. But his horse was also wounded, and he was taken prisoner by Admiral Damville. Each camp had its high-ranking prisoner: Constable Montmorency was in the hands of the Huguenots and the Prince of Condé in those of the Catholics. The battle had recovered a certain equilibrium.
Near the village of Blainville, after the flight of the Protestants, the duke of Guise succeeded in disarming 2,000 German mercenaries who agreed to cease fighting and go home. At this point a squadron with 1,500 horses emerged from the forest and rode toward him. Admiral Coligny was leading the charge. Everything seemed about to be reversed again. François de Guise mounted a fresh horse and Marshal Saint-André tried to do the same, but could not find his page. Then he leaped onto a tired horse that abruptly collapsed. Not being able to get away in time, he was on the verge of being taken when a horseman, Baubigny-Mézière, shot him in the head with a pistol. Left alone, Guise had to withdraw. Harquebusiers placed in the rear finally spotted Admiral Coligny’s cavalry and forced Coligny to give up his pursuit of Guise. The battle was reaching a decisive turning point. After assembling his troops, François de Guise launched a last charge against Admiral Coligny, who finally gave the signal to retreat. In the end, the Battle of Dreux was won by the Catholics after a long day full of reversals. The following day, negotiations began between the two camps to arrange for an exchange of prisoners.52
FIGURE 9. Third Charge at the Battle of Dreux, a print by Tortorel and Perrissin, 1570. Image courtesy of the University of Chicago.
The battle’s outcome had long remained uncertain, though it was not confused. It was even waged in the old style, that is, frontally and without skirmishes. The four successive charges and the final retreat produced an impressive number of episodes that were fairly distinct chronologically. Agrippa d’Aubigné summed up this uncommon battle in six points: an old-style combat; the extreme valor of the Swiss soldiers explaining the final victory of the Catholic troops; the duke of Guise’s patience, which made a major contribution to the legend that viewed him as a remarkable strategist; the long duration of the fighting (more than four hours); the capture of the two leaders; the retreat of both armies on the same day.53 D’Aubigné estimated the casualties at eight thousand men, while other authors set the figure at six thousand. Tortorel’s, Perissin’s, and Hogenberg’s engravings testify to the complexity of the troop movements and the magnitude of the successive charges.
Concerning this battle, Montaigne notes only Guise’s patience and does not mention the battle’s different phases or the role played by its various actors, on either the Protestant or the Catholic side. He makes no comment on the multiple charges or the strategies adopted by the adversaries. What are we to think, for example, about the impassiveness of François de Guise while his army was being trounced? Montaigne needs to make only a simple remark to evoke a hot topic of conversation: “those who do not strongly favor the reputation of Monsieur de Guise are fond of averring that he cannot be excused for having halted and temporized with the forces under his command while the Constable, the commander-in-chief of the army, was being smashed by the artillery.”54 Against this accusation, Montaigne mentions only the result of the battle and offers a meager commentary, referring merely to “what the outcome proved,” as if the outcome of the battle guaranteed the integrity of the decisions that Guise made. Montaigne seems to place himself on the side of the Machiavellian logic that gives priority to the end at the expense of the means. The victors are always right because they won.
Montaigne takes the side of the duke of Guise because he was able to aim at “victory as a whole” and foresee the result of the battle. Thus he refuses to divide the battle into charges, because then he would have to comment on François de Guise’s decisions in their direct relationship to the particular events that took place on the battlefield. For Montaigne, the Battle of Dreux is an indivisible whole with a victory, the only one that counts: that of the duke and the Protestants’ retreat. His commentary emphasizes the sense of duty. It is in the name of a lofty idea of the state that the duke of Guise is supposed to have chosen not to intervene to help his companions in arms. Only the final victory matters; it is therefore pointless to discuss the development of this battle in detail.
Here we are in the “post-Machiavelli” period, and Montaigne is defending a fundamental principle of a new conception of politics. Because they are ultimately effective, the raison d’état authorizes actions that are not very glorious or heroic. The soldier is only an instrument of the state, and in this sense, only the duke of Guise incarnated the state on December 19, 1562. On that day, Constable Montmorency and Marshal Saint-André were only soldiers in the service of a cause that transcended them and of which they never had an overall vision. François de Guise apparently better incarnated the ineluctable character of history and destiny.
Is the military man in the service of politics (as Montaigne seems to imply) or, on the contrary, do the chivalric ideal and the values it represents constitute the main stake in battles? It seems to me that Montaigne, over the years—and especially after 1585—defends precisely the latter position, which should have led the duke of Guise to rush (like the Chevalier Bayard, for example) to the aid of the constable. This aristocratic ideal that Montaigne finds in the Cannibals is in complete contradiction with the behavior of the duke of Guise, who acts here in a Machiavellian way. In the first edition of the Essais published in 1580, Montaigne repeatedly justifies politics and thus a strong state that acts against the very principles of humanism. In this way he understands that one can kill people in the name of a higher conception of politics. However, after 1585, and after his own failures in politics, he seems no longer to want to follow this path and prefers on the contrary to defend a noble and chivalric idea of politics. That is probably why this short text on the Battle of Dreux was not developed—at least as a particular battle—in the 1588 edition or in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy.
Then comes the “second charge in the chapter,” that is, its incorporation into a system of exemplarity in which Greek Antiquity and France at the end of the Renaissance are included. Montaigne was not able to offer an extensive commentary on the Battle of Dreux, and over time, this chapter became mute. The Guises succeeded in taking Paris in 1588, and Montaigne was even their prisoner at the Bastille for one afternoon—although he was set free by the duke of Guise himself. Depending on the side chosen, the commentator was free to make François de Guise a remarkable strategist or a dark calculator. Montaigne defends Guise without offering a single incriminating argument, other than his victory. Did Guise allow the constable to be defeated in order to get rid of him? Was it simply military genius? Everything depends, of course, on what was to follow. In the end, the Battle of Dreux occupies only a third of the chapter that bears its name, since two examples drawn from Antiquity permit Montaigne to generalize his remarks—one example is present in the 1580 edition, in direct association with the duke of Guise, and the other was added in the 1588 edition. From the bataille de Dieux (a lapsus that gives a pagan connotation to the Wars of Religion) to the bataille de Dreux, there is only a minimal gap in the construction of the chapter. In it, Montaigne defends an idea that was later to disappear from his repertory when he asserts that “there was more craft than valor in it.”
The richness of the description of the battle and the small amount that Montaigne draws from it, while at the same time choosing to devote a chapter to it in his Essais in 1580, has not failed to astonish his readers. In my opinion, this contradiction between Montaigne’s original intention and his inability to comment in detail on the duke of Guise’s actions can be explained by the absence of political calculation and the value attributed to gratuitous acts and ideals in his work after 1585. Moreover, his relation with the Guises changed considerably after 1585 and until the assassination of the third duke of Guise in 1588. Montaigne remained silent regarding the fact that the kings he served (Henry III and then Henry IV) had been driven out of Paris by the League and the Guises. Commenting on the actions of François de Guise, the father of the third duke, was rather delicate at a time when the League was gaining ascendancy over the kingdom and defying the sovereign’s authority.
Moreover, twenty years after the Battle of Dreux, the Catholic cause was no longer the same. As we have seen, at the beginning of the Wars of Religion, Montaigne proved rather intransigent and little inclined toward negotiation with the Huguenots. We recall, for instance, that he had spontaneously presented himself before the parlement of Paris in 1562 to profess his Catholic faith. At that time François de Guise could still claim to be uniting the kingdom behind the king by presenting himself as an indispensable intermediary between God and Charles IX.55 However, after 1580, his son, Henry de Guise, defied the monarch’s power. It had become difficult for Montaigne to criticize one without alienating the other. Henry de Guise had founded the Catholic League with which Montaigne had never had any political affinity. He chose to be faithful and loyal to Henry III, but he also developed ties of friendship with Henry of Navarre, while at the same time rejecting any possibility of a parallel government: “We may wish for different magistrates, but we must nevertheless obey those that are here.”56 On the other hand, his relation with the Guises changed over the years, in inverse proportion to the exacerbation of their religious extremism. From one edition to the next, this chapter is not a defense of the duke of Guise but instead bears the mark of a criticism that became even more important after the beginnings of the League and Henry de Guise’s defiance of Henry III and Henry of Navarre.
After 1588, Montaigne preferred to keep silent on this subject, though he did not eliminate this chapter, which henceforth occupied a relatively small place in a book whose size increased from one edition to the next. Finally, “Of the battle of Dreux” is a rather misleading title. Although Montaigne is discreet regarding religious questions, in this chapter he shows that he is not a historian, either, at least not so far as his own period is concerned. Faced by the profusion of his contemporaries’ commentaries on this battle, Montaigne displayed restraint, or perhaps he simply found nothing more to say. He could not have been unaware that readers might have expected a little more from him in a chapter that remained skeletal. His critical parsimony on the battle certainly astonished his contemporaries more than it does us today. This battle is no longer relevant to our concerns and has been largely forgotten. However, if we put this chapter abandoned by Montaigne back in the historical context of a generation (from 1563 to 1585, for example), the perspective is quite different. Montaigne’s judgment of François de Guise—and consequently of Henry de Guise—is more equivocal than it seems. Praised at several points in the Essais for his character and political presence, in the chapter “Of the battle of Dreux” François de Guise appears as a man of practical judgment, more political than human. History suggested to Montaigne that this might be a family trait on which it was better not to comment.
Although Montaigne still considered historians as coming “right to [his] forehand”57 and gave them pride of place in his library, contemporary history—as he admits on more than one occasion—was not really his favorite reading, and that is probably why he decided, in the final analysis, not to title his book Mémoires, Journal, or Discours. Montaigne did not like labels, whatever they might be. In an addition to the chapter “Of husbanding your will” (III: 10) inscribed on the Bordeaux Copy, he proclaimed his political independence and his individual judgment:
I adhere firmly to the healthiest of the parties, but I do not seek to be noted as especially hostile to the others and beyond the bounds of the general reason. I condemn extraordinarily this bad form of arguing: “He is of the League, for he admires the grace of Monsieur de Guise.” “The activity of the king of Navarre amazes him: he is a Huguenot.” “He finds this to criticize in the king’s morals; he is seditious in his heart.”58
Montaigne cannot be accused of having opined in one way or another in “Of the battle of Dreux.” He summed up the battle in a single remark: “There were plenty of unusual incidents in our battle of Dreux.” He leaves it to the reader to inform himself elsewhere if he wants to know more about this crucial event in the Wars of Religion.
An Apology for Sebond or a Justification of Montaigne?
