CHAPTER 8

“Messieurs of Bordeaux Elected Me Mayor of Their City” (1581–1585)

While he was still in Italy—on August 1, 1581—Montaigne was elected mayor of Bordeaux, apparently against his will: “Messieurs of Bordeaux elected me mayor of their city when I was far from France and still farther from such a thought. I excused myself, but I was informed that I was wrong, since the king’s command also figured in the matter.”1 He received the news on September 7, while he was staying at the baths of La Villa: “This same morning there came to hand, by way of Rome, a letter from M. de Tausin, written from Bordeaux on August 2nd, in which he informed me that, on the preceding day, I had been chosen to be mayor of that city by public choice, and begged me that, out of my goodwill for the city, I would take up this burden.”² Montaigne had been expecting a quite different kind of appointment. On September 1, he had written in his journal: “if I had received from France the news for which I had been waiting—indeed for four months I had heard nothing at all—I should have set forth at once.”³ It was therefore not for pleasure that he spent several months traveling in Italy and sojourning at different baths. In fact, he had been waiting for news from the royal Court since April, when he learned that he would not be ambassador in Rome. Had the king hinted at the possibility of another diplomatic post for him in Italy? Probably. That would explain Montaigne’s decision to remain in the country after his departure from Rome. He did not leave the baths at La Villa until five days later, on September 12, when he went to Lucca, where he attended the Sainte-Croix festival and the ceremony of the changing of the city’s gonfalonieri (high magistrates) before leaving for Rome a week later. He dawdled along the way, and it was only on October 1, when he finally arrived in Rome, that he learned of the letter from the jurats of Bordeaux informing him of his election and urging him to return as soon as possible.⁴

Montaigne’s election as mayor of Bordeaux must be seen as a political compromise that was made at his expense. The possibility of serving the city was probably never mentioned to him. The political situation had developed in an unfavorable direction and Biron was no longer desirable in the city. He had become estranged from Henry of Navarre and no longer enjoyed Catherine de Medici’s support. The king had decided to get rid of him, and it was more urgent than ever to replace him with a strongman. Montaigne did not have the political weight necessary to govern Guyenne and had no military experience. On the other hand, over the generations the Eyquems had retained a good reputation as managers of the city. In the view of various local powers and the Bordeaux élites, the mayor could not come from another region, and the king already had enough problems with the parlement of Bordeaux without proposing such a choice. He balked at the idea of appointing a man who had not lived in Bordeaux, at least for a time, and decided to divide the two functions normally performed by the mayor: the mayor of Bordeaux and the governor of Guyenne. These two titles would be separated and the functions associated with them performed by two different men.

The king was opposed to the nomination of a mayor who came from the milieu of the robins. In a letter to the parlement of Bordeaux dated July 2, 1577, he had asked the councillors to overcome their differences so that “without anyone of the long robe being able to intervene, an honorable gentleman of the short robei might be elected mayor of this city of Bordeaux.”⁵ Here we can see Henry III’s problem in early 1581. If the governor could come from another province—and that was the case for Marshal Matignon—there was no question of choosing a mayor who would not be familiar with the political networks that had developed among the great Bordeaux families. Confronted by the overt resistance of the robins in the parlement of Bordeaux, the king was determined to remove them from the administration of the city, but he had to find a man who could stand up to them. The city’s statutes did not explicitly stipulate that the mayor had to be a member of the nobility, but the king had already expressed this wish on July 11, 1577, when in a letter to the Bordeaux parlement he asked that the person elected mayor of Bordeaux not be, “nor ever again hereafter, anyone of the long robe.”⁶ In late summer 1581, after a short hesitation and a preliminary agreement with the queen mother, the king finally made up his mind: the governor would be Matignon and the mayor Montaigne. The mayor’s political power was thus weakened and Henry III would rely chiefly on Matignon to reestablish order in Aquitaine.

Far from being enthusiastic about this news, Montaigne did not hasten to return to France. He preferred to visit the baths of Diocletian at Monte Cavallo, and two days later, at the invitation of Paul de Foix, who was now the French ambassador to Rome, he went to see, in the suburbs of Rome, the furniture and other objects of interest that had belonged to Cardinal Ursino. Montaigne admired a bed covering made of taffeta and stuffed with swan feathers, and described an ostrich egg that was carved and painted with great skill. On his way back, at Marignan, he went fifteen kilometers out of his way in order to visit Pavia. Service to his city seemed far from his immediate concerns.

He finally left for Bordeaux on October 15. A good horseman—and Montaigne was one—even with baggage, could travel as far as ninety kilometers a day; fast couriers managed to ride as many as 170 or even 200 kilometers a day. In the chapter “Of coaches,” Montaigne says he had learned to ride all day “in the Spanish fashion,” that is, without stopping. The distance from Rome to Bordeaux being about 1,500 kilometers, the journey should have taken him about twenty-five days—at an average of sixty kilometers a day with trunks and baggage. Montaigne took forty-five days to get home, that is twice as long as an average horseman.7 The itinerary he chose for returning to Bordeaux was not the shortest: he crossed the Mont Cénis pass and arrived in Chambéry, but instead of proceeding directly to Lyon—the most direct route and the normal itinerary, which passed through Pont-en-Beauvoisin—Montaigne made another detour via the Lac du Bourget. He may have chosen this route, which took him across the Rhône near Yenne, to meet Francesco Cenami,⁸ a banker in Lyon who had retired to this small village, and who made him “several very generous compliments” during his passage through the region.⁹ He also bought new horses in Lyon and a mule in Limoges.

Montaigne had left his young brother, the lord of Mattecoulon, in Italy. Mattecoulon planned to study fencing with famous teachers and had decided to remain in Rome a little longer. Montaigne had left him forty-three crowns to cover his expenses. Being quarrelsome in temperament and carried away by his youthful ardor, Mattecoulon had the bad idea of putting his fencing lessons into practice. He was arrested for having fought a duel and spent some time in a Roman jail for serving as a second to Esparezat, a Gascon gentleman, in a duel with Louis de Saligny, baron of Rousset, seconded by La Villate. During this duel, Rousset and La Villate were killed, and Montaigne’s brother was once again in serious trouble. After several efforts were made, Mattecoulon was finally freed after the king intervened directly, surely at Montaigne’s request.¹⁰

As Montaigne indicates in his almanac, it was only on November 30 that he arrived at his château, after an absence of seventeen months and eight days. The new mayor was in no hurry to take up his functions, and he was reminded of his obligations. A threatening letter from Henry III, dated November 25, was waiting for Montaigne when he arrived home. Quite irritated by this delay, the king openly scolded him and ordered him to assume his municipal functions “without delay or excuse”:

Monsieur de Montaigne, because I have great esteem for your fidelity and zealous devotion to my service, I was pleased to hear of your election as mayor of my city of Bordeaux, having found very pleasant and having confirmed the aforesaid election and all the more willingly because it was made without intrigue and when you were far away. On the occasion of which it is my intention, and I order and enjoin you very expressly, that you return, without delay or excuse, as soon as the present letter is delivered to you, to do the duty and service of the office to which you have so legitimately been called. And you shall do something that will be very pleasing to me, and the contrary would displease me greatly.11

It is always smart to play hard to get, and at this time it was not rare for a politician to refuse an office offered him by the king. For example, Henri de Mesmes was quite proud of having had to be ordered twice to join the king’s Council.¹² Montaigne could not refuse to serve Henry III, because this letter was an order, but he did express his reluctance—and probably his displeasure at not being named ambassador—by dragging his feet and making the king wait.

At odds with the parlement, the king was counting on Matignon to establish his authority in Guyenne. Montaigne was part of this strategy of moving closer to the municipal authorities, but the parlement continued to meddle in the city’s affairs. Thus, on November 21, the parlement had designated Richard de Lestonnac and Florimond de Raemond to attend the deliberations of the jurats at the city hall¹³ regarding the implementation of the royal edicts. Montaigne had not yet taken up his functions, and the king was impatient to see him defend his point of view and represent his interests. On December 4, the king’s general prosecutor tried to get the parlement to register the letters patent concerning Matignon’s power “in order to complete the edict of pacification in this country of Guyenne, begging the Court to decide that it will register its Registers in accord with the king’s will.”¹⁴ In no hurry to recognize Matignon as governor of Guyenne, the members of the parlement once again delayed the registration of his letters patent, claiming that the letters patent could not be presented by the king’s prosecutor, but only by Matignon himself. These quibbles served chiefly to assert the parlement’s autonomy and to remind the king that nothing would happen in Bordeaux without prior consultation with the members of parlement, who retained the right of inspection concerning the city’s affairs and were constantly preoccupied with their honor and their authority. Montaigne thus began his first term in a climate of mutual distrust.

Four months late, the “elected” mayor finally took the oath of office in the church of Saint André in Bordeaux. In the presence of the people, Montaigne swore on the Bible and relics that he would “uphold the customs, ways, statutes, privileges, and liberties of the aforesaid city and its commune.”¹⁵ He had hardly taken up his office before he returned to his estate. He continued to take his task lightly and seemed in no hurry to get to work in early 1582. Putting the finishing touches on a new edition of the Essais, he spent most of his time in his château and seldom appeared in Bordeaux. He did the minimum, and the jurats of the city reproached him for his repeated absences and dilettantism. To respond to the critics who were already making themselves heard, Montaigne addressed these remarks to the jurats: “I beg you to excuse a little longer my absence, which I shall no doubt abbreviate as much as the burden of my affairs may permit. I hope that it will be short. However, you will keep me, please, in your good graces and command me, should the occasion present itself, to act on behalf of the public welfare.”16 The tone of this letter is sufficiently explicit. Montaigne was courteous and reverential, but he had other priorities. He claimed to be dealing with a few private and family matters, but perhaps he was also already thinking about his reelection at the end of July 1583.

Montaigne’s public career in Aquitaine officially began in 1581, but his civic service had unfortunately put an end to other ambitions that were just as political and corresponded more to his aspirations. His election as mayor of Bordeaux in 1581 did not match his expectations at the time; instead, it was the result of particular circumstances and a political strategy worked out by those who had facilitated his rapid ascension in the entourage of Henry III and at the king’s Court. Moreover, Montaigne had not even been consulted in the matter. The decision to have him “elected” mayor of Bordeaux was made during meetings at Fleix, that is, in his neighbor’s château, in November 1580, almost three months after his departure for Italy. Montaigne seems not to have been informed of this political choice before he was elected. It is probable that he owed his election to the marquis of Trans, who had sponsored him and presented him at the Court.

Back on his estate, Montaigne became aware of the role that he was being asked to play on the regional political chessboard. Flattered, but not enthusiastic, he entered public life hesitantly, initially invoking the necessity of settling his private affairs. Of course, such a long stay abroad required particular attention to the economy of his household, but after the slow return from Italy, this absence of six months (from December 1581 to late May 1582) at the beginning of his first term as mayor of Bordeaux is explained mainly by the preparation of the second edition of the Essais for printing by his publisher, Simon Millanges.