The first book of the Essais of 1580 gave a preponderant place to political reflections, but in the second book, theological questions are more prominent because of the space occupied by chapter 12, which is supposed to be a defense of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis. Since the end of the fifteenth century, the Theologia naturalis had enjoyed great success in Europe, first in Germany and Holland and then in France in the early sixteenth century. In it, Sebond demonstrated the truths of Christianity through the testimony of the Creation. The first chapter clearly states the method, which could have appealed to Montaigne: “because they are reasonable, they [human beings] also have intelligence, discretion, judgment, and the power to reason: [they] are capable of conceiving by experience and by art: [they] are capable of knowledge and doctrine, which other animals are not.”59 Thus human beings can arrive at knowledge by themselves, thanks to reason and experience. This program involves a previous knowledge of oneself, and for that reason the book was worth the trouble to translate and defend. It had paved the way for Montaigne’s method of proceeding; without being a theologian, he tested his judgment on humans and other creatures. The “Apology for Raymond Sebond” is a chapter monstrous in its size and in its content. Further elaborated in successive editions, as we have seen, it already occupied a major part of the 1580 edition. Why did Montaigne accord so much importance to Sebond, and why did he spend so much time on this famous defense that is an apology only in name? To answer this question, we have to examine this chapter, remembering the translation Montaigne had made of it twenty years earlier, and once again place the publication of the 1580 Essais in the context of its author’s personal ambitions, without neglecting the political and religious situation in which he acted.
In her Mémoires written during her sequestration in Paris by her brother Henry III in 1576, Margaret of Valoisxii wrote that she found comfort in “reading in this beautiful universal book of nature so many marvels of its Creator.”60 She was referring to Raymond Sebond’s book, Theologia naturalis, sive liber creaturarum (1436), Montaigne’s translation of which had appeared in Paris in 1569 under the title Théologie naturelle.xiii She and her younger brother, the duke of Anjou, had been kept at the Court against their will, and one night in January they tried to escape. Francis of Anjou managed to deceive the guards at the Louvre and rejoin his army in Flanders. Left alone in Paris, Margaret was subjected to the gossip of the Court favorites regarding her love affairs. Her former affair with Henry de Guise as well as her more recent adventures were the object of malicious rumors at a time when the Prince of Joinville was presenting himself as the natural leader of the Catholic League. Margaret set out to convince the king and the queen mother to let her join her husband in Guyenne. She was finally allowed to leave her gilded cage and travel to Pau with her mother, where she rejoined Henry of Navarre in July 1578.
At the Court of Nérac, Margaret was able to surround herself with the local intelligentsia, and she used her title as queen to try to maintain a fragile peace between the moderate Catholics supported by Henry III and the Protestants under her husband’s command. Her mother, Catherine de Medici, remained in Guyenne to try to negotiate a lasting peace. The meeting held at Nérac, the fruit of eighteen months of talks, produced the illusion of a lull in the religious conflicts in the southwest. Montaigne, as an ordinary gentleman of the king of Navarre’s chamber, frequented the Court of Nérac. The Court of the queen of Navarre rapidly became a major locus of power for the Gascon nobility. It was in this intellectual sphere of influence that Montaigne had the idea of devoting a whole chapter of his Essais to Raymond Sebond, a Catalan theologian of whom Margaret had a favorable opinion. Montaigne had earlier become acquainted with Sebond’s work when he translated it into French at his father’s request. He set out to write a defense of the theologian, but a rather complicated one, as we shall see. In addition, this long chapter might serve as an introduction (placed at the heart of the second book of the Essais) to the reprinting of his translation of Sebond, of which Margaret of Valois thought highly, and which Montaigne intended to have reprinted at the same time as his Essais.
To accompany his slightly revised translation, and writing a long chapter, “contrary to [his] custom,” Montaigne nonetheless undertook to defend “your Sebond” (he is addressing Margaret). He chose to give a central place to this chapter which, along with that on La Boétie, displays the name of a “near-contemporary” in its title.xiv Obviously, the queen of Navarre’s “Sebond” was also his, because he had translated him in the early 1550s. Montaigne explains the reasons for his choice. He says that he likes Sebond’s “peculiar (ordinaire) form of argument,” by leaps and gambols, which he associates with his own way of writing. However, Sebond was a controversial author, and Montaigne is careful to distance himself from arguments based on reason. He reminds Margaret of Valois that “our mind is an erratic, dangerous, and heedless tool: it is hard to impose order and moderation upon it.”61 Reason shows itself under “a varying and formless body,” because it inevitably communicates through language; ultimately, it is fully a form of rhetoric. This remark, which has the authority of a political precept, together with the veiled counsel Montaigne gives Margaret, sets the limits of Sebond’s procedure.
Montaigne is making sure he has something to fall back on; he declares his agreement with the queen—without naming her—and explains in turn the pleasure he took in translating the Spanish theologian’s book. He nonetheless distances himself from it by warning the queen against the thinkers of his time who have the unfortunate habit of being “nearly all, we see, incontinent in the license of their opinions and conduct.” Montaigne assuredly encourages Margaret to defend Sebond—after all, the new edition of his translations was, so to speak, in press—but solely for his “peculiar” way of arguing, “in which you are instructed every day, and in that you will exercise your mind and your learning.”62 It is a matter of making Sebond more flexible and less didactic, that is, of taking an interest in the form of his argumentation rather than in its content. Montaigne seems to admire the theologian’s style. We can understand the interest he took in the 1550s in translating this text into French while preserving the allegedly “ordinary” form of the author. On this view, Montaigne’s translation was a stylistic exercise, and he would never have translated Sebond for his ideas. A youthful exercise, just like La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Montaigne’s translation of the Theologia naturalis also needed to be clarified at the beginning of the 1580s.
The “Apology for Raymond Sebond” occupies a disproportionate space in the second book of the Essais. It is a book within the book. This chapter deals more than any other with theology and religion. Montaigne admits that he is hardly well versed in theology, and declares elsewhere, not without emphasis, and after 1588, that he is not a philosopher. This undermining of his own competency clearly shows the ambiguous position taken by the author of the Essais with regard to religious questions. This ambivalence is part of a strategy of distancing and confirms Montaigne’s ability to understand the thorniest arguments on precise points of theology. Such a stratagem allowed him to detach himself “theoretically” from Sebond in case the analyses proposed by the theologian were judged contrary to Catholic dogma. Montaigne was sufficiently familiar with Patristic writings and religious rites to know when he was deviating from Roman apostolic doctrine. Although he cannot be accused of not being a practicing Catholic,63 we must question the foundation of his faith, which appears at several points in the Essais to be more the result of a cultural heritage than of a conviction drawn from the teaching of the Gospels. For example, we may be surprised that Montaigne does not apply to Catholic doctrine the same principles that allow him to form an opinion of almost every subject. Apparently theology does not lend itself to “judging” (contreroller) and remains a dogma that he does not question, except perhaps in a veiled way and with many precautions. In the chapter “We should meddle soberly with judging divine ordinances” (I: 32), Montaigne “dares” to criticize those who claim to interpret and judge divine matters: “To whom I would be prone to add, if I dared, a whole pile of people, interpreters and controllers-in-ordinary of God’s designs, claiming to find the causes of every incident and to see in the secrets of the divine will the incomprehensible motives of his works.”64
Who is targeted here, if not the Protestants? Or at least those who systematically saw the hand of God behind natural phenomena or human actions. Obviously, a Christian must believe that everything emanates from God, but that is an affirmation in principle and not a way of operating or an excuse for acting in accord with one’s own convictions. We must not see in human actions the proof of a divine will: “I think that the practice I see is bad, of trying to strengthen and support our religion by the good fortune and prosperity of our enterprises.”65 Montaigne puts things in perspective: “Our belief has enough other foundations; it does not need events to authorize it.”66 Wouldn’t it be preferable to accept religion as one submits to the laws of one’s country? Montaigne respects the authority of theology, but nothing prevents him from offering a commentary, without claiming to be an expert. He is not a theologian, but he nonetheless discusses religious questions. For example, it is possible to criticize the laws of a country while at the same time obeying them. Montaigne endorses the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church because he thinks humans are incapable of producing better ones without upsetting the social balance. If he was not tempted by the Protestants’ ideas—some of which were, however, in accord with many of his own convictions—that is certainly because he was horrified of change, as he admits on several occasions in the Essais. This conservatism, which he associated with tradition, in no way prevented him from making anthropological comparisons between various “religious customs,” as if religion were itself part of habits and customs. It is possible to observe them and describe these customs, but rarely to change them.
Nonetheless, we are allowed to interpret divine matters, and that is precisely the theologian’s task; but the common man—which Montaigne claims to be—has to take a few precautions before venturing onto a terrain that he does not know well, because, “In short, it is difficult to bring down divine things to our scale.”67 The fact that it is not easy to judge religious beliefs does not mean that it is impossible to form an opinion. Thus in 1580 Montaigne does not completely exclude theological considerations from his reflections. If the Essais claims to offer a political commentary on its time, it has to discuss all the subjects that were then upsetting people. Montaigne is “hardly” a theologian, but he is nonetheless enough of one to devote several chapters to the religious problems that were dividing his contemporaries: “We should meddle soberly with judging divine ordinances” (I: 32), “Of prayers” (I: 56), “Of freedom of conscience” (II: 19), and especially “Apology for Raymond Sebond” move in this direction and allow him to participate in the debate on tolerance and pacification between the churches. However, in an important addition made after 1588, Montaigne noted “human reason’s” failure to explain divine phenomena. Henceforth theology represented “a conflict that is decided by the weapons of memory more than by those of reason.”68 But as we shall see, Montaigne had not always held that view. In 1580, he still believed it was possible to read Sebond in a productive way.
To be a theologian is to defend a dogma. In this sense, Montaigne could not be a theologian. However, in the late 1570s everyone was talking about religious issues, and taking sides was obligatory. One could not escape the grip of the religious question. Thus it was normal, in this social and political context, and especially in Aquitaine, that Montaigne should take an interest in the freedom of religion, in prayer, and in religious tolerance. In his own way, he meddled in theology in 1580. He had no other choice, because his translation of Raymond Sebond was interpreted in a way he could not have foreseen thirty years earlier.
We must return to 1552–54, the time when Montaigne probably undertook his translation of Sebond’s Theologia naturalis. But the date of the translation must not be confused with that of its first publication (1569), even if Montaigne declares that he translated Sebond into French more or less around the time of his father’s death on June 18, 1568. It is likely that he made a few revisions to his translation to prepare it for publication, but the bulk of the work had been done long before the latter date. Montaigne’s statements regarding theology and theologians in the 1580 edition of the Essais have to be read in relation to his translation of Sebond. In 1569, the Théologie naturelle marked Montaigne’s entrance into the world of letters, when he was already more than thirty-five years old. According to Montaigne’s account, it was his father, as we have said, who “ordered” him to translate into French the Catalan theologian’s text, which was written in an incomprehensible (baragouiné) Latin. He presents this work as the result of pure filial respect, without offering the slightest judgment on this considerable task imposed on him by an overbearing father.
While he was pursuing a career in the parlement in the 1560s and could still hope to rise in the hierarchy of the nobility of the robe in Guyenne, Montaigne remembered this schoolboy exercise, which could allow him to display a learned erudition and show a solid knowledge of the Latin language, which was still considered essential for an ambitious magistrate. In the 1560s, Montaigne was not yet expressing the pretensions to nobility that obsessed him after 1570, that is, after his father’s demise, his resignation from his office in the Bordeaux parlement, and his nomination to the Order of Saint Michael. When Pierre Eyquem died in 1568, his son was not yet a writer and he did not even plan to be one, nor did he foresee a career as a negotiator, diplomat, or ambassador. At that time, he still wore the long robe and was fully engaged in his first career as a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux. Several of his colleagues had published learned works, and Montaigne’s good knowledge of Latin had allowed his father—and Montaigne himself—to anticipate a brilliant career in the parlementary milieu. We have already emphasized the professional logic in which this translation of Raymond Sebond was situated.