The Mayor’s Book

Montaigne’s election as mayor of Bordeaux suddenly thrust him onto the political stage where Henry III was opposed by the king of Navarre in Aquitaine. In this context the first Essais of 1580 took on a public dimension, because their author was now mayor of Bordeaux. Simon Millanges saw in this development an opportunity at a time (early 1582) when he seems not to have been swamped with work, contrary to what was the case in late 1579 and early 1580. In 1582, Millanges printed mainly leaflets. In addition to the Essais, the inventory of his publications for that year is the following: a new edition of Pierre de Brach’s poems; Decreta Concilii provincialis Burdigalae; Edicts du Roy (12 f.); Edict du Roy sur la reformation du calendrier ecclésiastique (4 f.); Lettres du Roy pour l’Establissement de la Cour de la Justice en ses pays et duché de Guyenne (4 f.), Pomponii Melae de situ orbis libri tres (61 p. and 13 f.); and Hieracasophioy sive de verratione per accipitres libri duo de Jacques-Auguste de Thou (published anonymously)17 (less than 60 f.). When we add up the pages Millanges printed in 1582—with the exception of Montaigne’s Essais—we arrive at a very low number. He had very few books in the pipeline and the reprinting of the Essais was the only important project he had for 1582. That is why it is likely that Millanges suggested, or at least encouraged, the publication of the 1582 text. The plan for a corrected edition of the Essais was conceived after Montaigne’s return to Bordeaux. This scenario allows us to explain several particularities relative to this edition of 1582. If in fact Montaigne had made corrections and additions during his trip to Italy, we would have more remarks concerning his experiences on the other side of the Alps. For instance, the travel journal testifies to the richness of his encounters and his observations during his absence of seventeen months. If he took notes—in particular after his first sojourn in Rome—Montaigne included very few of them in the 1582 edition. This latest version of the Essais was prepared with a rapidity that is explained by the jurats’ repeated urging that he assume his functions as soon as possible. Montaigne hastily produced a new edition on the cheap by correcting typographical errors in the text of 1580 and sprinkling it with a few Italianizing references.

If the 1580 edition was addressed to a royal audience and must be considered a private edition whose goal was to make its author known to a small group of influential people (which is not so different from the medieval model, in which the only thing that mattered was the personalized presentation of the book to the king, a prince or a patron), the 1582 edition was governed by a very different logic. The reprinting of the Essais during Montaigne’s term as mayor served the publisher as much as it did the author, and for that reason it must be related to Montaigne’s entrance into politics. Even enlarged, his audience nonetheless remained local or regional, and the publication sought mainly to confirm Montaigne’s political power while at the same time stressing his membership in the nobility. In 1582 Montaigne had become a public man.¹⁸ The reprinting of the Essais in 1582 is an excellent example of the political use to which his book could be put. In fact, it is not certain that in 1581, when he had just returned from Italy to take up his functions as mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne intended to publish a new edition of his Essais so rapidly. What did he have to add, after all? In fact, very little. He did not have time to expand significantly the book he had published just before his departure, but his election as mayor of Bordeaux now made him a public man who had suddenly been projected onto the regional political scene. Simon Millanges was well aware of how he could make use of the notoriety acquired by one of his authors.

In 1582, François Grudé, lord of La Croix du Maine, had conceived the project of a dictionary of contemporary authors; it was a general catalog of all sorts of authors (those are the words used in the title: toutes sortes d’auteurs) who had written in the French language over the past five centuries. According a privileged place to the authors of his own time, La Croix du Maine drew up brief biobibliographies of more than three thousand writers in French in order to produce a general catalog of authors who had published books of their own or translations. After spending fourteen years in researching and compiling all kinds of biographical information, he had moved to Paris in May 1582 in order to receive authors at his home there. He acknowledged having obtained “notices or memoranda” from numerous authors who transmitted information about their lives to him directly. We can imagine that Montaigne was one of them, since the entry for “Montaigne” in the dictionary gives details that only the author or a member of his family could know.19

The article on Montaigne in La Croix du Maine’s Bibliothèque française allows us to see how Montaigne presented himself to the public in the 1580s. The biographical part of the article begins with the author’s titles, which are identical to those presented on the title page of the 1582 edition of the Essais. Then we learn that Montaigne was “initially” a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux, and then, after the death of his elder brother, he “abandoned that estate in order to follow [that of] arms.” However, so far as we know, Montaigne had no elder brother. According to this first biography, Montaigne is supposed to have left the parlement for a simple family reason, to concern himself with the noble lands of his ancestors. This invented brother of Montaigne’s allowed him to explain easily his resignation as a member of parlement and to find a more honorable justification for his failure in that profession. Such an ideal biography made necessary his condition as a gentleman replacing an elder brother who had died prematurely. The expression “to follow arms” (suyvre les armes) used by La Croix du Maine (or by Montaigne) is clearly an exaggeration, since Montaigne did not participate in any battle, the siege of La Fère being the only time he was close to a battlefield. From a literary point of view, La Croix du Maine noted in Montaigne “his great learning and marvelous judgment” as well as the number and diversity of the authors he had read. According to La Croix du Maine (or more probably his source), “this work has been well received by all men of letters,” but he also mentions that he had heard that there are some who “do not sufficiently praise this book of Essais, and do not attach as much importance to it as it deserves.” However, this book is “very recommendable” for the education of anyone, because of “other very remarkable things that are included in it,” though La Croix du Maine does not provide any further details.

La Croix du Maine associated the Essais with a kind of biography, “because this book contains nothing other than an ample statement of the life of the said lord of Montaigne, and each chapter contains a part of it.” The confusion of the man and the work was deliberately maintained by the printers who anticipated—as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century—the public’s taste for particular biographies. The silly project of portraying oneself, to adopt Pascal’s formula, corresponded to an expectation on the part of readers at a time when portraits of famous men constituted a fashionable genre.20 The title of the book includes its author’s name: Essais de Michel, seigneur de Montaigne. How can a book on Michel, lord of Montaigne be read without learning when he was born, what education he received, what his occupation was, and under what circumstances he died? The life of Montaigne established itself very early on as a tool that could help the reader forge an opinion regarding the commentaries and judgments presented in each chapter of the Essais.

The second edition of the Essais was undoubtedly a commercial operation cooked up by Millanges. The author made very few changes to the text and only a few Italian quotations were added. The Au lecteur was recomposed by the printer for the occasion, but it remained fundamentally unchanged. We note only a few spelling corrections, probably made in the printer’s workshop: entrée replaces antrée, ils replaces ilz, moyen replaces moien, and connoissance replaces coignoissance. The most notable difference is the capital letter on the word Lecteur (Reader), which was to be retained in the 1588 and 1595 editions. Montaigne’s reader had changed, and he was aware of that fact. He had not received the diplomatic post he had been counting on, and he now had a political responsibility in Bordeaux. Having arrived very belatedly to take up his functions, he had hardly had time to revise his text. Nonetheless, the Au lecteur remains as equivocal as it was in 1580, despite a completely different context of publication. This probably did not displease Montaigne. What did he have to add? He had not received the desired post and a consolation prize had been proposed to him—or rather, imposed on him—as compensation. Montaigne was mayor because he had not been named ambassador. Keeping the same Au lecteur could then be considered (by him) as a reminder of a promise that had not been kept. Not changing the preface to his book offered him an opportunity to reassert an unsatisfied political ambition that acquiring a municipal office had not impaired. Montaigne projected the image of an editorial coherence that the vicissitudes of politics could not shake.

The preface to the reader (who in 1582 was no longer necessarily the king) could remain as it was. Montaigne’s election as mayor of Bordeaux made him a political man who had suddenly been propelled into the heart of the religious conflict dividing France. His publisher understood the advantage to be derived from the recent notoriety of one of his authors. He could count on an audience that was better defined than it was in 1580 and present his author as “Mayor and governor of Bordeaux” (figure 13). The Essais belonged to him by privilege, and it could reach a public unhoped for two years earlier. The minimal additions to the 1582 edition served to create the illusion of an “augmented” or “corrected” edition, but they did not result from any true work on Montaigne’s part;²¹ the additions from 1582 included only eight Italian quotations, eight Latin quotations, one Latin quotation translated into Italian, and thirty-four new passages of at least two lines each. On the whole, few changes. It is impossible to assert with certainty that Montaigne made these additions on a 1580 copy of the Essais that he had carried along with him to Italy. It seems more likely that he made these few additions after his return from Italy and at Millanges’s request. They are very few for a stay abroad that lasted almost fifteen months.ⁱⁱ

FIGURE 13. Second edition of the Essais, 1582 (private collection).

The 1580 and 1582 editions of the Essais were thus addressed to different readers. The first was addressed to a familial and royal audience, while the second was addressed to a more local audience in the area of Bordeaux and Périgord. Although it had not succeeded in launching its author’s career in diplomacy, the Essais of 1580 had still made it easier to obtain an important political office (as mayor), whereas the 1582 edition was conceived with a twofold objective: first as a commercial operation for Millanges but also as a way of making Montaigne’s name better and more widely known in the region. This objective was connected with political propaganda. Millanges hoped to capitalize on his closeness to the mayor and benefit from his situation as a bookseller in Bordeaux. He had the necessary support in the city to publicize the mayor’s book, and also to assert a claim to receive new printing contracts from the city. He enjoyed a monopoly on the books of ordinances, customs, and other texts relating to the administration of the city, and he also printed a large number of school textbooks for the College of Guyenne, which was also under the control of the mayor and the jurats. For example, in June 1582 the Chamber of Justice of Guyenne ordered that Simon Millanges be paid “cinq escus d’or sol deux tiers d’escus trois sols tournois” for having provided the court with two volumes of Ordinances along with the Coustumes de Guyenne and the Edicts de pacification.22 Montaigne’s election as mayor of Bordeaux was a genuine windfall for Millanges, who had one of his authors as leader of the city. By reprinting the mayor’s book, he almost did the city and the region a favor, and publicly reaffirmed his friendship with one of his authors. It is useful to be well acquainted with the people who govern you; that could have been the printer-bookseller’s motto. The name of Montaigne, along with his titles and functions printed on the title page, made it possible to increase the number of readers of a book that portrayed the mayor.

However, we must not exaggerate the success of this second edition, which seems to have had a relatively limited print run. It has been claimed that Montaigne’s book had a national distribution as early as 1580 and 1582, but this view seems exaggerated, even if a catalog of booksellers in Augsburg—Hans Georg Portenbach and Tobias Lutzen—shows that the Essais was for sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the autumn of 1581.²³ It seems more likely that the 1582 edition was aimed at a local audience and that it was mainly in Guyenne that Millanges hoped to sell copies of the second edition of the Essais. After seventeen months outside of Bordeaux and Guyenne—fifteen of them outside France—the name of Montaigne was far from being on everyone’s lips at the time of his return from Italy.

We must also consider the way in which the reprinting of the Essais in 1582 might have played an important role in the presentation of the mayor, not only to those he administered but also to the Bordeaux nobility. In fact, in the context of the election to the mayor’s office in Bordeaux, the Essais of 1582 might have allowed Montaigne to shape his political image and confirm his independence of mind. Theological questions were now relegated to the background; the book had suddenly recovered a more secular and civil flavor, that it had in fact always had.

Driven by down-to-earth considerations, Montaigne did not take into account the oral “censure” and the reproaches that had been addressed to him regarding his book during his stay in Rome. He did not delete any reference to Fortune in the 1582 edition, even though we have proof that he reread attentively the passages found objectionable. At the end of the fourth chapter of Book I (“How the soul discharges its passions on false objects when the true are wanting”), he changed “d’autant que l’impieté y est jointe, qui s’en adressent a Dieu mesmes a belles injures, ou la fortune, comme si elle avoit des oreilles sujectes a nostre batterie” (1580) to read “ou à la fortune,” adding the preposition à before fortune, thus correcting what he saw as a syntactical error, but he did not eliminate the reference to Fortune. The same thing happens at the end of chapter 12: “et est bien plus aisé a croire que la fortune ait ja favorisé” (1580). Here, Montaigne changes the tense of the verb that accompanies the word “Fortune”: “a croire que la fortune favorisa.” These examples show that Montaigne reread the passages in which the pagan goddess is mentioned but did not eliminate or modify them. So let us take literally what he says when he refrains from following the recommendations of others: “I flee command, obligation, and constraint. What I do easily and naturally, I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command.”24 Attentive to others, Montaigne was nonetheless determined to act in accord with his own interests and convictions, often rejecting any pragmatic consideration connected with specific situations or events.

Montaigne resolutely situated himself in the humanist tradition and found it difficult to put up with the practical political questions that arose in his everyday work as mayor. In this sense, his term as mayor of Bordeaux permitted him to test the limits of politics when it amounts to simple governance. By repeating his attachment to the humanist tradition (with its obligatory dose of ancient paganism), the author of the Essais does not, however, distance himself from the Catholic religion. He simply dissociates literary license and religious faith.²⁵ In many another passage of the Essais, Montaigne insists on this essential distinction. But as we have suggested, the “noncorrections” in the 1582 edition of the Essais may also indicate that he did not have time to undertake major textual revisions. The most flagrant example of these rapid clarifications occurs at the beginning of the chapter “Of prayers,” whose title was likely to attract his contemporaries’ attention, as is shown by the suggestions and reproaches made by the Roman censors. Montaigne decided to take the initiative by cleaning up the somewhat controversial content of this chapter with as little loss as possible. Adding a clarification in the form of a preamble, he attenuated passages that might be judged philosophical or didactic by presenting his ideas as personal, unresolved “notions”:

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it. And I submit them to the judgment of those whose concern it is to regulate not only my actions and my writings, but even my thoughts. Equally acceptable and useful to me will be condemnation or approval. And therefore, always submitting to the authority of their censure, which has absolute power over me, I meddle rashly with every sort of subject, as I do here.26

This passage, added as an introduction to the chapter “Of prayers” in 1582, expresses an attempt at temporization and submission, but it also allows us to glimpse a “bolder” kind of writing. At the risk of overinterpretation, modern readers, at least, might nonetheless see in it a mark of literary temerity. Montaigne distances himself from the debates that were raging in his time and chooses to rise above the battle—or at least that is what he hopes to do. But it is not clear that this kind of temerity was intentional on Montaigne’s part. On the other hand, the clarification carried out in these few lines does considerably attenuate the rest of the chapter, which it qualifies and defangs. With this addition, Montaigne seeks to reassert the instability of his judgment and especially his political and religious submission to those who “regulate” his actions, his writings, and even his thoughts. Thus we see appear a first trace of distancing between his ideas on political and religious questions and their shaping in the Essais. The two are not necessarily identical.

The preliminary discourse in the chapter “Of prayers” also sheds light on the corrective work he did in early 1582. Rather than revise a whole chapter in order to attenuate its import, Montaigne decided to defuse the explosive content that follows these lines, which are more literary than political. In this literary “paratext,” Montaigne distances himself from the events of his time. His “formless and unresolved notions” are nothing more than that and must not be confused with a mark of commitment to a particular denomination. Montaigne submits to the authority of the Church, but did not have time to modify his text in detail to follow the recommendations of the censors. He repeats on several occasions that he is a good Catholic and reasserts elsewhere that he adheres to “the ancient beliefs of our religion, in the midst of so many sects and divisions that our century has produced.”27 These amplified passages allow the 1582 edition of the Essais to appear more Catholic than that of 1580.²⁸

The political context of Montaigne’s appointment as the mayor of Bordeaux also required him to tone down the political passages that might attract attention in this time of religious troubles. Montaigne was now a public figure, and his Essais were inevitably going to be subjected to an examination that he could not have foreseen for the 1580 edition. His audience had escaped him by the simple fact of the religious divisions, and Montaigne needed to warn it against drawing any abusive conclusions. That is how the opening of the chapter “Of prayers” must be read. Montaigne was not yet operating in the logic of “extensions” that we find later on; he had to move quickly to reprint his Essais as soon as possible. Everything suggests that the “Catholic reframing” of the chapter “Of prayers” was carried out rapidly when the 1582 edition was being prepared, that is, between December 1581 and March 1582. Montaigne’s book had become a public work and was liable to be read by potential political or religious detractors.

The corrected edition of the Essais supplanted the preceding edition, because Montaigne kept the same title for his work. The Essais of the period when Montaigne was mayor is thus a revised edition rather than a new work. This kind of amendment of the 1580 text had a considerable political function, because Montaigne could no longer be attacked for an earlier text. The 1582 printing brought his thought up to date, or at least gave that impression. The rapid clarifications in the 1582 edition must therefore be interpreted in the light of his election as mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne accepted a few remarks that had been addressed to him, cites a few Italian authors, and recalls various specific events of his sojourn in Italy.²⁹ The quotations drawn from Dante, Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversatione, and Benedetto Varchi’s Ercolano make it possible to speak of a new book. The same goes for the quotations from Petrarch and an Italian translation of Propertius that seems to come from Guazzo. So far as the quotations from Tasso are concerned, though there is no trace of them in the travel journal, Montaigne was marked by his meeting with the Italian poet in Ferrara, which he describes in an addition in the 1582 edition: “I felt even more vexation than compassion to see him in Ferrara in so piteous a state, surviving himself, not recognizing himself or his works, which, without his knowledge and yet before his eyes, have been brought out uncorrected and shapeless.”³⁰ Montaigne uses the same technique of briefly reported impressions to describe the statues of Suetonius he saw in Rome; and we find it again in an anecdote about Henry III that tells us that the king never wore gloves and did not wear different clothes in the winter.

These additions give an Italian flavor to his book without for all that representing a major rewriting. Montaigne’s impressions of Italy were all drawn from a memory still fresh, and he had no need to refer to his travel journal to remember anecdotes from it. He also took advantage of the opportunity to revise his text to standardize the spelling and systematically correct (in rather distant passages) words written in different ways, such as arondes, corrected to read arondeles (modern French hirondelle, “swallow”). This hasty correction did not prevent the author from rereading his whole text to add a few details regarding Italian customs. The Turks customarily kiss on greeting one another, and in the 1582 edition Montaigne adds: “as the Venetians do.”31 Similarly, he comments on the rigor with which the common people are sometimes treated, and tells of having witnessed in Rome the execution by strangling of the famous thief Catena. The allusions to Italy are almost always based on personal experiences and refer to recent memories, but these “Italian commentaries” are not numerous and are always brief.³²

The second edition of the Essais published in 1582 should still be considered a political document rather than a literary work. Few changes were made in the text, and Montaigne limited himself to moderating certain questionable passages and sprinkling his book with Italian anecdotes and examples. However, he omitted one important event that occurred during his stay in Italy, because his acquisition of Roman citizenship is not reported. Not until the 1588 edition of the Essais did he reproduce the text of the bull according him this privilege. This remarkable absence testifies to Montaigne’s lack of time, between returning from Italy and taking up his functions as mayor of Bordeaux, to put together a new edition with major additions. It is likely that his election inspired Millanges, who was eager to print an enlarged edition of the Essais as soon as possible, to ask his author to provide one. Whatever one says about Montaigne’s corrections and additions, these alterations did not require strenuous work, and it was possible to make them in less than three months. Nonetheless, they allowed Millanges to specify that this edition had been “revised and enlarged” (revuë et augmentée), an effective bookseller’s trick.

Unfortunately, we know nothing about how many copies of the 1580 and 1582 editions were printed. In a list of 220 inventories of private libraries in Paris in the sixteenth century made after their owners’ deaths, we find Montaigne’s Essais in only six of them: those of Pierre Cabat, a bookseller (1598); Claude Cousin, the wife of Nicolas Millot, doctor-regent of the Paris faculty of medicine (1597); Jean Labas, a councillor (1585); Pierre Le Sannoys, a bookseller and bookbinder (1583); Pierre de Sayvre, a magistrate (1589); Charlotte Teste, the wife of J. Chevalier, a prosecutor at the Châtelet (1586). It is however difficult to compare this list with that for other authors of the Renaissance. For example, we find thirteen occurrences for Rabelais’s books, twenty-three for Rondard, and ten for Du Bellay.33

The market for rare books (based on an inventory of sales catalogs over the past century and a half) may tell us more than the holdings of public collections,³⁴ and leads us to think that the print run for the 1582 edition of the Essais was about the same as that for the 1580 edition, maybe slightly more. This edition of a revised text ultimately shows the interest for Millanges, as much as for Montaigne, of a less inaccurate publication. It was likely to help Millanges obtain further contracts with the city, and it displayed the author’s titles of mayor and governor of Bordeaux. Although Millanges had probably seen only a moderate interest in publishing the Essais in 1580, he now felt much more involved in what represented a commercial operation of an entirely different scope because of the recent public notoriety of his author.

Finally, if Montaigne did not change the title of his book, it was probably because this second edition was too close to the first. The Essais of 1582 is a reprinting, and Montaigne did not think it necessary to change the date of the preface Au lecteur. Despite the handful of additions written in 1582, after the return from Italy, neither the author nor the publisher considered the book sufficiently distinct from the 1580 edition to give it a different title. The objective of making Montaigne’s name better known in Bordeaux and in the surrounding region had been realized. The author of the Essais did not yet see himself as a full-fledged writer and launched into a career as a municipal administrator without even imagining that his book would one day appear in a third edition. Keeping the same title for his book of 1582 was not yet part of a literary strategy that was not clearly conceived until after 1585, when the Paris publisher Abel L’Angelier was to play an essential role in transforming Montaigne’s persona as an author. In 1582 Montaigne’s book was still profoundly marked by the political content of the first edition. However, without even thinking about it, Millanges and Montaigne had established—starting with the 1582 edition—a literary precedent that the author of the Essais would later turn to his advantage when changing his publisher. What was at first a publishing expedient later became an authorial strategy.

Bordeaux and Its Administration

It was only after the publication of the Essais of 1582, toward the end of the summer, that Montaigne finally familiarized himself with the issues facing the city of Bordeaux.35 He was already halfway through his term, which at that time was only two years. Without managerial experience—even though he had succeeded in increasing his family’s patrimony since the death of his father—he was about to confront various interest groups that were fighting tooth and nail for control of the city and its economic resources. Unfortunately, Bordeaux’s municipal archives no longer contain enough documents to evaluate with precision Montaigne’s work as mayor, and the registers of the jurade are lacking for this period. Thus it is difficult to form an exact idea of the mayor’s governance for the years 1581–85. However, other printed sources allow us to assess Montaigne’s work at the head of one of the largest cities in France. As mayor, he probably preferred to live in the home made available to him in the Rue des Ayres. During his stays in Bordeaux, Montaigne had the use of this house, the mairerie, which had served as the official residence of the mayor of Bordeaux and his family since the Middle Ages.36 Montaigne’s own house in the Rue de la Rousselle reminded his critics that his family belonged to the world of commerce, and the mayor had to display a way of life more appropriate to a member of the nobility. He had no difficulty in covering in a single day the forty-three kilometers that separated his château from the City Hall. It took him approximately four hours on horseback.