It is obvious that this work was not a learned one. It was a schoolboy assignment that took on a quite different connotation after the beginning of the Wars of Religion. The relative autonomy of the members of the parlement with regard to the ecclesiastical world justified Montaigne’s choice to see in this translation a career asset in 1569, independently of the disputed theological points Sebond made. However, after 1572, when Montaigne had already embarked upon a political career, Sebond’s book no longer had the same meaning, and it had to be admitted that it was indeed a theological book. Montaigne’s translation was now seen as a contribution to the theological debate and not simply as an exercise in style. In 1580, not able to remain silent about this reality, Montaigne recognized openly that Sebond was a “great Spanish theologian and philosopher.” If prior to 1569 he had approached this text as a simple translation from Latin into French, the Théologie naturelle had in the meantime become a book whose ideas now had to be discussed, and whose content had to be “defended.” In 1569, the Théologie could be seen as a “memorial,” or at least a conversation with his father. It was normal for Montaigne to publish his first scholarly work of translation as the outcome of the insistence of a father concerned about his son’s education.69 In 1569, Montaigne took little interest in the religious controversies contained in Sebond’s book. However, the reprinting of his translation published in Paris in 1581 played a very different role: revising or cleaning up the translation allowed Montaigne to interpret and rephrase several questionable passages in Sebond’s work to produce a rather free reading that is sometimes quite distant from the original text.70 The “Apology for Raymond Sebond” served to salvage and justify a project carried out in his youth (1552–54) and an awkward publication (1569) that might have harmed Montaigne’s political aspirations.
The Wars of Religion officially began in 1563, and translating a text like the Theologia naturalis immediately after the first armed conflicts between Catholics and Protestants showed a certain independence of mind with regard to the two camps that were battling each other. However, nothing allows us to say that Montaigne knew exactly what he was translating in 1552 or 1553. Quite the contrary: in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond” he clearly explains that this translation was imposed on him by his father. He nonetheless took care to attenuate certain emphatic passages in Sebond’s prologue. The translation of this work, in which the qualities of judgment and reason are emphasized, which “appeals to no authority,”71 and which was prepared for publication soon after Montaigne’s father’s death, was perfectly suited to advance a career as a jurisconsult and a member of the parlement. The fact that the book was written by a theologian hardly mattered, and in 1552 Montaigne could not have known that the Theologia naturalis would be put on the Index in 1559—seventeen years after it was given to his father by Pierre Bunel, in April or May 1542, during a brief stay at the family château.
After 1559, it obviously became difficult to publish this book, and that was probably why Montaigne’s translation remained in a drawer. Here we have to distinguish between the Auctores quorum libri & scripta omnia prohibentur (that is, a list of authors all of whose writings were prohibited) and the Certorum auctorum libri prohibiti (a list of certain prohibited books). Sebond’s Theologia naturalis was put on the latter list in the Index of 1559.xv Thus Montaigne began his translation long before Sebond’s book was put on the Index. However, five years later, only the “Prologue” to the Theologia naturalis was censured and put on the Tridentine Index published in 1564, immediately after the conclusion of the Council of Trent. From that time on, Montaigne’s translation became salvageable. Moreover, the authors and texts put on the Tridentine Index were not really monitored by the Inquisition—for example, regarding the entrance of books into Rome—until June 1569.72 Only Sebond’s introduction was forbidden, and nothing any longer stood in the way of the publication of Montaigne’s translation. His father’s death was an opportunity for Montaigne to pay homage to him, but also to demonstrate his ability to translate and “edit” a text in Latin. As a member of parlement, he was running no great risk in 1569.
In 1580, when he was about to become an author, Montaigne preferred to forestall the accusations that might be made against him. In that event, he could always count on Margaret of Valois to protect him. Without giving her name or putting her in any pointless danger, he nonetheless acted in such a way that there was no possible doubt as to this chapter’s true dedicatee. In the first pages of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” the translator explains the circumstances that led him to translate the Catalan theologian. The account Montaigne gave was written almost thirty years after the translation. Pierre Eyquem had been dead for more than a decade when his son explained the circumstances of his translation. He completely changed his strategy. A declared gentleman and lord, he had left the long robe behind and was now part of the royal entourage of Henry III and the Court of Navarre. Having achieved a regional career in the magistracy, he was now seeking a post at the national, even international, level. His youthful translation might be misinterpreted, because the religious situation had changed for the worse in the late 1570s. The case of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, withdrawn from the Essais at the last minute, must have made him worry that he might be accused of deviating from the Roman church’s dogma, of excessive indulgence toward the Protestant cause, or even of heresy. Montaigne had already had an opportunity to see how a text could be diverted from its original meaning and transformed into a tool for propaganda in the service of a political cause.
For someone who was hoping to serve the king, this youthful translation might come back to haunt him and compromise his political ambitions. Religious questions were obviously at the very heart of the conflicts, and for that reason theology had to be kept out of any political negotiation. Montaigne no longer desired to take sides and had resigned himself to pursuing a career as a “centrist,” though one who continued to respect royal authority. In 1569 he had considerably attenuated the prologue by tempering almost all the passages that put the emphasis on natural reason.73 Thus when Sebond writes “the foundation of all the knowledge that is necessary for man,” Montaigne translates this as “the little foundations of the doctrine pertaining to man for his salvation” (“les petits fondements de la doctrine appartenante à l’homme pour son salut”). He changes “all the truth necessary for man” into “truth, so far as it is possible for natural reason” (vérité, autant qu’il est possible à la raison naturelle); “[the reader] will learn more in less than a month from this knowledge than from the study of learned doctors for a hundred years” is rendered by “in a few months he will make himself more knowledgeable and versed in several subjects, to know which it would be required to spend a long time reading several books” (“il se rendra par cette doctrine en peu de mois savant et versé en plusieurs choses, pour lesquelles savoir il conviendrait employer longtemps à la lecture de plusieurs livres”).74 These sensible deviations from the original text still needed further explanation.
Now Montaigne had to explain this text and distance himself from it without too much damaging his image as an independent thinker, while at the same time reaffirming his unconditional intention to serve the king faithfully. This translation could be seen as a “career error” that might compromise his political ambitions. Although such a translation was acceptable in the parlementary milieu, it certainly became more problematic after he had resigned his office and entered politics. There was also the problem of the text and its partisan interpretation. Giving the impression of being concerned with theology would expose Montaigne to political commentaries seeing him as taking sides in the religious situation, which would in turn make him a committed man. Declaring oneself too strongly for one religious camp was risky for a man who proclaimed himself a servant of the king and sufficiently independent and open to listen to the grievances of the Protestant party.
In the first edition of his Essais, Montaigne tried to keep a foot in both camps. He owed obedience to the king, but he also criticized the Catholics. He had learned to put political commitments drawn from events into perspective. Politics must be seen in the middle and long term, and never considered as a simple reaction to the crises that arise every day:
I can say this for having tried it. In other days I exercised this freedom of personal choice and selection, regarding with negligence certain points in the observance of our Church which seem more vain and strange than others; until, coming to discuss them with learned men, I found that these things have a massive and very solid foundation, and that it is only stupidity and ignorance that make us receive them with less reverence than the rest. Why do we not remember how much contradiction we sense even in our own judgment? How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday, which are fables to us today? Vainglory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul. The latter leads us to thrust our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.75
Montaigne proposed a line of political conduct that he will later try to apply during his two terms as mayor of Bordeaux. Theology had to be approached as a necessary and inevitable discourse for the gentleman that he now was. It was not a matter of fleeing responsibilities that would force him to take sides, but rather of clarifying certain points that might seem equivocal. Moreover, could theological discourse be separated from the social and political practices of the Renaissance? Montaigne situates religious practices—notably, prayer—in the context of the Wars of Religion and regrets that his contemporaries did not hesitate to “call God to our company and society.”76 That is a fact, and no one can be unaware that in the early 1580s politics was closely linked to the religious, which was then transformed into ideology in the service of the parties that were battling in the political arena. Montaigne pondered the true theological foundations of systems of belief and noted that our mind is itself not exempt from vengeance and resentment. Religion performs particular functions depending on the period, and that is why it is essential to distinguish the motivations that mark the translation done in 1552–54, the publication of the Théologie naturelle in 1569, and its republication in 1581.xvi
The enthusiastic judgments that see in the republication of the Théologie naturelle in 1581 a significant work on Montaigne’s part must be qualified. Without having compared the texts of the 1569 and 1581 editions, most critics assure us that Montaigne engaged in a task equivalent to what we can observe in the Bordeaux Copy. That is not true. The 1581 version does not substantially modify Montaigne’s original translation. He merely corrected misprints in the 1569 text, which are not very numerous in comparison to those in the 1580 edition of the Essais.
A revised copy of the 1569 Théologie naturellexvii that belonged to Montaigne and that was presented by Alain Brieux in 195877 illustrates well the way Montaigne corrected his text, mainly by changing the punctuation or a single character in a word in the framework of the printed page. According to Brieux’s count, out of the 229 words or “groups of letters” corrected, no passage was the object of a genuine rewriting. It was a matter of simply cleaning up the text. Moreover, we must be wary regarding the nature of these corrections. Thus in the 1569 prologue, the text gives “convaincu fause,” which becomes “convaincuë faulse” in 1581. Is this correction attributable to Montaigne or the foreman in the printshop? It is hard to decide so long as the copy of the Théologie corrected in Montaigne’s own hand and mentioned by Brieux has not yet resurfaced. Similarly, “d’avantaige” (1569) becomes “d’avantage” in 1581, and “maistre d’ecole” (1569) becomes “Maistre d’ecole.” The punctuation is often increased in 1581, and allows the text to breathe more easily. Where in 1569 we have “d’avantage ils sont privez de mouvement de lieu à autre,” in 1581 we read “d’avantage, ils sont …”, or again “Ceux de la seconde à cause de leur memoire, ont mouvement” has another comma in 1581: “Ceux de la seconde, à cause de la memoire, ont mouvement.”78 On the same page, twenty lines farther on, we read “ny reng auquel l’homme puisse monter par de là” in 1569, and “ny reng auquel l’homme puisse monter au delà” in 1581: a set of minor stylistic corrections.