Montaigne received his political instructions directly from the king and from Matignon, the king’s lieutenant governor in Guyenne. His principal role—at least for the king who had had him “elected”—was to inform Matignon of what was going on in Bordeaux, a city that was still suspect in the eyes of the king’s government.³⁷ He fully assumed his responsibility as a political observer. As mayor of Bordeaux, he was in permanent contact with Matignon.³⁸ On October 30, 1582, Montaigne wrote to Matignon that nothing “new” had happened in the city. Two years later, when the end of his second term as mayor was approaching, he continued faithfully to submit his reports to Matignon: “The rest of the country remains quiet and there is nothing on the move.”³⁹ His correspondence with Matignon shows clearly that the mayor was following the orders of the lieutenant governor who was his superior.

Promoted to Marshal of France in 1579, Matignon had been sent to Guyenne after the peace of Fleix to replace Biron, who no longer enjoyed unanimous support in the region. Brantôme later said about Matignon that he “was as cold as the other [Biron] was hot.”⁴⁰ Famed for his abilities as a negotiator (not Biron’s strong point), Matignon had also succeeded in halting the Protestants’ establishment in Normandy, his own ancestral area. To the king and the queen mother, he seemed to be the man of the hour to bring Guyenne into line. Although he was appointed by Henry III to represent his interests in Guyenne, Matignon also had to answer to Henry of Navarre and keep on his good side. It was on this point that Biron had failed. Matignon excelled in maintaining an equilibrium between the king and the Huguenot leader in Aquitaine. He could not be elected mayor of Bordeaux immediately (he was elected in 1585) because he had first to make people forget his reputation as a Norman and then make himself accepted by the Guyenne aristocracy. It was inconceivable to elect a “foreigner” to lead a city proud of its political past and aware of its cultural specificity.

The king and his counselors had decided that the offices of mayor and governor of the region—titles that had historically been given to the mayor of Bordeaux—would be temporarily separated. Montaigne was mayor and “governor” of the city—a title that did not mean much—whereas Matignon, as lieutenant governor of Guyenne, had been given the real political and military powers and served as a de facto governor of the region. Since the edict of Beaulieu issued in 1576, the king of Navarre had recovered his title of governor of Guyenne, but the gates of the city of Bordeaux remained closed to him because of his religion. The lieutenant governor designated by Henry III was responsible for ensuring the city’s military security and for seeing to it that the Protestants neither exercised too much influence there nor took power. The former mayor of Bordeaux, Biron, had assumed these functions of lieutenant governor of Guyenne and mayor of Bordeaux with a certain success before he came to be seen as a man of another time—a time when it was still possible to ignore the Huguenots’ demands and reply to them with gunpowder. This policy was no longer relevant, and it had been replaced by an approach based on compromise and negotiation. Montaigne had not yet returned from Italy when Matignon arrived in Bordeaux to take up his military command, on October 15, 1581, around eight in the morning.41

About 40,000 people lived in Bordeaux when Montaigne was mayor (figure 14).⁴² It was the fifth-largest city in the kingdom after Paris (300,000), Rouen (75,000), Lyon (65,000), and Toulouse (60,000).⁴³ According to Théodore de Bèze, 7,000 Protestants lived in Bordeaux. Although this figure may appear to be exaggerated, it is confirmed by a document from the period that estimates the number of Huguenot households in the city at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Bordeaux⁴⁴ to have been 1,200, or nearly 6,000 Protestants. Protestants represented more than 15 percent of the city’s population, a figure far above the national average (less than 10 percent). This high proportion of Protestants eager to have political representation had to be pacified and controlled. The king feared that the city would be seized by a Huguenot coup, and he needed to be informed about the political situation and troop movements in the region. It was essential that communications between Matignon and Montaigne be frequent and swift in order to forestall any military operation within the city walls. For four years, Montaigne was first of all a faithful servant of the king in Bordeaux and only secondarily an administrator in the service of the city. His relations with Matignon remained constant and predictable, and he fully performed his role as an informer. In addition to this political responsibility to represent royal authority in Bordeaux, Montaigne also had to arbitrate the constant frictions between the parlement and the jurade, and prevent the deplorable political and religious climate—which was exacerbated by personal quarrels—from affecting the proper functioning of the city’s economic and commercial activity.

FIGURE 14. Joris Hoefnagel, Civitatis Burdegalensis in Aquitanea genuina descrip, 1554 (private collection).

The parlement was increasingly meddling in the city’s affairs and had infiltrated the jurade. The administrative jurisdiction of this municipal council was sometimes contested, notably in matters of policing and regulating the transportation of merchandise within the city walls. For example, a memorandum written by Biron in April 1580 proposed to the king that the election of the jurats in Bordeaux take place without the parlement’s intervention, and that the English who came to Bordeaux to buy wine should be forced, as they had earlier, to ask the jurats’ permission to do so. Thus Biron tried to reduce the growing power of the parlement in the city’s affairs.45 Three months later, he warned the king that there was a great danger that the Protestants might seize the city. The city walls had large breaches in several places, and the jurats could not repair them for lack of public funds. Annoyed by the members of parlement who meddled increasingly in the city’s affairs, the jurats constantly complained about the diminishing power of the jurade and the mayor’s office. It was to win back their administrative powers that they wrote to the king, explaining that the parlement’s councillors were not formerly accustomed to attend general assemblies or the election of the jurats. The municipal administration was trying to free itself from the power of the parlement, and Montaigne found himself directly involved in this political battle.

The way in which the mayor was elected had been changed after the 1548 revolt. Since 1550, the mayor had no longer been chosen for life; instead, he was now elected every two years. According to the chronicler Jean Darnal, the mayor of Bordeaux “had always been chosen and elected from the most noble, valiant, and capable lords of the country.”46 This change allowed the king to control the city’s administrative and political apparatus more easily. The requirement that he reside in the city was not very restrictive. For example, the mayor’s presence was not required for the election of jurats, since the city’s statutes stipulated that “the aforesaid mayors [must] attend and preside over elections, if they are in town.”⁴⁷ The office of deputy mayor was eliminated after 1550 in order to concentrate power in the hands of a single man, whose main task consisted in “defending the privileges, statutes, and liberties of the aforesaid city.” Confronted by the steady growth of the population in the course of the second half of the sixteenth century, the city had to considerably enlarge its police force. We see, for example, a great increase in the number of officers of the guard between 1550 and 1580. There were twenty of them during Montaigne’s term as mayor. The salaries of municipal officials were increased just before his election. In 1579 the wages of the captain, the lieutenant, and the officers of the guard were raised to a thousand livres per annum. The development of the municipal administration led, of course, to higher taxes.

By virtue of the city’s ancient titles, the mayor and the jurats were also called “governors of Bordeaux,” since in the absence of the king’s lieutenant governor they held the “password” and kept the keys to the city’s gates and towers. Montaigne considered himself to be technically a governor of Bordeaux, and did all he could to restore the reputation of an administration that the king had mistreated since the revolt of 1548. In June 1556, the king had returned to the mayor and the jurats all the honors they had enjoyed before the troubles of 1548.⁴⁸ Despite the restoration of the city’s privileges, Montaigne had to cross swords repeatedly with the military authority of the captain of the guard and the governors of the two strongholds situated within the city, the castles of Trompette and Le Hâ, in order to impose his municipal authority. Although at first the captain of the guard rejected the jurisdiction of the jurats and the mayor, new letters patent relating to the mayor’s powers ordered him, along with his lieutenant and officers, “paid and salaried from the aforesaid city’s coffers,” to obey the command of the mayor and the jurats.49 This slow reconquest of the authority of the mayor and the jurats was completed only at the time when Montaigne became mayor in 1581. Thus it was with an increased political power and a control that was greater than ever over the city’s police that Montaigne entered office to defend in Bordeaux the interests not only of Henry III but also those of the jurats who were counting on him to make their city prosper.

Initially, Montaigne had to put up with jurats who had more local ambitions and responsibilities. Moreover, he was expected to be their spokesman in dealing with Matignon and the king of Navarre. When Montaigne was mayor, the jurade of the city of Bordeaux was composed of six jurats (instead of twelve before 1550)—on the model of the Paris aldermen (échevins)—half of who came up for election every two years. Two jurats were elected from the nobility, two from the bourgeoisie, and two from the magistracy. A jurat elected for two years could run for office again only five years after the end of his term. The electorate also consisted of twenty-four (originally, thirty) notables recruited in equal numbers from the gentlemen, merchants, and magistrates of the city. These notables (all of whom were members of the Council of Thirty) were elected each year and had as their function to advise the jurats in matters concerning management and the municipal police. The mayor had to belong to the nobility of the sword, and the people of Bordeaux would not have accepted a foreigner at the head of their city. Thus we can understand why it was important for the author of the Essais to emphasize his noble titles (Messire, gentilhomme, seigneur) placed prominently on the title page of his Essais in 1582. From the administrative point of view, the role of the mayor consisted primarily in supervising the jurade and serving as an arbiter in the event of a conflict.

Montaigne had a hard time managing the often contradictory interests of the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the parlement. During her visit to Bordeaux in September 1578, Catherine de Medici had been warmly received by the jurats, who had given her an eight-foot-long dolphin caught the same morning, as well as a “golden pentagon weighing two marcs,”ⁱⁱⁱ but on the other hand she was poorly received by the parlement. Annoyed by these members of parlement too insistent on their independence, she “caused to be drawn up a regulation regarding the government of the city and the nomination of intendants to the jurades.”⁵⁰ On this occasion, she addressed copious remonstrances to the court, which she had harangued by M. de Foix before leaving Bordeaux, very unhappy, on October 1. Like other great cities of the Renaissance, Bordeaux had several interest groups competing with one another, and the mayor found himself in the middle of these rival pressure groups, tugged at by each of them. His arbitration was often perceived as treachery by the losing party. Tensions were frequent among representatives of the nobility and those of the bourgeoisie, the parlement, and the jurats, Matignon, and the king of Navarre.

During his first term, Montaigne’s strategy consisted in not openly taking sides and remaining outside local political scheming. As he said after 1585, he preferred to keep to himself: “Outside the knot of controversy I have maintained my equanimity and pure indifference.”51 He presented himself as a moderate man, a centrist, who used his humanist erudition to adopt a more universal perspective. Gabriel de Lurbe, the author of a Chronique bordeloise and a prosecutor-syndic in 1581–82, speaks of Montaigne, mayor of Bordeaux, in very laudatory terms and describes him as endowed with a “singular erudition,”⁵² thus emphasizing his qualities as a humanist more than his political or administrative competencies. Montaigne’s book had helped present him as a man in the service of the civitas (in conformity with the antique ideal) and not of the urbs (in its present concrete form), and this constituted a considerable advantage when particularly difficult decisions had to be made. His knowledge of the Ancients and the numerous Greek and Latin quotations scattered throughout his book won him a certain intellectual respect. The city had at its head a humanist, an image that was unlikely to displease Montaigne. What a difference from the preceding mayor, Biron, who took a more “soldierly” approach to his office and did not hesitate to fire cannon shots to resolve the slightest problem!

From the outset, Montaigne had announced his intentions to the jurats. If he was mayor, that was not because of his experience as a manager, but because of his political innocence, which placed him above the usual municipal cabals: “On my arrival I deciphered myself to them faithfully and conscientiously, exactly such as I feel myself to be: without memory, without vigilance, without experience, and without violence.”⁵³ He presented himself as a political model out of the ordinary for a city subject to high tensions. Far from the usual political struggles and personal quarrels, he offered an independence of judgment that could be verified in his Essais, which had been reprinted in Bordeaux that year. The famous consubstantiality of the man and the book, defended before the king a little more than two years earlier, served him once again to define the political framework of his municipal function. We can easily see how he could consider as strategic the decision to reprint his book before taking up his position in Bordeaux. Simon Millanges might even have been able to convince him to indicate his administrative responsibilities on the title page—“mayor and governor of Bordeaux”; a book in the service of an office.

As we have said, the mayor entered upon his functions more than ten months after his election. How can we explain a humanist’s lack of interest in serving his city and his king? His election—rather a nomination—was a disappointment for Montaigne, who had not even campaigned to obtain a municipal office. For him, his election as mayor came as a surprise, because he was expecting different favors. A diplomat’s title would have been better suited to his inclination and temperament. Being well acquainted with the world of Greek and Roman antiquity, Montaigne may have thought that the politics of Bordeaux was at the antipodes of the conception he had formed of the city and its administration. On the other hand, the choice of Montaigne as mayor of Bordeaux had a considerable advantage on the level of local and municipal politics. The descendant of a family of notables that had been living nobly for more than a hundred years (since the purchase of the noble house of Montaigne dated from 1477), and that had served the city in its time, he was well acquainted with the functioning of the parlement to which he had belonged in an earlier career that was not so far in the past. The name of Eyquem had long been associated with the administration of the city, and Montaigne had the advantage of continuity. His grandfather, Grimon Eyquem, had been a jurat in 1485 and provost in 1503. His father, Pierre, was also a jurat and provost of the city in 1530, before being chosen as deputy mayor in 1536, and then elected mayor in 1554. Even if he had not imagined this responsibility, Montaigne was definitely situated in the lineage of great municipal servants. In principle, his family history should also have made it easy for him to be accepted by the Guyenne nobility.

His name had not encountered any opposition when it was mentioned during the discussions at Fleix. This proposal was endorsed by the marquis of Trans. In 1581, Montaigne could count on the support of members of the jurade who belonged to the nobility and who saw in him an ardent defender of their values. After all, they had been seduced by the ideas put forward by this gentleman in his book: glory, heroism, bravery, and virtue occupied a considerable place in it. Logically, the nobility thus saw in him an ally. Similarly, the bourgeois on the jurade did not oppose his election, because Montaigne had already presented himself as a man full of pragmatism and common sense. This situation is rather paradoxical when one knows Montaigne’s scorn for anything that had to do with business and the world of commerce in general. He was thus officially “elected” mayor of Bordeaux at the king’s will, but also after he had been unanimously approved by the jurats Pierre Dupérier, Gabriel de Lurbe, François Treihes, Guillaume de Cursol, Jehan Turnmet, and Mathelin Fort.

The social origin of the members of the jurade had changed since the first half of the sixteenth century, a period during which the jurats who came from the nobility represented almost half the members of the administration of the city,54 while bourgeois represented only 15 percent and magistrates 40 percent. On the other hand, during the second half of the century there was a steady increase in the number of bourgeois and merchants (40 percent) elected to the jurade, to the detriment of the nobility, which now represented only 30 percent, about the same as the robins.55 Against his nature, and for strictly political reasons, Montaigne saw himself obliged to support the demands of the bourgeoisie, often to the disadvantage of the interests of the nobles and the robins. Despite the uncontested political domination of the bourgeois on the jurade, it has nonetheless been observed that during Montaigne’s term of office, the bar retained much of its power.⁵⁶ We shall see that the parlement gave Montaigne a great deal of trouble and forced him to confront directly his former colleagues at the Palais de l’Ombrière.

The bourgeois, whose prosperity came essentially from their economic and commercial activity, were not entirely satisfied to see a noble at the head of the city. Since 1550, the law provided that “the institution and deposition by the treasurer of the public funds of the aforesaid city belongs forever to the mayor and jurats of that city,”⁵⁷ but the bourgeois and powerful merchants intended to have a right to inspect the city’s accounts, being well aware that they were mainly responsible for the wealth that made Bordeaux a flourishing city. They wanted to be sure that the money they paid to the city through various taxes would be returned to them in the form of municipal investments intended to promote the transportation and storage of merchandise in the city. Consequently, it was only fair to complain to the mayor and to accuse him of defending the nobility’s prerogatives. By means of this constant pressure, the bourgeois sought to ensure that the city’s administration was indeed on their side and responded to their demands. They were particularly intent on influencing the supervision of the treasury. However, a decision of March 7, 1583, reaffirmed the mayor’s privilege with regard to what concerned the treasury.⁵⁸ Montaigne had no intention of yielding to the bourgeois’s pressure, even if he often made concessions to them for political reasons. Against all expectations, he had understood that the bourgeois could become his best allies.

In 1561, the king had authorized the people of Bordeaux to hold, by virtue of their ancient privileges, two free fairs per year, each lasting thirty days, the first starting on October 15 and the second on February 15. These free fairs permitted the merchants who went to them to enjoy the same privileges as those who went to the fairs in Paris, Lyon, and Rouen, or those of Brie, Champagne, and Poitou. Their merchandise—with the exception of woad—was exempt from all the taxes usually levied by the king.⁵⁹ Letters patent issued by Charles IX and dated March 27, 1571, granted these two free fairs for an indefinite time. To avoid cheating, a declaration made by Henry III limited the freedom of fairs in 1576, establishing a distinction between merchandise brought into the sénéchaussée of Guyenne before the opening of the fairs—commodities that would be sold during the fairs but outside their area of freedom—and the merchandise that would merely pass through the city during these fairs without having been unloaded inside it.60 During his two terms as mayor, Montaigne had to cope with numerous cases regarding foreign merchants navigating on the Garonne River who had unpacked their wares at the port, thus exposing themselves to a fine of three hundred Bordeaux sols, since the city’s statutes stipulated that it was “also forbidden to all sorts of people, merchants and others bringing and conveying any merchandise into the city, to sell it in any way without having first acquired a ticket.”⁶¹ This kind of incident happened almost every day and demanded immediate action on the part of the mayor and the jurats.

On the administrative front, the parlement continued more than ever to meddle in the current affairs of the city. In 1556, Charles IX had decided that two councillors of the parlement would attend the general assemblies at the City Hall the better to supervise what was debated there. This parlementary surveillance was criticized by the jurats coming from the nobility and the bourgeoisie, who sought to separate the powers of the parlement and those of the city. In the sixteenth century, Bordeaux was considered a nonconformist, even rebellious city. During the first half of the century, the sovereign’s authority became increasingly unpopular and contested in Bordeaux, in Saintonge, and in Guyenne as a result of the repeated levies and new taxes. The parlement was supposed to be a tool of royal power, but it was in permanent conflict with the jurats and the municipal government. At the center of the disagreement was the parlement’s police power over the city and its almost daily interference in the city’s affairs. However, on December 21, 1556, eight years after the tax revolt of 1548, the king had restored to the mayor and the jurats their police powers in the city. The city’s privileges were confirmed in 1573 by royal letters patent⁶² that also ordered the parlement of Bordeaux to maintain the mayors and jurats in the possession of the honors that had been returned to them by letters patent in June 1556. In 1557, just after the end of Pierre Eyquem’s term as mayor, the people of Bordeaux were once again authorized to carry arms. The same year, the mayor and the jurats were able to resume their places in ceremonies and public processions. They were once again authorized to precede presidial judges and the city’s provost. The city hall bell, which was a symbol of Bordeaux’s power and had been removed after the disturbances in 1548, was put back in place on September 21, 1561.

While Pierre Eyquem was mayor, the city of Bordeaux recovered most of its privileges. The jurats regained their authority in matters of criminal justice in the city and its suburbs, and civil justice was entrusted to the seneschal, who could issue judgments in the first instance. The Bordeaux parlement essentially handed down decisions regarding appeals, whereas the seneschal decided présidial cases in first and last instance, and all other cases in the first instance, though these could be appealed before the parlement. In Montaigne’s time, this distinction between the legal jurisdictions was a constant source of conflict, and the judgments rendered at the level of the city were sometimes invalidated on appeal by the parlement after a report from one of the Chambres des Enquêtes. It had taken the city twenty-five years to recover its privileges in matters of municipal policing. Thus the Edict of Amboise, issued in January 1572, proposed the creation of a chamber of police composed of a jurat (bourgeois) and a councillor in the parlement. The jurade and the mayor defended tooth and nail their judicial authority, and almost always saw interventions by members of parlement as inappropriate interference.

We can imagine the political alliances that were formed on both sides to influence judicial decisions relating to the proper functioning of the city. For example, on May 7, 1572, the parlement sent an emissary to the king to inform him of remonstrances affecting his “judicial authority.”63 The parlement argued that the chamber of police infringed on the royal authority represented by the parlement. For their part, after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the mayor and jurats of Bordeaux wrote in turn to Charles IX, congratulating themselves on the “public tranquility” prevailing in the city, “in accord with Your Majesty’s intention that thanks to God no turmoil occurred there.”⁶⁴ Municipal officials even mentioned a great number of conversions among the Protestants. That was what better police could produce. In the early 1580s, both the parlement and the jurats made every effort to make it known that they were the only ones who were resolutely on the side of the royal authority when it was a matter of policing the city. As mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne found himself thrust into the heart of an open war punctuated by scathing judicial skirmishes.

In order to clarify the question of justice and political jurisdiction in Bordeaux, a ruling of the Council stated that the Edict of Amboise did not in any way abolish the authority of the mayor and the jurats. Indeed, it even reconfirmed the mayor and the jurats in “the justice and political jurisdiction belonging to them in the aforesaid city and suburbs,” and also did not “intend that the court of parlement of Bordeaux alter or diminish their jurisdictions; nor that the nomination of jurats and bourgeois who are to assist the police, in accord with the aforesaid edict, appertain to the court of parlement.”⁶⁵ It was clear that in matters of political jurisdiction the parlement was supposed to follow and respect the jurisdictions of the municipal officials. After 1550, “the mayor and the jurats of the city of Bordeaux will all have the justice and political jurisdiction of the city of Bordeaux and its suburbs.”⁶⁶ These privileges were confirmed in 1573. Judicial practice was an entirely different story, however. Since the creation of the parlement of Bordeaux, the authority of the jurats in matters of justice had significantly diminished. All the decisions made by the mayor, the seneschal, and the jurats could be appealed to the parlement.

The new powers granted to the mayor and the jurats were very quickly reduced by rulings issued by the parlement. For example, in 1551 the parlement ordered that the appeal of sentences handed down by mayors and jurats in police matters had to be presented to the seneschal of Guyenne before moving on to the parlement. Similarly, a ruling stipulated that the seneschal of Guyenne would attend the elections of mayors and jurats.67 A war over administrative and judicial jurisdiction had been declared among these three axes of power in the city: the city and its administrators; the parlement; and the seneschal, the king’s military representative in Guyenne.