What should we say about the errors attributable to the printer? A methodical comparison between a 1569 copy (Sonnius) and two copies of the 1581 edition (Sonnius and Chaudière) does not allow us to validate what Montaigne says when he claims that his translation was printed “with the nonchalance that is seen in the infinite number of errors that the printer, who carried out the work alone, left in it.”79 This criticism of the printer has more to do with a commonplace than with reality, and Montaigne justifies the reprinting of a controversial work for purely philological reasons, namely, the simple correction of errors in the first printing. I have found only corrections bearing on spelling and punctuation; in short, changes that affect the text itself very little. It is often errors in reading made by the compositors that have been rectified. How long exactly did it take Montaigne to change the spelling of a few words and modify the punctuation on the 1569 copy? A week at most. What is more, it was a task that could easily be carried out while traveling. Montaigne might very well have made these corrections between Bordeaux and Saint-Maur-des-Fossés during the summer of 1580. Finally, a very large number of pages (more that 95 percent), even though all recomposed, end up with the same guide words, which proves that the compositors were able to keep the same references when putting together the 1581 edition. The number of pages is the same in the two editions, and only the additions in the margins differ in their fonts: in Roman letters for those in 1581 and in italics for those in the 1569 edition. Thus it is an exaggeration to claim that the Théologie naturelle of 1581 constituted an entirely reworked edition; rather, it was a reprinting with a few corrections.
Montaigne explains the absence of François d’Amboise’s encomiastic sonnet in the 1581 edition of the Théologie naturelle. For him, the omission of these verses is a matter of fashion, nothing more. He accuses the printer, Gilles Gourbin, of having succumbed to the lure of the “commissioned and borrowed prefaces”80 that were in vogue at the time of the first edition.
Must we be satisfied with this explanation of the publishing practices of the 1560s? Let us note first that in the last years of the sixteenth century, far from having disappeared, preliminary pieces were becoming even more fashionable. It is more likely that in 1581 Montaigne demanded an authorial independence that was less obvious in 1569. Was François d’Amboise competent in theology, as has been suggested?81 From 1568 to 1572, d’Amboise did teach philosophy as regent of the second class at the College of Navarre, where he had a fellowship as an “Écolier du roi.”82 At the time, d’Amboise was proud of his poetry and had managed to place his verse in numerous collections. In 1569, he also published a Tombeau de A. Sorhin with Guillaume Chaudière, the copublisher of Montaigne’s translation of the Theologia naturalis. It was probably through this connection with Chaudière that d’Amboise was able to convince the publisher that a sonnet placed at the head of Montaigne’s translation would embellish this work done by an unknown. Inserting the poem was not without interest for the bookseller because the young d’Amboise was then openly aligned with the party of the Catholic extremists. It was perhaps thanks to the contacts with d’Amboise that a privilege was rapidly obtained, apparently without difficulty, whereas Sebond’s Theologia was on the Index. The publication of this sonnet could be seen as Chaudière’s way of thanking d’Amboise for services rendered. The name of François d’Amboise clearly situated the work in the camp of the Catholics and probably explains why Chaudière agreed to place his verses at the head of the Théologie naturelle of 1569.
In 1581, François d’Amboise’s status had changed. He had accompanied Henry III to Poland, but after his return to France, he had given up all pretension to be a poet in order to study law in Paris. He became a robin and followed a career path the inverse of that followed by Montaigne, who had abandoned his office in the parlement. Received by the parlement of Paris as a novus advocatus, François d’Amboise was named prosecutor in 1575 and rapidly rose through the parlementary hierarchy. He was successively magistrate at the parlement of Paris and Brittany, maître des requêtes, and councillor of the king in his Great Council.
If François d’Amboise’s poem had helped the publisher obtain a privilege and thus to make the printing of Montaigne’s translation possible in 1569, his name meant something quite different in 1581, at a time when Montaigne was trying precisely to keep his translation at a distance from theology and theologians. In 1569, François d’Amboise’s last verses unhesitatingly presented Sebond’s book as a theological work:
That is why Nature with its theology,
Better than art marks on us the true effigy
Of God, of his essence, and his high power.
This is a reminder that Montaigne wanted to avoid in 1581. Similarly, this poem by a member of parlement threatened to be misinterpreted,xviii even if François d’Amboise remained a militant Catholic. In the end, he represented another generation (he was seventeen years younger than Montaigne), and the author of the Essais was annoyed by the fact that this sonnet made no reference to his work as translator. In 1581, the name of François d’Amboise would have served only to complicate the reception of this new edition of the Théologie naturelle by reminding readers that questions of theology were the principal subject matter of this book, which Montaigne now wanted to present as a work that was stimulating for its thought and a style that pleased by its simple and peculiar form of argumentation.
As we have seen, rather than the text itself, it is the prologue to the Theologia naturalis that had been a problem for the Roman censors and had caused the entire book to be put on the Index in 1559, while the prologue was put on the Index tridentum in 1564. In 1580, it was again the prologue that Montaigne had to explain or at least interpret in his own way in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”; this was a rather difficult task, considering the number of Sebond’s propositions repeated in one form or another in the Essais. For example, what are we to think of the passage in which Sebond maintains that man is “illuminated to know himself”? This Socratic principle expresses one of the foundations of the Essais. This turn inward, without passing through an ecclesiastical mediator, was, as we might expect, the main reproach addressed to Sebond by the censors. If Sebond’s recommendations are taken literally, it can be deduced that man can attain truth by his own means and through reason.
We understand why Sebond was read with interest by the Protestants, who regarded favorably this ability of man to base knowledge on reason, and thus outside the doctrine and institutions of the Roman Catholic Church.xix However, it has to be added—and Montaigne did not fail to do so—that Sebond’s book was written before the “innovations” of Luther and Calvin. The very special knowledge that appeals to personal judgment, outside of disciplines, became one of the Essais’ credos after 1585. The truth, Sebond writes in Montaigne’s translation, “presupposes neither grammar, nor logic, nor any other liberal art, nor physics, nor metaphysics.” This passage reminds us of what Montaigne says in “Of the education of children,” where he states that it is only after having regulated the child’s “behavior and his sense, that will teach him to know himself,”83 and “after the tutor has told his pupil what will help make him wiser and better,” that he can be instructed in “the meaning of logic, physics, geometry, rhetoric.”84 In fact, we find in Sebond a few of the great principles of the Essais, notably the will not to be content with bookish knowledge and to argue “only from things that are clear and known to everyone through experience.”85
It is equally disturbing to find in Montaigne’s translation of the prologue to the Theologia naturalis the title of what was to become a literary genre. Sebond recommends that “everyone [has] tried out (essayé) in himself” the method he advocates, because it “has need of no witness other than man.”86 This exhortation of Sebond’s might have been recalled—unconsciously—by Montaigne and used again twenty years later to explain man and to recycle—in the title of his book—an expression that he had initially chosen when translating Sebond’s critical work from Latin into French. Similarly, in a way unexpected in a theologian—and this was probably what alarmed the censors—Sebond says that he adduces “no authority, not even that of the Bible.” Montaigne made this axiom one of the pillars of his own critical approach; this was acceptable for a robin in 1569, but not for a gentleman in 1581. Whence the necessity of a defense of the translation of Sebond’s book, which must not be confused with a defense of Raymond Sebond.
An attentive reading of the opening pages of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” in the text of the first edition of the Essais in 1580 produces a rather strange feeling in the reader, as if the author were trying to distance himself from a youthful exercise imposed by a despotic father, which he had to accept without hesitation. Why this later detachment? Eleven years after the first edition of the Théologie naturelle, Montaigne might be harried for translating this work whose prologue was still on the Index. However, we must not overdramatize the situation. After all, Montaigne was “hardly” a theologian, and endorsing certain of Sebond’s ideas did not give rise to genuine persecution, especially if it is recalled that the main quality he attributes to Sebond is his peculiar way of arguing. For an intelligent man who was demanding a certain independence with regard to the political and religious elites, such an exercise was not necessarily a mistake. We have to distinguish between Montaigne’s motivations in 1569 and his expectations and ambitions in 1580.
If one wanted to put oneself at the disposal of the king’s policy, on Catholic territory—Rome, for instance—this translation could lead the ecclesiastical authorities to wonder about the translator’s religious convictions. For Montaigne it was preferable to approach the problem head-on, and offer a new edition of this work done at another time, openly emphasizing his simple role as a translator whose name did not even appear on the title page of the first edition of 1569. The revised 1581 edition could provide an opportunity to explain the circumstances under which he did the translation. Why not accompany it by a prologue, an apology for Raymond Sebond that could at the same time serve as a self-justification? Better yet, why not propose an apology outside Sebond’s text, thus creating an additional distance between this youthful exercise and the theologian’s book? It was pointless to make too much of it or to deny the translator’s interest in some of Sebond’s ideas and the way they are defended. So these ideas had to be situated in their historical context in order to show that they could now serve the Catholic cause against the atheists or the heretics. Sebond might even have been a visionary: “In this he was very well advised, rightly foreseeing by rational inference that this incipient malady would easily degenerate into an execrable atheism.”87
After recognizing the utility of knowledge at the beginning of his apology for Sebond, Montaigne admits that he does not accord it disproportionate importance. Knowledge is not the mother of all virtue. He recounts his everyday family life in his father’s time, and describes the château as open to learned men of all denominations, “inflamed with that new ardor with which King Francis I embraced letters and brought them into credit.” Therefore, it was natural for a lord to follow the humanist fashion of celebrating arts and letters. However, Montaigne adds that his father was not well read, and that his judgment was sometimes faulty, making him incapable of telling good books from bad ones, “collecting their sayings and discourses like oracles, and with all the more reverence and religion as he was less qualified to judge them, for he had no knowledge of letters.”88 Then Montaigne recounts the circumstances under which his father hosted Pierre Bunel, “a man of great reputation for learning in his time,” at the château for a few days, probably in 1542 or 1543.xx
In his Mémoires, Henri de Mesmes reports that when he was studying in Toulouse he often saw the famous humanists Pierre Bunel and Guy du Faur de Pibrac.89 Montaigne tells us that his father liked to surround himself with learned men and received them “like holy persons.” Receiving “oracles” was part of a country gentleman’s way of life. As he was saying farewell to his host, Bunel gave Pierre Eyquem a book titled Liber naturae sive creaturarum. However, it was long after Bunel’s visit that Montaigne’s father “ordered” him to translate into French a “very useful book and suited to the time in which he [Bunel] gave it to him.”90 The Wars of Religion had not yet begun, and Montaigne’s father could not be accused of having given his son a controversial book. Nonetheless, we know that in his time Pierre Bunel had been forbidden to live in Toulouse and was accused of “false religion.” It was only thanks to the protection of Arnaud du Faur that Bunel had been able to return to his native city. Pierre Eyquem did not know about this incident and had not seen the urgency or interest of having Sebond’s book translated; it remained in a chest in the château for about ten years.
When a career in the judiciary loomed on the horizon, Michel, like the good son he was, carried out this work that was imposed on him to prevent him from forgetting his Latin. In the dedication of his translation, addressed to this father, Montaigne explains that he had “shaped and trained the manner of Raymond Sebond, that great Spanish theologian and philosopher, [giving him] a French dress and divesting him, so far as I was able, of the savage bearing and barbarous demeanor you first saw in him: so that in my opinion, he now has enough good behavior and civility to be presented in any good company.”91 It is as if Montaigne were still too young—in 1581 he was forty-eight years old—to form his own opinion regarding religious dogmas. We emphasize this obligation because that was how he presented this pensum of his youth.