The mayor and the jurats opposed the jurisdiction of the lieutenant governor of Guyenne, and the king, in an order issued in 1553, changed his mind for a time. The presence of royal soldiers garrisoned in the Trompette castle and the fort of Le Hâ also created tensions with the municipal officials, who did not like having these garrisons escape their control. They issued several municipal edicts to make the life of the royal troops more difficult. For example, the people of the city were not required to provide them with wood, candles, “or other utensils, unless paid for.”⁶⁸ The Trompette castle was under the command of Louis Ricard Gourdon de Genouillac, baron of Vaillac, who was later devoted to the Catholic League but was above all a hot-headed detractor of Montaigne and the most redoubtable opponent to his reelection as mayor in 1583. Matignon and Montaigne had to constantly temper the Catholic ardor of a faction that was in the minority but was among the most active, and that they could not confront openly because doing so would expose them to accusations of being in the pay of the Protestants. Montaigne was also expected to maintain good relations with the king of Navarre. The League was gradually gaining a hold over Henry III, who was being overwhelmed by the extremist Catholic party. It was only after many hesitations that Matignon and Montaigne finally succeeded in impressing Vaillac in the spring of 1585 and forced him to hand over the stronghold that was supposed to be controlled by Henry III but was in reality under the influence of Guise’s followers. This political development also pleased the king of Navarre, who did not like Vaillac.

The power of the king’s lieutenant governor was rather limited in matters affecting the city alone. However, the religious aspect of current affairs soon exceeded by far any administrative consideration, and it was through the maintenance of the right religion (the Catholic) that he was authorized to intervene. Henry III’s letter patent relating to the attributions of military authorities stipulated that the king’s governor and the lieutenant governor would not have their own jurisdiction, but only the right to repress uprisings, the municipal magistrates and the ordinary tribunes being the only ones in charge of the police in the cities. The captains of the two castles could therefore not officially hinder the execution of decisions made by the judiciary.

This ongoing struggle between the parlement and the city in matters of legal jurisdiction was still continuing when Montaigne became mayor. As a result of the obligations of his office, he was often in disagreement with the parlement of which he had once been a member. Not only had he abandoned this milieu ten years earlier, but also his office had transformed him into the unwilling head of the opposition. He took advantage of this to settle a dispute that went back to the beginning of the 1560s. As soon as he was elected mayor, Montaigne found himself in a particularly ambiguous situation and made decisions that were often contrary to his personal convictions. The complexity of the judicial relations between the city and the parlement did not make the mayor’s task any easier when it came to arbitrating conflicts connected with commerce and merchandise. However, Montaigne could not allow himself to confront openly the parlement, which was the official representative of royal authority. The jurats and the mayor of Bordeaux were regularly in conflict with the parlement to ensure that the city’s privileges were respected, and Montaigne was always negotiating compromises. The parlement demanded superior authority and played on the political weakness (real or perceived) of the city to force the king to increase its judicial purview. Caught between these different pressure groups, the author of the Essais was aware of the “little power he ha[d] in this city,” and complained overtly about it in a letter to Matignon in October 1582.69

One of Montaigne’s functions—and not the least important one—was to arbitrate legal disputes between merchants and to review the statutes of the various professions. Almost all the statutes of the artisanal professions were reviewed and amended during his two terms as head of the municipal administration. Thus the creation in 1563 of a consular jurisdiction in Bordeaux had made it possible to deal with quarrels between merchants in order to resolve “all the suits and disputes that would afterward arise between merchants with regard to merchandise alone.”⁷⁰ The consuls’ jurisdiction was however strictly limited, because they were to concern themselves only with sales, purchases, and promises of sales, or the purchase of merchandise by wholesale or retail businessmen. This consular jurisdiction concerned only conflicts between merchants regarding merchandise. Because it was responsible for the regulation of the police, the city ratified the statutes of the crafts and the guilds. Between 1582 and 1585, the mayor intervened regularly to arbitrate disputes between trade associations whose areas of authority overlapped, thus giving rise to conflicts.

As mayor, Montaigne was surrounded by a large number of officials and municipal employees. At that time, the administration of the city included a city clerk, a tax inspector, twenty-four sergeants, a wine marker for the wines of the “haut pays,”iv two heralds, two collectors of the tax on fish, a porter at City Hall, a bread inspector, a bread weigher, an executioner, a river guard, a wheat clerk, two river inspectors, two salt fish inspectors, an attorney and a prosecutor at the parlement, a guest of the city, a city solicitor, two prosecutors in the county of Ornon and the baronry of Veyrines, an almoner, a cleaner of the grating on the River Devise, and a cleaner of the public wash house. All these officials received wages that varied between 100 livres for the prosecutor, the syndic, and the clerk, and four livres for the cleaner of the grating and the cleaner of the public wash house. Other employees were supposed to clear away rubbish and keep the streets free of obstacles. The College of Guyenne, which operated under the authority of the city, was a considerable expense. The principal of the college received a salary of 1,000 livres per year, and each professor received 600 livres. Barbers, priests, and sergeants were also remunerated by the city, as was the superintendent of the city workers. Just after Montaigne was named mayor, letters patent issued by Henry III ordered the continuation of the payment of 3,000 livres allocated for various municipal expenses. These discretionary funds were under the control of the mayor and the jurats. The amount was payable on presentation of the receipt of the two coutumes^v for the needs of the city and without any explanation of the sums expended being required.⁷¹

In Montaigne’s time, the municipal administration constituted a workforce that varied between sixty and seventy persons placed directly under the authority of the mayor. The list of municipal employees makes clear the activities that allowed the city to raise the majority of its revenues, chiefly the wine trade, which was the subject of a disproportionate part of the city’s ordinances and regulations, but also the sale and exportation of salt fish and the trade in wheat. The bourgeois thus made a major contribution to the city’s wealth and for that reason benefited from significant political and economic advantages. The privileges Henry III granted to the city of Bordeaux stipulated that “the aforesaid bourgeois of our city of Bordeaux, even though they are not nobles but commoners, will nonetheless be able to acquire fief and noble lands.”⁷² This dispensation, which had far-reaching consequences, was perceived as a veritable affront by a nobility that was no longer able to impose its prerogatives. Considered as a representative of the nobility at the beginning of his term, Montaigne soon came to be seen as a spokesman for the bourgeoisie. The city’s wealthy merchants were accumulating dispensations and were increasingly able to escape taxation. For example, they were exempt from the taille, and a growing number of them were also exempted from paying other taxes. Adding insult to injury, the bourgeois could even acquire dignities. And Montaigne let them do it—not that he could have halted this historical tendency, but he was accused of not having sufficiently defended the interests of his order.

The Public Welfare

In 1581, Montaigne was not yet fifty years old, and he still had ahead of him a political career of which the mayor’s office was far from being the conclusion. At least, that was how he saw it after 1583. He was planning to use his experience as mayor of Bordeaux as a political stepping stone to move on to other offices more compatible with his ambitions. The marquis of Trans continued to serve as his advisor in all matters concerning public affairs, and Montaigne remained more faithful than ever to his sponsor in politics. Until the end of his second term as mayor of Bordeaux, he often made the trip to Fleix to consult his protector. For example, on February 9, 1585, he wrote that he had his “boots on his legs to go to Fleix.”73 As he acknowledged, the visits to Fleix to consult Gaston de Foix were an integral part of his service, just as were his written reports to Matignon.

Montaigne was well aware that one cannot succeed in politics without support in high places, and that it was essential to maintain political networks. He also knew that it was dangerous to put all his eggs in the same basket. Royal favors disappeared as quickly as they appeared, and he therefore constantly had to broaden the company he kept. This was the logic of the politician and the courtier. Montaigne could not forget that one of those whose support he had formerly sought at the time of the publication of La Boétie’s works in 1571, Henri de Mesmes, had fallen into disgrace in early January 1582, at the same time that Montaigne was taking up his functions in Bordeaux. It was Catherine de Medici who had caused Mesmes to lose Henry III’s favor.

The king frequently changed his mind and did not always keep his promises—Montaigne was well placed to testify to that after his disappointments in Rome. Immediately after his arrival at the mayor’s office, on December 13, 1581, Henry III had dissolved the tripartite chamber (one-third of which was composed of Protestant magistrates) by letters patent addressed to the parlement of Bordeaux. This tripartite chamber had been established in Agen in July 1578 in conformity with article 22 of the Edict of Bergerac, but it had not fulfilled the king’s expectations.

Two and a half years later, the Fleix accords between the duke of Anjou and the king of Navarre had foreseen several measures relating to secure places, the burial places of the Protestants, and especially the creation of an exceptional chamber in Guyenne. Article 11 of this accord stipulated that the king would send two presidents and fourteen councillors to Guyenne to judge “all causes, trials, and disputes and contraventions of the Edict of pacification.”74 This chamber, composed of members of the Privy Council and councillors of the parlement of Paris, was supposed to receive the approval of the king of Navarre “so that if any of them were suspect, it would be permissible to make this known to his Majesty, who would elect others to take their places.”

On November 26, 1581, a new edict changed the situation once again, decreeing that “on the advice and deliberation of the queen our mother … we establish a Chamber of Justice in our country of Guyenne, which is in the jurisdiction solely of our court of parlement of Bordeaux,” and granting it “the knowledge and sovereign jurisdiction of all matters both civil and criminal as well as any others of whatever kind.”⁷⁵ This chamber of justice had as its first president Pierre Séguier, the sixth president of the Paris parlement and a member of the Council of State; it comprised thirteen Parisian councillors, including Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Claude du Puy, Antoine Loisel, and Pierre Pithou, who held the post of royal prosecutor.^vi They were all Catholics.⁷⁶ On January 8, 1582, when Montaigne had just taken up his duties as mayor, the members of the chamber sent from Paris arrived in Bordeaux to see to it that the royal edicts were implemented and to restore order in the city. The chamber held its first meeting in the Jacobin fathers’ school, that is to say in the Dominican convent. It was probably on that occasion that Montaigne made the acquaintance of Loisel and De Thou, who left a laudatory portrait of the mayor: “He [De Thou] also learned … a great deal from Michel de Montaigne, a man of independent mind and foreign to all factions who was then performing the extremely honorable functions of the mayor of Bordeaux: he knew in depth the affairs of France and in particular those of his Guyenne.”⁷⁷

The elected officials in Bordeaux and the parlement had no choice but to accept the new chamber of justice. Feeling wronged and furious at having lost their right of representation in the tripartite chamber, the Protestants plotted to seize several cities in the region. Thus on January 17, 1582, the mayor and the jurats of Bordeaux warned their counterparts in Saint-Émilion that a surprise attack on their city was planned. They recommended that an eye be kept out for seditious Huguenots.⁷⁸ It was a time for prudence.

Faithful to his idea of politics, Montaigne tried to calm the waters and was already beginning to see himself as a negotiator between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. He kept a low profile during his first term as mayor, but he fully accepted the responsibility incumbent on him to make the Fleix accords respected. Article 45 of these accords stipulated that the mayor and other royal officers “will be responsible in their own and private names for offenses that may be made against the aforesaid edict, if they fail to punish and chastise the offenders, both civilly and corporally, if the case arises.”79 In his Essais Montaigne provides an analysis of his attitude, which consisted in taking a distance on the obligations of his public office: “Not all important offices are difficult. I was prepared to work myself a bit more roughly if there had been any great need of it. For it is in my power to do something more than I do or than I like to do. I did not leave undone, so far as I know, any action that duty genuinely required of me. I easily forgot those that ambition mixes up with duty and covers with its name.”⁸⁰

The chamber of justice sent from Paris performed its functions until June 1584, when it finally returned to Paris. It held its first session on January 26, 1582, and reaffirmed the close connection between the Catholic Church and royal justice. The councillors began their work only “after having all heard the mass in red robes.”⁸¹ After the religious service, they held a public session that was attended by Matignon and “a great crowd of people.” The parlement quickly showed an unprecedented severity, and Montaigne could only witness the spectacle of this justice ordered from the capital by the king. Perhaps he was also flattered to find himself once again in the company of such eminent scholars. De Thou reports in his Mémoires the warm welcome he was given by the mayor when he arrived in Bordeaux. The main function of the chamber consisted as much in representing monarchical power with all its pomp and ceremony as in debating the cases it had to decide.