The accent is put on the book as a present rather than on its author. This present is also explained by the fact that it was “written in an obscure Spanish with Latin endings.” Bunel thought he would please Montaigne’s father, who knew a little Spanish and Italian because he had fought in those countries. This “very useful book and suited to the time in which he gave it to him”—it was in fact the time when Protestant ideas were beginning to take root in Aquitaine—allowed Montaigne to pay homage to Sebond for having promoted before its time a new form of theological discourse that was capable of being used to fight the heretics. Montaigne explains that the “common herd” cannot judge what is reported to it, and that reason is a dangerous tool if it is not put in good hands. He hastens to condemn the qualities that he was soon to claim as his own: the ability to “judge opinions” and to put “beliefs in doubt and upon the balance.”92 According to him, the turmoil engendered by the theological debates injured the principle of civil peace necessary for any society. The authority of the laws was seriously compromised by the new ideas. Montaigne defends the Catholic religion unreservedly, less on the basis of a theological analysis than simply in the name of the proper functioning of political institutions. Weak minds, the “vulgar”—and Montaigne adds that “(almost everyone belongs to this category),” a parenthesis struck out on the Bordeaux Copy—have to be kept out of decisions based on reason. The “common herd” is not capable of putting things in perspective or choosing among good and bad beliefs. Theology is, without any doubt, a matter for specialists. Montaigne situates himself between these extremes and limits himself to commenting on Sebond’s text, describing himself as an “ordinary man,” his political leitmotif in the following years.
After this clarification, Montaigne explains how, by a simple coincidence, “some days before his death” his father came across this book, which had been forgotten “under a pile of other abandoned papers,” and “commanded” him to put it into French. We have to examine the chronology of this episode a little more closely here. Pierre Eyquem died on June 18, 1568. If we believe Montaigne, who tells us that his father gave him this work to translate a few days before his death, it is hard to see how, in “a few days” the book could have been translated and sent to a printer, because Montaigne claims that it was not he, but rather his father, who took the initiative for this publication. Still, according to the account given by Montaigne in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” translating was for him a “very strange and new occupation,” because he considered this work to be a schoolboy exercise, but he was “unable to disobey any command of the best father that there ever was.”93 Twice, in a few lines, Montaigne refers to his father’s command. He carried out this assignment as best he could and his father “ordered it to be printed.”
In the short dedication preceding his translation, Montaigne also refers to “the task you [Pierre Eyquem] assigned me last year at your home at Montaigne,” thus during the year 1567. The printing of the book was completed on December 30, 1568, and the title page bears the date 1569. The letters patent for the authorization of the printing were given on October 27, 1568. Six months separate the death of Montaigne’s father and the appearance of the translation of Raymond Sebond’s book (in all, 496 printed sheets—that is, nearly a thousand pages—in the 1569 edition). Could Montaigne have translated this thick volume in a few days, or even in a few weeks? That seems highly unlikely.94 He ends his dedication this way: “My lord, I pray to God that he may give you a very long and happy life,” as if the notice had been written in the morning, whereas Montaigne’s father had died in the afternoon. The dates are a problem here. Oddly, this dedication claims to have been written “from Paris,” which is probable if Montaigne had made the trip to Paris to have his translation printed. However, if the date were correct (and it cannot be), Montaigne would not have been present at the château of Montaigne, at his father’s side, at the time of his death. We must, of course, take this (symbolic) date for what it is: a decisive turning point in his life and in his career.
Another contradiction must also be noted. Montaigne writes that he had “once inquired of Adrianus Turnebus, who knew everything, what could be the truth about this book. He replied that he thought it was some quintessence extracted from St. Thomas Aquinas.”95 But Turnebus died on June 12, 1565, which proves that this book was not “rediscovered” a few days before Pierre Eyquem’s death and that Montaigne probably began to translate Raymond Sebond long before, and not just before his father’s death. Montaigne does not tell the whole truth about his intellectual encounter with the Theologia naturalis and plays down his work as a translator, going so far as to suggest that it was a schoolboy exercise quickly dashed off.
Questions have also been asked about the omission of any reference to Sebond’s title—“theologian”—in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” of 1580. Montaigne states that Sebond “was a Spaniard, teaching medicine in Toulouse.” However, he did not omit to mention his title of theologian in the dedication of his translation to his father in 1569.96 The narrator who reports the history of the Théologie naturelle in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” presents himself as a popularizer, giving Sebond’s text a civil aspect in order to make it accessible “in any good company,” including women: “many people are reading it, and especially the ladies.”97 That allowed him to show that Sebond’s book is not really a work on theology, because, as he remarks in “Of prayers,” women are “hardly fit to treat theological matters.”98 The adverb “hardly” (guiere) recalls—and strengthens—Montaigne’s admission that he is “hardly well-versed” in theology. He puts himself on the same level as his ideal female reader: Margaret of Valois. We find the same interest in the stylistic composition of Sebond’s text at the expense of its theological import.
The question is not whether Montaigne betrayed Sebond, but rather how to understand the reception of Sebond from the time Montaigne translated the book in 1552–54—that is, for the first publication of it in 1569—and the reprinting of this text in 1581, accompanied by the first edition of the Essais (published a year earlier) in which the “Apology for Raimond Sebond” is dominant. Sebond’s thesis surely did not displease Montaigne; otherwise, how could we explain the reprinting and the major place given this author in the second book of the Essais? In any case, Montaigne had to explain this translation done in his youth. That is the primary function of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” which is so long that one has the feeling that Montaigne is trying to cloud the issue. Wasn’t the chief goal of the 1580 edition of the Essais to offer a political explanation—under the veil of a pseudo-philosophical discussion—of this first publication, which could rub the political and religious authorities the wrong way? Things had greatly changed in ten years, and suddenly Sebond’s book had acquired a contemporary relevance that it had lacked in 1569, and even more in 1552–54.
Now, after the beginning of the armed conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, this work could serve as a foil to Luther’s “innovations,” which “were beginning to gain favor and to shake our old belief in many places.”99 This was a hijacking of Sebond that proceeded from a good political feeling. In 1580, all Montaigne had to do through the mediation of his father was to ensure that this translation appeared to be relevant on the political level, without going too far in order to avoid upsetting any party. He had to deconstruct Sebond within an apology (which was an apology for his translation and not an apology for Sebond) that sometimes looks like a condemnation. From this chapter it emerges that Montaigne seems not to have understood Sebond all that well. But is that really a bad thing? Pretending to be naive in matters of religion was a political strategy that made sense at that time. Moreover, Montaigne has told us many times that he is not a theologian and took an interest in Sebond’s text only for his free style and way of arguing.100 To hear him tell it, Sebond might even have been the first essayist!
Montaigne finds Sebond’s argumentation “so solid” that he thinks it difficult to do better at making “that argument,” but he does not judge Sebond’s approach itself. Then he lists the accusations made against Sebond’s book. He tries to analyze Sebond’s arguments but takes the precaution of reaffirming, once again, that he is not a theologian: “This would be rather the task for a man versed in theology than for myself, who know nothing about it.” Here we have moved from “hardly” to “nothing.” Montaigne adds: “It is faith alone that embraces vividly and surely the high mysteries of our religion.”101 This is final. A specialist in reversals, Montaigne nonetheless continues with a “But …” He praises Sebond’s enterprise while politicizing his theses. For him, the more the existence of God is proven, the better, especially in times of heresy and atheism. Montaigne transforms the author of the Theologia naturalis into a prophet of the ills that were soon to divide France. Thus it is with the help of the text of the “Apology” that we must understand the reprinting of Montaigne’s translation in 1581. Montaigne transforms Sebond’s book into a political discourse on his own time. There is Religion and religion: the general sense of the term contrasts with a practical meaning that arose from the civil wars. Unfortunately, politics and theology became confused. Montaigne chose politics, sheltering himself from theological quarrels. He explains that he had to explain several passages that had been misunderstood and to defend Sebond’s text against “two principal objections that are made to it,”102 and he concludes that Sebond is both bold and courageous in his confirmation of the articles of Christian faith against the atheists. On this point, Montaigne cites Turnebus, whose opinion he says he asked regarding Sebond’s book.
The apology for Sebond is situated outside theology—at least in 1580, at the time of the publication of the Essais. Montaigne argues that reason must be put in the service of religion without, however, seeking to perfect “a knowledge so supernatural and divine.” Moreover, if faith sufficed, man would not waver and would not doubt. The arguments reason offers may have their interest from a strategic point of view—in the name of the Catholic religion, of course. Montaigne proposes to “accommodate to the service of our faith the natural and human tools that God has given us.”103 Reason’s purpose is to “embellish, extend, and amplify the truth of [our] belief”; we must not “think that it is on us that faith depends.” Montaigne offers a new prologue to the Théologie naturelle that is more moderate than Sebond’s censured one and is intended to replace it. Faced with a theological problem that he nonetheless thinks he can resolve, the author of the Essais begins by praising Sebond’s enterprise and then deems it absurd to think that one can base faith on reason. This contradiction does not frighten the amateur theologian that Montaigne is.
The publication of the Essais of 1580 exonerated Montaigne of a “youthful error.” He recognizes “Sebond’s errors” but nevertheless approves his approach in a period in which disbelief was spreading in France, and particularly in the southwest. Sebond’s aberrations with regard to the dogma of the Catholic Church might be excusable if their author was not represented as a theologian. Thus we can understand why Montaigne preferred not to mention Sebond’s title in his apology. He also takes care to display a flawless faith, but follows Sebond in lines of reasoning that go around in circles and are sometimes completely contradictory. Montaigne notes that “God owes his extraordinary help to faith and religion, not to our passions,”104 but immediately passes on to considerations more sociological than theological in nature. For example, he states—in accord with the views he was to develop later—that “All this is a very evident sign that we receive our religion only in our own way and with our own hands, and not otherwise than as other religions are received.”105 This relativist vision of religious belief considerably weakens the argument of the preceding pages, and the author of the Essais is venturing onto a slippery slope. The reader loses his way, because this long apology for Sebond looks like a labyrinth from which one cannot emerge.
Didn’t Montaigne misunderstand, or at least misread, Sebond’s work? Perhaps not. On the contrary, we see in these contradictions the a posteriori necessity of transforming Sebond’s text into a currently relevant document that could be used politically. Montaigne pretends to be a skeptic the better to assert the necessity of a rational, durable foundation for any power, either political or religious. As we have seen, his political conservatism has to be situated in the practices of his time. Montaigne often defends the status quo, even though he constantly makes—frequently in a contradictory way—skeptical judgments regarding any form of authority acquired through tradition or custom. To those who reproached the theologian for the weakness of his demonstrations, Montaigne replies that it is impossible to acquire and prove universal truths. This historicization of the arguments presented by Sebond corresponds to an updating of Sebond’s book in the context of the Wars of Religion. The beginning of the “Apology” designates a constant oscillation between the orthodox positions of the Catholic Church and a systematic questioning of the foundation for truths that are supposed to be truer than those of other religions. Montaigne inclines more toward an explanation that makes religion the result of “human ties.” What are we to think, for example, of this statement: “Another region, other witnesses, similar promises and threats, might imprint upon us in the same way a contrary belief”?106 Here Montaigne deconstructs his preceding statements. Then begins a veritable miscellany of remarks that move further and further away from the original intention of the “Apology.” The apologist allows himself to be taken over by his writing, but he can still refer critics to the first pages of the chapter, which offer a glimpse of the possibility of a human interpretation far removed from theological discourse.