Although the initial reception by the Bordeaux parlement had been positive, conflicts between the parlement and the chamber of justice soon made themselves felt because their respective functions were too similar. It was on procedural points and jurisdiction that the parlement fought back, denouncing serious infringements of its prerogatives. The jurats were absent during the first session, and it is not certain that Montaigne was there to welcome them. It is likely that he remained in his château to reread his corrections to the edition of the Essais that he was preparing at the time that the royal authority was being reestablished in such a manifest way in Bordeaux. However, he heard the praise of Bordeaux and of its learned men: Ausonius, Buchanan, Muret, Vinet, and the “les Boities, Mallevins, Pontac, Montaignes” pronounced by Antoine Loisel in January 1582 at the convent of the Jacobins in Bordeaux. On the other hand, Montaigne was not present to hear Loisel’s famous harangue that concluded the chamber’s session on August 22, 1582,vii and it was only eight years later that he addressed his compliments to Loisel, thanking him “for the fine presents you gave me” in a short dedicatory epistle that accompanied a copy of the 1588 edition of the Essais published by Abel L’Angelier in Paris.⁸² Nevertheless, on February 8, 1582, Montaigne had thought it important to go to Cadillac with the jurats to welcome the king and queen of Navarre. He was accompanied by the president of the parlement, Jean de Villeneuve, and the councillors Richard de Lestonnac and Joseph d’Andrault. In Cadillac he attended the baptism of a daughter of Louis de Foix who was held at the baptismal font by her godmother, Queen Margot.⁸³ This proof of Montaigne’s goodwill, while he was mayor of Bordeaux, toward the king of Navarre contrasted symbolically with the attitude of his predecessor, Biron.

When Montaigne assumed his functions at the end of May 1582, he was immediately faced with a demand sent from Paris for the collection of funds. Letters from the king asked that the jurats and the mayor allocate 8,000 livres to repair the tower of Cordouan, another 8,000 livres in unspecified levies, and finally 4,000 livres for the chamber of justice he had sent to Bordeaux. Needless to say, these demands were badly received. The jurats convoked the assembly of the Cent-Treize to deliberate on this request and composed remonstrances to the king to explain to him that the city could not pay these sums, because its residents had been ruined by the uprisings and wanted only to “beg the king to consider their present and past woes.”⁸⁴ The chamber of justice even supported the municipal administration on this point and expressed its astonishment at these letters from the king, because article 14 of the Fleix accord specified that the cost of maintaining the new chamber would be borne by the sovereign. A promise not kept by the king, whose reversals people feared.

Despite his hesitation to criticize Henry III overtly, the mayor of Bordeaux, as the city’s spokesman, had to become involved in this affair and uphold the jurats’ remonstrances. But this step did not succeed, and in 1583 the jurats repeated their complaint, and this time they sought to gain the support of the king of Navarre. In the remonstrances addressed to him, Montaigne and the jurats Geoffroy d’Alesme and Gabriel de Lurbe begged Henry of Navarre to intervene with Henry III so that “the wages of the lords of the high chamber of justice, presently in Périgueux, might not now be levied on the poor people, which has borne alone this mass of surcharges over the past two years.” In his response dated December 17, 1583,85 the king of Navarre ignored this request made by Montaigne. One more frustration for a mayor who had to provide more and more funds for a king short of resources and pay the legal costs normally borne by the state budget. Montaigne was testing the limits of a friendship that was less simple than he had imagined.⁸⁶

The funds flowing into the city’s coffers were steadily diminishing. The mayor and the jurats were responsible for levying the coutumes, a tax on all the merchandise sold within the city walls. For example, merchants were prohibited to go “ahead” of merchandise to buy it or sell it outside the city or on ships and barges to avoid paying the coutume. This kind of cheating was, however, frequent at the time. Since 1548, there had been two kinds of taxes: the small and the great coutume. The small coutume consisted of a levy of two and a half deniers per livre. For the people of the region and their own consumption, no tax was levied. On the other hand, if they engaged in local commerce, then they were subject to the small coutume, and if they sold merchandise they had not produced, they had to pay both the great and the small coutume, that is, eight deniers per livre. If they transported merchandise outside the region, they were taxed at the rate of six deniers per livre. Merchants who resided “above the Saint Martin Brook” paid no coutume to bring in merchandise they had produced themselves, but if they sold their products outside this space, then they had to pay eight deniers in taxes.⁸⁷ There were countless ways of avoiding the rules regarding taxes.

Exceeding its authority, the chamber of justice imposed on Bordeaux by Henry III sometimes went astray, making zealous, partisan decisions that caused an uproar in the region and shocked humanistic minds. For instance, on June 2, 1582, the lord of Rostaing, the son of the marquis Tristan de Rostaing, a gentleman and declared Huguenot, but also a pillager who spread terror in the region under the pretext of his religious commitment, was sentenced to death for the crime of rebellion by the chamber of justice, and was decapitated on a scaffold erected in front of the city hall.⁸⁸ About this sentence, De Thou tells us that “such a great example of severity against a gentleman had not been seen for more than thirty years.”⁸⁹ A few days later, the son of Captain Cornet, a native of Bordeaux, was sentenced to death by this same court. On June 28, convicted of murders, rebellion, violence, and other unspecified crimes, Philippe de Saint-Georges, lord of Le Fraisse and Meyrignac, was also executed, his property was confiscated, and his house razed. Like the others, he was put to death on the public square, in front of the Bordeaux city hall. Henry of Navarre protested to Henry III, who replied brusquely that there was only one justice in the kingdom and that it was applied in the same way to all his subjects, Catholic or Protestant, “without distinction of religion.”90

During this time, behind the windows of the city hall, Montaigne was witnessing with resignation the bloody repression of the Huguenots. He seems not to have flinched, and we understand the famous passage in the Essais in which he defends the notion that “the public welfare requires that a man betray and lie; let us resign this commission to more obedient and suppler people.”⁹¹ And after 1588 he adds: “and massacre,” thus expressing his consternation with regard to public service. This a posteriori reflection may have been inspired by his personal experience during the first months of his term as mayor. The public office indirectly involved him in these partisan decisions, and he put up a good show when faced by a partial and repressive justice.

At the king’s request, a provincial council under the auspices of Antoine Prévost de Sansac, the archbishop of Bordeaux, was held in the city from July to November 1582. According to the decrees issued after the Estates General held at Blois, the provincial council, which had not met for a very long time, was henceforth to assemble every three years. The bishops of Poitiers, Saintes, Périgueux, Angoulême, Sarlat, and Maillezais were convoked for the occasion. Montaigne and the jurats attended the opening ceremony of the council. The litanies, the Veni Creator and the Te Deum laudamus, were sung during the high mass, which was attended by the mayor wearing his official robe. Apparently Pierre Charron, “schoolmaster,” was present during this council, and it was probably on this occasion that he made Montaigne’s acquaintance.⁹²

The council’s agenda proposed to raise the question of the residence of members of the clergy, of seminars, and of the church service according to the order of the Council of Trent. On November 6, toward the end of the Council, Pierre de Villars, archbishop of Bienne and state councillor; Louis Angennes, lord of Maintenon, state councillor, and captain of fifty men-at-arms; Jehan Forget, private councillor to the king and president “es enquestes” of the Paris parlement; and Denis Barthélemy, councillor to the king and ordinary master of the Chambre des Comptes of the Paris parlement, arrived, all of them “commissioned, ordered, and delegated by the king to travel to the provinces of Guyenne and Languedoc to inform themselves of the state of both the clergy and all others.”⁹³ The mayor and the jurats had to give these representatives a warm welcome in their city. The king was multiplying occasions of this kind to manifest his authority through the intermediary of the chamber of justice and the council that he controlled, thinking in this way to cut the ground from under the feet of the extremist Catholics, who were increasingly active in Bordeaux and who reproached the king for his soft Catholicism. The clergy and the members of parlement marched together to prove the sovereign’s omnipotence. Official processions took place one after the other in the streets of Bordeaux, and the city was rapidly transformed into a symbolic place of the unchallenged exercise of royal power. For the occasion, Montaigne reaffirmed his loyalty to Henry III and the Catholic faith.

Apart from the political and religious considerations often mentioned, the mayor’s responsibilities were mainly practical. The office required a manager capable of dealing with the pressing needs of a city in full expansion. One of the mayor’s chief concerns was, for instance, to “keep the city clean.” While Montaigne was directing municipal affairs, two rulings, on September 10, 1584, and March 1, 1585, regulated the dumping of rubbish on the city’s streets.94 The growth of the city’s population had led to a problem of sanitation and odor. At that time, unsanitary conditions in cities were associated with epidemics of plague. Sewage, manure, mud holes, and garbage piled up on the street and created a public sanitation problem. During his first term, a municipal ordinance forbade throwing anything out of windows on pain of having to pay a fine. The decision stipulated that refuse would henceforth be collected twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. A great project of standardizing paving stones was also launched during Montaigne’s second term. Similarly, draining by the middle of the streets was made obligatory and manure was removed from the main arteries.

Another municipal responsibility: we find Montaigne supervising boat traffic on the Garonne. In early 1582 the congestion caused by boats on which merchandise was stored was so great that it became almost impossible to navigate on the Garonne. On March 24, Montaigne and the jurats published a decision forbidding the storage of merchandise on boats and ships moored in the city.⁹⁵ Unhappy about this decision, the merchants felt wronged and considered it to be a hindrance to the free circulation of merchandise. They blamed the mayor and expressed their dissatisfaction with an administration they found too repressive and that they felt was slowing the expansion of commerce in the city. A few months later, Montaigne was busy reforming the statutes of the parchment makers to stop the influx of people who were pursuing that craft without being “certified in the aforesaid trade.” The recent statutes limited access to the guild by requiring those practicing the trade to be trained and certified, thus forbidding the exercise of the craft by those who were neither “masters, nor journeymen, nor apprentices in it … on pain of being fined a sum to be determined.”⁹⁶ These statutes were decided upon and published in the jurade on May 2, 1582. This way of proceeding was followed by many crafts in Bordeaux; with the encouragement of the mayor and the jurats, they reformed their statutes to protect themselves better from the influx of outside craftsmen who sought to sell their products in the city.

During the summer of 1582, the mayor of Bordeaux was trying to settle a disagreement between master hose makers and dressmakers. The decision required a technical and industrial knowledge with the steps in the fabrication and distribution of the commodities associated with each guild. Montaigne commissioned an expert report on the trades and, after municipal deliberation, the dressmakers were forbidden to make “any hose, whether of cloth, velvet, silk, or any other material at all” on pain of paying a fine of 50 crowns per infraction, except for “wide or high hose for use on boats, which we have allowed them and will continue to allow them to make.”97 On September 19, 1582, the jurats convicted the dressmakers of having contravened the articles of their statutes, and the parlement confirmed this sentence by a ruling issued on August 1, 1583. Still determined to reorganize the craft professions in the city, in 1583 the municipal administration sought to revise the statutes of shoemakers, hat makers, and glove makers.