In the “Apology,” Montaigne covers his tracks by turning around once again the arguments given against Sebond. He sees faith as the backdrop for the proofs produced by reason and argues that it is very difficult to dissociate the two: “Faith, coming to color and illumine Sebond’s arguments, makes them firm and solid.”107 And Montaigne concludes: “And even if we strip them of this ornament and of the help and approbation of faith, and take them as purely human fancies, to combat those who are precipitated into the frightful and horrible darkness of irreligion, they will still be found as solid and as firm as any others of the same type that may be opposed to them.”108
Montaigne engages in an updating of the Theologia naturalis. Whereas before Luther and Calvin it was possible to consider such arguments dangerous to the Roman church, the same analyses could now be useful in combating the new beliefs. Montaigne puts one more author in the service of the Catholic cause. Only sixteen pages later, Montaigne moves on to the second objection against Sebond: his arguments are “weak and unfit to prove what he proposes.”109 Montaigne maintains that reading Sebond is not for people whose religious belief is strong, like his, but for weak minds. Sebond is useful for bringing back to the bosom of the Catholic Church those who have strayed from it: “Let us consider for the moment man alone, without outside assistance, armed solely with his own weapons, and deprived of divine grace and knowledge.”110 This line of reasoning can be interpreted as a variant of Pascal’s wager. Let us take up our enemies’ weapons the better to combat them, Montaigne says. But he knows that he is on dangerous terrain and emphasizes that those who lack faith are “ridiculous,” “miserable and puny creatures.”111 Why not use the weapons we have received from God the better to defeat those who are in error?
The first edition of the Théologie naturelle published in 1569 could now be seen as a skeleton in the closet. However, in 1581 Montaigne published it again, at the precise time when he was seeking political and diplomatic responsibilities. We can interpret this “recidivism” as strategic and believe that he had reflected at length on the accusations that might be made against him, and that he rejected them on the basis of many reasoned considerations. By republishing his translation of the Theologia naturalis at a time when he had just published his Essais, Montaigne persisted and took responsibility for the work, thus cutting the ground out from under those who might disapprove of an author who had been put on the Index and who was read by Protestants. This political and publishing strategy proved successful, since Montaigne was never reproached for this venture. The Roman censors had pointed out to him that the prologue to the Theologia was a prohibited text, but Montaigne’s translation was not even mentioned in the verbal remonstrances that the Maestro del Sacro Palazzo addressed to him during his stay in Rome. Montaigne could have seen in them a kind of exoneration. However, one question remained. Why didn’t he join to his translation of Sebond (in the 1581 edition) a preface in which he could have replied directly to the objections that he lists in his Essais? Why didn’t he add his “Apology” to the revised edition of the Théologie naturelle published in 1581? A political interpretation is necessary and allows us to offer an answer to these questions. Although Montaigne could not have known that the Theologia naturalis would soon be placed on the Index when he made his translation in 1552–54, he could no longer have been unaware of this when the second edition was published in 1581. The desire to accede to political responsibilities required a clarification separate from the controversial text, or at least that is how the author of the Essais seemed to see the matter in 1580.
Montaigne cleared the air before launching into his new political career. We can understand why he republished (without major change) his translation of the Theologia naturalis almost at the same time as the first edition of his Essais. The two texts complement each other: the Essais served as a political justification for this youthful incursion into the domain of theology, and the Théologie naturelle of 1581 enabled Montaigne to take refuge behind the more political understanding of the “Apology,” which minimizes Sebond’s theological design. In his Bibliothèque françoise (1584), La Croix du Maine mentions this translation of the Theologia naturalis. He does so in terms that distinguish the translation work done by the young Montaigne from the taking of any theological position. Thus La Croix du Maine notes that it was “at the command of his father” that Montaigne undertook to translate Sebond. Montaigne’s strategy had paid off, and this explanation was henceforth part of his biography. His father was also excused at the same time. La Croix du Maine explains that Pierre Eyquem “did this expressly, as much to instruct him in the fear of God as to teach him more and more to learn good literature and to exercise himself in languages.”112 On this point, the remark (which may have been suggested by Montaigne) is very true.
The best way to get rid of a skeleton in one’s closet is to bring it out into the daylight where everyone can see it. Montaigne does not conceal his “youthful mistake” (a lack of judgment with regard to the request made by an “unlettered” father), but he explains that it was a choice for which he takes responsibility. In the reprinting of the Théologie naturelle in 1581 we have to see a desire to limit the damage that might be done to a political career by a potentially dangerous book. If Montaigne succeeded in getting past the Roman censors on this point, then the battle would be won and his future in the service of the king assured. The author of the Essais acted as an amateur theologian in giving a political dimension to his apology. This famous chapter 12 of the second book of the Essais of 1580 must be considered an exercise in diplomacy. If it reassures Montaigne’s reader (here he was in no way thinking of a common reader, but rather of the political and religious authorities), he also reaffirms his own religious convictions and confirms his talent as a negotiator. Unlike in theology, in diplomacy nothing is ever achieved by being dogmatic.
A Royal Audience and a Military Siege
Montaigne’s book was brought out by Millanges in May 1580. According to modern estimates, the print run was limited to three or four hundred copies, of which the author could receive fifty copies gratis because he had provided the paper, that is, he had met the most important expense involved in producing a book.xxi Montaigne had planned to go to Paris, where he intended to deposit with a printer a slightly reworked and “corrected” version of his translation of Sebond. But the main goal of this trip to the capital was to present a copy of his Essais to the king. This meeting was probably arranged by the marquis of Trans. An audience with the king could not be improvised, and Montaigne had to respect the date set a certain time in advance. We can understand his desire to see the Essais emerge from Millanges’s printshop without delay. With his book hot off the presses, he prepared to travel to the Court.
Since June 2, an epidemic of “coqueluche” (whooping cough) had been raging in Paris; actually, it was a kind of influenza, since the reported symptoms were severe pains in the head, stomach, back, and aches all over the body. According to Pierre de L’Estoile, ten thousand people fell ill with this form of “cold or catarrh.”113 The king, the duke of Mercœur, and the duke of Guise also caught this flu. As soon as he recovered, the king left Paris, on June 18. This sudden manifestation of the flu was immediately followed by a much more serious epidemic, because the plague spread suddenly and violently in Paris around the middle of June. No one wanted to go to the capital, and Pierre de L’Estoile reports that on June 12 the duke of Nevers, informed that the duke of Montpensier was at the gates of Paris with five hundred horsemen ready to do battle with him, avoided the capital by pretending to go to Plombières. The plague scared people more than battles.
Rapidly overwhelmed by this scourge that threw Paris into chaos, the provosts did not know how to stop this contagion, whose last outbreak in the city, in 1562, had caused 25,000 deaths. Everything suggested that this record would be broken. Plague victims were rounded up in every quarter of the city and transported to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. A genuine panic had seized the city’s residents. L’Estoile reports that 30,000 people died in this epidemic during the summer of 1580. The terror was so great that most of those who could leave the city did so. Outsiders did not return for six months, and the capital was deserted by foreigners. Paris was so empty that people played skittles on the Notre-Dame bridge and in several other streets in the capital.114
Montaigne, like many others, preferred to remain outside the walls of the capital. His attitude with regard to the plague is well known. Five years later, when he was within a few days of the end of his term as mayor of Bordeaux, he refused to go into city, which was infected by the contagion, and transferred powers to jurats outside the city. He cannot be blamed for this decision. For the same reasons, he certainly preferred to present himself at the Court at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and avoid Paris. His meeting with the king therefore took place at Saint-Maur, where Henry III and Catherine de Medici were accustomed to spend a few weeks every summer since the queen mother had bought the château built by the architect Philibert Delorme in 1541. The château of Saint-Maur had belonged to Cardinal Jean du Bellay, who had been obliged to sell it in 1563 after falling into disfavor. It was there that in 1568 Charles IX signed the edict of Saint-Maur prohibiting Protestant worship.115
On June 22 or 23, Catherine de Medici arrived at her château in Saint-Maur with the king.xxii On June 24, she wrote to Louis Chasteigner, lord of La Rochepozay and Abain, the ordinary ambassador in Rome, to inform him that Jehan de Pilles, the abbé d’Orbays and the secretary ordinary of the king’s chamber, had just left for the Eternal City in order to transmit to him more ample instructions regarding financial negotiations to be carried out with the Holy See. In this same letter, Catherine asked her ambassador to intercede on her behalf with the pontiff, requesting that he confirm the abbeys of Corbie and Ourcamp, whose commendatory abbé was Charles I of Bourbon, cardinal of Vendôme and archbishop of Rouen.116 On July 20, the king sent a missive to Pope Gregory XIII to ask him to attribute the bishopric of Saluzzo to Horatio Blanco. He strongly opposed another candidate who enjoyed the pope’s favor. Relations between the Vatican and Henry III were extremely tense, and the pope openly accused the king of France of allowing himself to be manipulated by Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots. In 1580, Rome was a major concern for Catherine and the king, who were looking for a replacement for Chasteigner. After rejecting his increasingly pressing appeals, they now had to grant the wish of their ambassador, who for several months had been repeatedly requesting permission to return to France. The pope was not unaware that Chasteigner was expecting his recall to France any day now, and this made negotiations with the Holy See even more delicate for the king. During the month of July 1580, Montaigne presented himself at Saint-Maur to present his book to the king in person. He had left his château on June 22, perhaps in the company of his young brother Bertrand, lord of Mattecoulon, twenty-seven years his junior; and Bertrand de Cazalis, lord of Frayche, who had recently lost his wife, Montaigne’s sister Marie. Although it is also quite possible the two Bertrands only joined him later, as we will see.
The gift of his book to the king had been prepared with care, and we can suppose that Montaigne expected much from this meeting. After all, it was not every day that a lord from a small house in Guyenne—even if he was a knight of the Order of Saint Michael and an ordinary gentleman of the king’s chamber—could expect a private audience with the monarch. We can imagine that Montaigne rehearsed this interview in his head and gave special thought to what he was going to ask of the king. The book he had had delivered to the king a few days earlier was supposed to allow him to show himself in the best light and to produce a positive, unusual image of himself, one that might impress Henry III. His book was the best possible career résumé. Things went as planned. The only extant account of this meeting was written by La Croix du Maine, who reports it briefly in his Bibliothèque françoise.
According to La Croix du Maine, the king complimented Montaigne on his work. Montaigne replied: “Sire, … I must necessarily please your Majesty because my book pleases you, for it contains nothing but a discourse on my life and my actions.”117 Who could have been La Croix du Maine’s source for this remark except Montaigne himself? Or at least one of his close relatives. We see again here the project of the Essais as it is presented in the Au lecteur, which makes the king a privileged reader, if not the first reader. The wager Montaigne made in this short introductory text would thus have been completely won. We understand better this literary strategy that consisted in establishing a consubstantiality between the book and its author. If the book pleased the king, the man would please him. And if one pleases the king, one can expect some largess. The gift of the book entailed obligations in the symbolic economy of the Renaissance. Montaigne was ready to serve his king, and his book was an extension of himself that made an exchange of services possible. It can be argued that in 1580 the book served Montaigne as an introduction into a career that was not in any way literary, but rather political. His ideal reader (the king) was less fond of literature than he was looking for a good servant capable of representing him. Montaigne’s book realized an offer of service based on the fidelity and personal friendship that could develop between a king and one of his counselors.118
Unfortunately, apart from Montaigne’s remarks to the king reported by La Croix du Maine, we know nothing about the exact nature of their conversation, which, if we take into account the protocol of such royal audiences, lasted no longer than ten or fifteen minutes. In fact, the general protocol in August 1578 forbade courtiers to approach the king directly and to speak to him. Meetings were set for precise times and the list of visitors was drawn up in advance.119 The information La Croix du Maine provides does, however, allow us to make a few hypotheses. We have seen that the king was thinking about a possible successor to replace—even temporarily—Chasteigner in Rome. In the first chapters of his book, Montaigne had highlighted not only examples of embassies but had also shown that he could make judgments compatible with and desirable in diplomatic service. Still more important, the king was very preoccupied with the political situation in Bordeaux and the southwest. Montaigne could be useful on both these fronts even though he far preferred to pursue a career in diplomacy, which corresponded better to the models with which he had identified himself since his publication of La Boétie’s works. He believed that he was completely capable of following the path laid out by the Foixs, the Lansacs, and the Mesmeses. We could imagine that the king suggested that Montaigne should go to Rome, where he could serve him as an extraordinary ambassador until a replacement for Chasteigner could be found. Henry III was also considering sending Charles d’Estissac on a mission to deliver documents in Italy, and may have proposed that d’Estissac and Montaigne travel together. However, there was no hurry, and the first priority was to deal with the military matter of the siege of La Fère, the king’s other major concern during the summer of 1580. Indebted to the king and as if to prove his fidelity, Montaigne went to La Fère long enough to prepare his journey with the young d’Estissac.120 We shall return to this scenario, which gave the trip to Italy—generally seen as a pleasure trip on the model of such tours in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a quite different meaning, not touristic but political. But let us first return to the question that was most pressing, at least for the king: the siege of La Fère.
On June 15, shortly before his departure for Saint-Maur, the king had declared his intention to besiege the stronghold of La Fère in Picardy, near the cities of Saint-Quentin and Laon. He expected the Catholic nobles of his kingdom to go to La Fère to fight alongside his army. For him it was an occasion to make a show of force with the French nobility behind him. The siege was being conducted by his best marshal, Jacques II de Goyon de Matignon, a “wily and capable Norman” who was soon to be governor of Guyenne and mayor of Bordeaux. Matignon was on a roll and was considered one of the best military strategists. He had been made a marshal of France on July 14, 1579, and was received the same year into the Order of the Holy Spirit (December 31, 1579). After having pacified Normandy, he restored order in Picardy before leaving for Guyenne to replace Biron, who had become undesirable in the region. Did Montaigne know about the call to the nobility sent out by the king? If he did, we could understand the obligation he felt to attend this siege to show his allegiance to the king of France whom he had just met at Saint-Maur. After obtaining some favor—in the form of a vague promise—from his audience with the king, he felt obliged to demonstrate his fidelity and specifically to reaffirm his membership in the nobility. As a gentleman and the lord of Montaigne, he had military duties.
The king’s correspondence shows that the political situation concerned him a great deal during his summer sojourn at Saint-Maur. In early July 1580, everything was going badly. Pillaging had taken place in the churches in Senlis, Compiègne, and Reims. The king wanted to regain the upper hand over the duke of Anjou and Henry of Navarre. Marshal Biron, the mayor of Bordeaux and governor of Guyenne, was ordered to begin a military campaign to dispossess Henry of Navarre of the cities he controlled in the southwest. The situation was rapidly degenerating, despite Biron’s optimism and the assurances he had given the king regarding his reconciliation with Henry of Navarre. At the end of the summer 1580, La Fère was a point of tension between Catholics and Protestants, and the taking of this stronghold was supposed to demonstrate the king’s military domination. The time had come for a showdown. Highly symbolic, the conquest of La Fère was supposed to send a strong message from the king to Henry of Navarre and put a stop to his military ambitions in Aquitaine.
Condé (Henry I of Bourbon-Condé, the second prince of Condé) had entrenched himself at La Fère in the spring of 1580, and despite his repeated efforts since the “Peace of Monsieur” to avoid military conflict with the Protestants, the king had no option other than to confront Condé directly. This peace had been short-lived, and the intransigent attitude adopted by Biron (who was actually faithfully following the king’s orders) in Bordeaux and Guyenne had inflamed people’s minds and was beginning to cause serious problems for the king. In addition, Henry III’s correspondence shows that Biron still enjoyed the king’s full confidence and was repeatedly praised by him. For example, on May 15, 1579, Henry III wrote to his lieutenant general: “I esteem your virtue and entrust myself to your prudence and loyalty.”121 Loyalty is one thing, and prudence another; the least one can say is that Biron was singularly deprived of the latter. It was in this voluntarist and bellicose context that he had proposed to serve the king in a “Bironian” way,122 that is, without gloves. He had already used artillery against Margaret of Valois and had won a reputation as a warmonger. In his defense, it has to be admitted that the king secretly encouraged Biron to resume the war against the Protestants. These constant hesitations between peace and all-out war reveal the dilemma of royal policy, which ceaselessly oscillated between repression and negotiation, without a happy medium. The royal army’s soldiers, paid only irregularly, deserted by the hundreds, and Biron found it harder and harder to recruit new ones. The king did not have the means to pursue his policy.
The siege of La Fère began on July 7, 1580, and lasted nine weeks, until September 12. The Catholic nobility had been convoked to help reconquer the stronghold from the Huguenots, and they responded to the call in great numbers. During the summer of 1580 it was better to be at the siege of La Fère than in Paris, where the plague epidemic had caused a large part of the population to flee. The Court was at La Fère, where festivities, merry-making, and sumptuous dinners alternated with cannon fire. The duke of Épernon, Joyeuse, and the king’s minions hastened there to put in an appearance, dressed in luxurious clothing as if they were at the Court. A mocking sonnet was published on this occasion:
These engraved corsets and celestial headdresses
Of the heedless band, and these fanciful heads,
Traveled the roads to lay waste to La Fère.
What think you, Sibillot? They’ll have much to do!
These ruffled dandies, both active and passive,
Will they join the assault? Will they do it in earnest?
Will they take it soon? What will be the outcome?
In the end they’ll be beaten, if not worse.
Then the plague, which carries off the big and small,
Will cause the kingdom to remain quite naked,
And a surviving third party, which had no thought of it,
Seeing God far too offended everywhere
By our impieties, abhorring our life,
Will soon establish a new colony there.123
As a gentleman and a soldier, Montaigne was also obliged to make an appearance at La Fère. He went there after his audience with the king and it is likely that Henry III urged him to participate in the siege, where he had an opportunity to make the acquaintance of Matignon. Although this siege was nicknamed the “velvet siege,” no less than four thousand men lost their lives on the side of the assailants and eight hundred on that of the besieged.124 Even if Matignon had shown a great patience that contributed to his reputation, the royal party nonetheless suffered major losses. La Valette, a minion of the king, was wounded on July 18. On August 2, Philibert of Gramont, governor of Bayonne and seneschal of Béarn, a friend of Montaigne and the husband of Madame de Gramont to whom Montaigne had dedicated the chapter “Twenty-nine sonnets of Estienne de la Boétie” (I: 29), was mortally wounded by a cannon ball that tore off his arm. He died of his wound four days later, on August 6. Philibert had abjured his Protestant faith the day after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and like Montaigne he was an ordinary gentleman of the king’s chamber, and he was the mayor and governor of Bayonne. His brother-in-law, the viscount of Duras, also followed the royal party led by Marshal Biron against Henry of Navarre, and was “a great friend”125 of Montaigne; he had joined him in Picardy with “several other friends of his.” Madame de Gramont, Henry of Navarre’s future mistress, suddenly found herself a widow and soon played an important role in Montaigne’s new career as a negotiator. Along with the Foix-Candales, the Foix-Gursons, and Duras, the Gramonts were one of the leading houses of Guyenne and Gascony. Montaigne had just dedicated “Of the resemblance of children to fathers” (II: 37) to Marguerite de Gramont (also known as Madame de Duras) after she had visited him in his château, along with other ladies, during the winter of 1579. Montaigne recounts the death of Philibert de Gramont in his Essais and in his almanac.126
Montaigne left La Fère to escort the body of his friend to Soissons: “I was one of several friends of Monsieur de Gramont who escorted his body from the siege of La Fère, where he was killed, to Soissons.”127 On the way, he was astonished by the tears and lamentations of the people caused by the mere sight of the funeral cortege, even though these people knew nothing about the identity of the deceased. Soissons is thirty-five kilometers from La Fère. From Soissons, Montaigne went to Beaumont-sur-Oise by way of Villers-Cotterêts, Crépy-en-Valois, Senlis, and Chantilly, traveling a total of ninety-five kilometers, probably with an overnight stop between the two cities. In Beaumont he joined Charles d’Estissac, who “had with him a gentleman, a valet-de-chambre, two lackeys, a muleteer and a mule.”128 The expenses of the trip were to be shared “by halves.” On September 5, 1580, the caravan was formed and the journey to Italy could then begin. The first stage took the group from Beaumont-sur-Oise to Meaux, about sixty kilometers (twelve leagues, the secretary tells us). The travelers went around Paris without entering it and headed for eastern France. Montaigne did not return to La Fère and did not witness the end of the siege. Accompanied by the lord of Mattecoulon (his younger brother), the lord of Cazalis (his brother-in-law), Charles d’Estissac,xxiii and a friend of the latter, Count Du Hautoy, who seems to have joined the group later, Montaigne began his journey to Rome.
La Fère fell ten days later, in mid-September. We do not know exactly where Montaigne was between August 10 and September 5, the date on which we find him in Beaumont-sur-Oise. Did he stop in Paris during the second half of August to visit Gilles Gourbin—the bookseller who had obtained the privilege for the printing of the 1569 edition of the Théologie naturelle—and who was to print the new edition of Sebond’s book in 1581xxiv—and to take care of a few matters before traveling on to Germany and Italy? We can suppose that during a brief stay in Paris, Montaigne deposited with the Paris printer a corrected and slightly revised version of his translation of Sebond. His name appears prominently on the title page with all his titles “messire Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne, Chevalier de l’ordre du Roy, et Gentil-homme ordinaire de sa chambre.” We note that the order of his titles is identical to that on the title page of the 1580 edition of the Essais, which allows us to infer that Gourbin copied the title from a copy of the 1580 Essais received from the author during the summer of the same year. Montaigne thus doubled his bet: his titles were now disseminated on two different works.
If he did stop off in Paris, Montaigne took the risk of being exposed to the epidemic that left 120,000 people dead, according to François de Syrueilh.129 No doubt he chose another way of transmitting his books without having to stay in the capital. His travel journal tells us nothing about this, because the secretary, probably hired in Paris, wrote nothing before Beaumont-sur-Oise, to which Montaigne made a detour to visit before leaving to rejoin the party of Charles d’Estissac. Charles d’Estissac was the son of the late Louis de Madaillan d’Estissac,130 a powerful lord in Guyenne who had been the Dauphin’s panetier (an official responsible for distributing bread) before becoming the governor of La Rochelle and then lieutenant general in Poitou.xxv
The Madaillan d’Estissacs were among the oldest families in Guyenne. Montaigne had dedicated to Madame d’Estissacxxvi the chapter of his Essais titled “Of the affection of fathers for their children” (II: 8).131 His family origins gave the young d’Estissac precedence over Montaigne. He carried with him letters of recommendation from Henry III and Catherine de Medici that he was to deliver to Alfonso d’Este, the second of that name, duke of Ferrara, of Modena, and of Reggio since 1558.132 The content of these letters shows that the young d’Estissac’s trip was not an ordinary one. Henry III presents him as “worthy of continuing the service” that his predecessors “have always formerly performed for this kingdom”; Catherine speaks of the reciprocity of good procedures. These two letters were written in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés on August 27 and 29. Although he was still very young, it is likely that d’Estissac had been entrusted with delivering letters of instruction. The fact that he traveled with Montaigne shows that these two men were probably on a mission.
Montaigne’s secretary does not mention Cazalis at first, but he names him in his account of an excursion to Lake Garda on October 30. The husband of Montaigne’s sister Marie, Bertrand de Cazalis, lord of Frayche, was a widower. There remain, however, certain doubts regarding the identity of this Cazalis who accompanied Montaigne as far as Padua, where he stayed to study at the university. Some have argued that he might be Bernard de Cazalis, the husband of Margaret Blanc de Séguin, rather than Bertrand de Cazalis.133 However, several bits of evidence connect Bertrand de Cazalis with Montaigne’s party, especially when Montaigne rented three horses for Cazalis, Mattecoulon, and himself, while d’Estissac rented two horses for himself and the lord du Hautoy. If it had been Bernard de Cazalis, Montaigne probably would not have rented a horse for him. As for Du Hautoy, he seems to have joined the travelers already en route to Italy. He will also be received by the pope during the French travelers’ audience in Rome. Between Bar-le-Duc and Neufchâteau, the group passed close to Du Hautoy’s lands,134 perhaps to allow him to make a quick stop there. Montaigne was leaving France to go to Rome.
i Michel Sonnius, Gilles Gourbin, and Guillaume Chaudière for the Theologia naturalis, and Federic Morel for La Boétie’s Mesnagerie de Xenophon and Vers françois.
ii The noun “Essais” was preceded by a definite article (Les Essais) only after Montaigne’s death. The posthumous edition of the Essais produced by Marie de Gournay in 1595 included this article for the first time; it is found in all the later editions throughout the seventeenth century. The edition published in Lyon by Gabriel La Grange (1593) uses the title Livre des Essais. The pirated edition published “in Lyon” (Geneva) in 1595 by François Le Febvre also introduces the definite article (Les Essais).
iii It was at the request of Sir Edward Wotton that John Florio undertook, in 1595, the translation of a single chapter of the Essais, “Of the education of children,” on the basis of the 1588 edition published by Abel L’Angelier, which implies that Florio had not yet received the posthumous edition of the Essais when he conceived the project of putting Montaigne into English. He completed his first draft while he was residing at the home of the Countess of Bedford, who encouraged him to continue his translation of the Essais.
iv Blaise de Monluc (1502–1577) fought through all the wars of Francis I. During the religious wars, he held Guyenne for the king and against the Protestants. He became marshal of France in 1574. His Commentaires were first published in 1592. Montaigne met several times with the marshal and evokes him in his Essais.
v François de La Noue (1531–1591) embraced the Protestant cause and fought alongside Henry of Navarre. Montaigne speaks eloquently of La Noue in his Essais and probably read his Discours politiques et militaires (1587).
vi A collection of poems or adages; a miscellany. [Trans.]
vii A pejorative term the Protestants used to describe the religious doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.
viii Deborah Losse (Montaigne and Brief Narrative Form: Shaping the Essay. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) has shown how the growing political disturbances during the Wars of Religion led Montaigne to distinguish himself from the conventional forms of exemplary narratives to develop a style in which detailed ethnographic observations and the contingent occupied a primordial place.
ix Avertissement. The French word means “notice” or “foreword” and “warning.” [Trans.]
x In the 1580 edition, this reads: “Je me fusse paré de beautez empruntées, ou me fusse tendu et bandé en ma meilleure démarche.” [Trans.]
xi The place occupied by Montaigne’s various titles on the title page did not allow Millanges to put his printer’s mark on it, and that is why it appeared only on the title page of the second book of the Essais. The mark was replaced by a smaller fleuron with arabesques. We find the same fleuron in several works published by Millanges as early as 1573 (in the Epigrammata of Martial Monier [1573] and the De rheumatismo of Pierre Pichot [1577], for example). This fleuron was used again in the 1582 edition of the Essais.
xii Usually known in English as Margaret of France, or as “Queen Margot.” She was the daughter of Henry II and Catherine de Medici and the wife of Henry of Navarre. [Trans.]
xiii A French translation of Sebond’s Liber creaturarum had already been published in 1519. Montaigne seems not to have known this work. However, it is less certain that he was unaware of the abridged translation of Sebond’s book, better known under the title of Viola animae, made by Jean Martin in 1551 and republished by Vascosan in 1565 and 1566.
xiv All the other names mentioned in a chapter title belong to Greek or Roman Antiquity: Cato, Cicero, Democritus, Heraclitus, Julius Caesar, Virgil, Seneca, Plutarch, and Spurina.
xv Index Auctorum et Librorum, qui ab officio S. Rom. & uniuersalis inquisitionis caueri ab omnibus & singulis in uniuersa Christiana Republica mandantur, sub censuris contra legentes, vel tenentes libros prohibitos in bulla, quae lecta est in coena Domini, expressis & sub aliis poenis in de creto eiusdem sacri officii contentis. Rome: ex officina Salviana, XV. Mens. Feb. 1559. As we will see, in 1581, the Roman censors notified Montaigne that Sebond’s prologue had been condemned. An expurgated Latin version of the prologue was published without difficulty in Venice in 1581. Sebond’s “Prologue” was removed from the Index only in the nineteenth century.
xvi When the Théologie naturelle was reprinted, Montaigne was already in Italy. It is dated September 22, 1581. Montaigne had just left the baths at Villa to go to Rome.
xvii This copy is now in the hands of a private collector.
xviii At the end of the 1570s, François d’Amboise signed his poems using the title “Advocate at the Court.” See for example his poem in Pierre de Larivey’s book, L’Institution morale du Seigneur Alexandre Piccolomini, published in Paris by Abel L’Angelier in 1581.
xix In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argues that Protestantism represents the triumph of reason over the irrationality of Catholic dogma. Lamennais did not hesitate to assert that “Protestantism is ultimately only a kind of spiritual idolatry in which man, after having made a god of his reason, consecrates and adores all his thoughts just as the pagan consecrated and adored his passions” (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, in Œuvres complètes. Paris: 1836–37, vol. III, p. 124).
xx Pierre Bunel died in Turin in 1546.
xxi A contract signed by Simon Millanges and Pierre Charron, dated May 10, 1601, allows us to form an idea of the Bordeaux publisher’s commercial practices with regard to his authors: “in addition, it was agreed that for each printing and new edition of the said works the said Millanges will be expected to provide the following to the said lord of Charron: for the first printing, fifty copies, and, for each of the others, thirty, part of the whole bound and part unbound” (see J. N. Dast Le Vacher de Boisville, “Simon Millanges, imprimeur à Bordeaux de 1572 à 1623.” Bulletin historique et philologique du comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1896, 792–93). It was not unusual for an author to receive a number of copies that he could then distribute to his friends and to people who could help him professionally. The first edition of the Essais in 1580 was thus supposed to permit Montaigne himself to see to the distribution of his book to readers selected in relation to precise expectations.
xxii Since 1564, Catherine de Medici had usually spent part of the summer at the château of Saint-Maur. Thus in 1566 she resided there from May 10 to May 31, from June 18 to June 30, and from November 8 to November 27; in 1567 from May 11 to May 21; in 1568, from September 2 to September 30; in 1580, from June 19 to June 24, and then from July 1 to July 30 and from August 2 to August 29; in 1581, she resided there from June 23 to June 29, and from July 11 to July 31; in 1582, from June 12 to June 18 and from September 4 to September 30. Thus her stay at Saint-Maur in 1580 was by far the longest (more than two and a half months).
xxiii Charles d’Estissac died tragically in a duel in March 1586. Six young gentlemen (the eldest was only twenty-five) had met at dawn to settle “a very slight quarrel”—as Pierre de L’Étoile put it—that had occurred the preceding day. Charles de Gontaut-Biron, the marshal’s son, had brought with him François de Montpezat, lord of Laugnac, and Bertrand de Pierre-Buffière, baron of Génissac, as witnesses. In the other party, Claude de Peyrusse d’Escars, prince of Carency, had d’Estissac and La Bastie as his seconds. The six duelists threw themselves on each other and d’Estissac, La Bastie, and Carency ended up losing their lives. This story was widely discussed at the time and we find several accounts of this tragic day, notably in Brantôme’s Discours sur les duels, vol. VI, 315–16. In his turn, Montaigne had to get his youngest brother out of a jam (and out of prison) during a duel in Italy that was just as absurd. In his Essais, he remains very critical of the way in which duels were decimating the youth in the nobility of the sword.
xxiv Although the 1569 edition of the translation had gone almost unnoticed, Montaigne hoped to give more visibility to this new printing in Paris. It has been suggested that he made corrections on a copy of the 1569 edition that he took with him on his journey to Italy. This hypothesis is, however, not very plausible. The printing of the 1581 Théologie naturelle is dated September 22. If we assume that it took at least five months to produce the book, printing could not have begun before spring 1581. It is hard to imagine Montaigne sending a corrected copy from Italy without having previously come to an agreement with the publisher regarding the details of the printing (including the new title page).
xxv At the assembly of the nobility of the Agen region in March 1557, the contribution to be made by the lord d’Estissac was set at seven light horse. In a notice issued by Henry of Navarre to maintain order in Paris in 1560, we find the name of d’Estissac among the signatures, along with those of the Cardinal of Bourbon, the Cardinal of Guise, Montmorency, Saint-André, and Chavigny.
xxvi Madame d’Estissac (Louise de La Béraudière) has often been confused with one of her cousins, also named Louise de La Béraudière, but better known as “La Belle Rouet.”