We do not know exactly how much Montaigne involved himself in the study and reform of these statutes, but he must have become acquainted with the municipal decisions that were issued from these statutory reforms. All these examples confirm that the mayor’s duties were quite distant from the philosophical or philological concerns of a humanist with a bookish culture that allowed him to immerse himself in Antiquity. Dealing with the problems of glove makers, doublet makers, and pin sellers could not have corresponded to Montaigne’s idea of public service and the government of the city. For someone who liked to read the rhetoricians of Athens and Rome, the everyday worries of a city like Bordeaux must have seemed very insignificant. It was certainly a time when great questions of society and religion were being discussed, but it was also, at least for Montaigne as mayor of Bordeaux, a time for the most concrete and prosaic management of the guilds and professions operating within the city walls. On certain occasions, the mayor and Montaigne had to be quite distinct, and the humanist had to find a place to which he could withdraw: “We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.”⁹⁸ This salutary retreat from the everyday work of the mayor’s office and its bureaucracy was of course his château, far from the obligations of the city. Although Montaigne continued to devote himself to reading books, it is nonetheless unlikely that he envisaged a third volume for his Essais during his two terms as mayor of Bordeaux.

At the end of 1582, the mayor and the jurats had to apply the reform of the calendar desired by Pope Gregory XIII. Ten days were removed from the month of December, and Christmas was celebrated on the fifteenth. In 1582, the month of December had only twenty-one days, which led to several trials and disputes, as Darnal tells us in his supplement to the Chronique de Bordeaux.⁹⁹ We can imagine that Montaigne discussed this matter with François de Foix-Candale, an eminent mathematician, alchemist, and savant who had served as an advisor to the pope on this reform. The author of the Essais offers his own considerations on this reform, of which he did not approve and which he found it difficult to put up with: “I want to mention this as an example: that the recent eclipsing of ten days by the Pope has so taken me aback that I cannot feel comfortable with it,”100 and suggests elsewhere that this reform might have been “carried out in a less inconvenient fashion.”¹⁰¹ The role of a mayor also consisted in implementing reforms and decrees, even if he personally disapproved of them.

The end of Montaigne’s first term as mayor of Bordeaux provoked a political stir. His repeated absences and his detachment from the city’s current concerns had made people think he might not run for a second term. Some accused him of having paid too much attention to the interests of the bourgeoisie and not enough to the demands of the nobility. His political enemies openly campaigned in favor of a mayor who was more Catholic and less conciliatory toward Henry of Navarre. Others went so far as to denounce Montaigne’s suspect friendship for Henry of Navarre. By adopting a wait-and-see attitude, Montaigne came to be seen as a politician without firm judgment, and in the end he attracted the criticism of both camps. Sympathizers with the League were annoyed by the cordial relationship between Henry of Navarre and Matignon and accused the mayor of having a large part in this unnatural rapprochement. It was an election year and people were becoming hot-headed. The nobles and Catholic extremists saw in Jacques d’Escars, lord of Merville, grand seneschal of Guyenne since 1566, and captain and governor of Le Hâ castle, an ideal candidate who would allow them to get rid of Montaigne. Although at first Montaigne may have considered not running, the disagreeable turn of events and the accusations made against him made him change his mind. Wounded in his vanity, he decided to seek a second term.

A Contested Reelection

In his role as arbitrator and conciliator between the various political and ideological interests represented in the jurade, Montaigne occupied a rather delicate and ambiguous position in 1583. He looked like a typical politique at the time when all-out commitment was in fashion. The municipal ordinances and decrees of the past two years made it possible to think—at least for his detractors—that in matters of municipal administration Montaigne usually was on the side of the merchants and bourgeois of the city. The nobles ended up aligning themselves with the robins and members of parlement to form an opposition group determined to prevent Montaigne’s reelection. This policy of rapprochement, the result of personal animosities between Montaigne and a significant number of councillors in the parlement, bore fruit at the time of his reelection, because the nobility’s candidate (a notorious member of the Catholic League) allied himself with the president of the parlement, Jean de Villeneuve, and also with the highest representative of the clergy in Bordeaux, Archbishop Antoine Prévost de Sansac. The robins found a sufficient ideological affinity between the milieu from which most of them came (the bourgeoisie) and from which they were trying to free themselves, and an order to which they aspired (the nobility). They represented a force influential enough to tip an election their way. This particular, decisive position of the robins explains why the seneschal Merville and the baron of Vaillac did everything they could to win their votes to prevent Montaigne’s reelection.102 Documents in the archives show us that they came very close to winning this political battle. We note in particular a major defection of magistrates who joined Merville’s clan and overtly campaigned for him during the summer of 1583. In his Essais, Montaigne preferred to keep silent about these intrigues and the difficulty he had in getting reelected, simply congratulating himself on the confidence in him shown by the people of Bordeaux, “who did everything in their power to gratify me both before they knew me and after.”¹⁰³ A declaration that is as political as it could be, but is nonetheless far from reality.

In Montaigne’s time, the castles of Le Hâ and Trompette were royal enclaves within the city. These strongholds played an important role in the military control of the city. However, many conflicts regarding jurisdiction, precedence, and more specific problems connected with the establishment of a military garrison made it difficult for the city administrators and the captains commanding these strongholds to coexist. Brawls, quarrels, and various kinds of conflicts between soldiers and city dwellers were frequent. Between September and December 1582, Montaigne and the jurats had presented a memorandum to Matignon to demand the right to place guards near the castles and fortifications. The governors prevented sentinels “for guarding the city” from being stationed near their strongholds.¹⁰⁴ Having this zone forbidden to sentinels but controlled by the city was an intolerable situation for the mayor and the jurats.

Montaigne had repeatedly complained about the abuses committed by the governors of the castles of Le Hâ and Trompette, who hindered the free passage of city patrols around their strongholds and delivered, in exchange for payment, certificates of indulgence to the residents, even going so far as to exempt them from serving as guards and paying taxes. The true conflict actually had to do with the space situated near the castles that the soldiers occupied. There, for example, they maintained vegetable gardens. Housewives even had to pay a fee to spread their laundry to dry on the grass of the prairies that surrounded the strongholds. The captains also levied a tax on all the merchandise stored at the foot these two forts. Vaillac, the captain of the Trompette castle, forbade carts to pass over the fausse-brayeviii bridge, which forced residents and merchants who wanted to bring their wares into the city to make a long detour. The jurats and the mayor firmly pointed out that passage over this bridge was supposed to be controlled by the city authorities, in particular in order to facilitate bringing carts into the city at the time of the wine harvests. It was always useful to use arguments bearing on the wine industry in a city that depended chiefly on the trade in wine.

According to the jurats, the esplanade that extended between the first houses in the Chartreux quarter and the Trompette castle belonged to the city, but Merville and Vaillac thought differently. In response to the numerous remonstrances made by the mayor and the jurats, the governors wrote in turn and in common a long memorandum in which they discussed various points regarding the control of the area adjacent to the king’s military sites.¹⁰⁵ In reality, they were above all attacking Montaigne, who had wanted to build a storage depot on an empty site that he owned near the Trompette castle. It was a piece of land he had inherited from his father, Pierre Eyquem. In an initial will dated February 4, 1561, we find mentioned “one of the wine storage depots I have at the site of the Chartreux lès Bourdeaulx, nearest the Trompète castle…. Also the place adjacent to the aforesaid storage depot toward the Trompète castle, containing the aforesaid place, which is to be built upon, fifty feet from the river as far as the vineyards.” The purchase went back to 1527–28, a period for which we have ninety-seven notarized documents drawn up by the notary Pierre Perreau for the “nobleman Pierre Eyquem, squire, lord of Montaigne and of Belveyou.” These property acquisitions had allowed Pierre Eyquem to considerably enlarge his lands and increase his real estate holdings in the region and in Bordeaux.¹⁰⁶ Merville and Vaillac’s complaint was therefore directed against the mayor personally.

Montaigne had apparently obtained special permission from the king (requested and granted during one of his visits to the Court) to build on this land, but Vaillac vehemently opposed this, invoking a security problem. Vaillac denounced a conflict of interests between Montaigne, the mayor of Bordeaux, and Montaigne, the private person. Montaigne defended himself: “As for the place of the aforesaid castle, outside the city, on which the lord Montaigne, currently mayor of the city, claims to have some right to build, which Vaillac … prevented him from doing, which gave the mayor and the jurats reason to complain about him.”¹⁰⁷ The captain of the Trompette castle warned the king that because of the disturbances it was dangerous to construct houses and depots against the walls of the castle or near the garrison posts; he noted that it had recently been decided to tear down homes in the area that were too close to the castle’s ramparts. He accused Montaigne of profiting personally from his term as mayor and of using his office to obtain special privileges.

This was a supreme insult for Montaigne, who prided himself precisely on not deriving any advantage from his office. He responded to Merville and Vaillac’s memorandum with another memorandum addressed to Matignon, in which he refuted the grievances filed against him and accused in turn the captains of having it in for him personally because of the dark affair of his reelection. He explained the matter of the building site this way: “And regarding the place that is outside the city, between the Trompette castle and the Chasteaulx [Chartreux], it is not only now that this complaint has been made by the mayor and the jurats, but their predecessors have often filed a grievance about it.”108 His memorandum ends with a defense of the freedom of the citizens and of their privileges. In their turn, the mayor and the jurats accused the baron of Vaillac of having helped fraudulently to bring wine from the Haut Pays into Bordeaux, to the great detriment of the bourgeois of the city. That was an argument that did not fail, as one can imagine, to rally the merchants behind Montaigne’s cause. In politics, it is sometimes necessary to find allies where one does not necessarily expect them. Throughout his life, Montaigne was able to attract the support necessary to advance his personal interests. Thus in May 1588, Montaigne demanded a dispensation (in the form of a request) from the parlement in order to bring into Bordeaux “fifty barrels of wine produced by his house of Montaigne.” Contrary to the city’s customs, and certainly after the intervention of well-placed persons, the parlement authorized him to bring this wine into the city on the condition of having it conveyed “by Catholic people and sailors” and after presenting a certificate proving that the grapes had been harvested on his land.¹⁰⁹

In the matter of the storage depot, Montaigne’s defense insisted that this was an old affair that they had to put behind them. But Vaillac brought the matter directly to the attention of Henry III during one of his sojourns to the Court in April 1583. The king seems to have allowed himself to be convinced that there was a conflict of interests and that Montaigne had indeed used his office to obtain personal advantages. In response to Vaillac’s accusations against Montaigne, the king wrote to Matignon, asking him for a clarification of this affair:

However much the permission that was sent to the mayor of Bordeaux to build on the site that he claims belongs to him near my castle of Trompette may have been made as a result of the earlier ones, still, having seen the memorandum presented to me by the baron of Vaillac regarding this case, and considering also what he told me orally, I have deemed it necessary, for the good of my service and the security of the aforesaid castle, on which depends that of my city of Bordeaux, to defer the execution of the aforesaid permission until I have been further informed in greater detail and truthfully about its consequences. By which means you shall forbid, on my behalf, the mayor to make use of it until I have ordered otherwise, and you shall send me a true map of the castle and the site, on which the distance between the two shall be specified; and you shall also tell me what you think should be done about it, and if the content of the memorandum presented by the baron of Vaillac is true and if you consider that it was appropriate to revoke the aforesaid permission to build on the aforesaid site. I shall be happy to buy it from the mayor, so that he might have no reason to complain, because I do not desire to do him any wrong; consequently, you can discuss it with him, and if you think it needful, send me his response.110

After investigating, Matignon finally decided in favor of Montaigne, but he was certainly also biased. Another year had been lost in quarrels that cost Montaigne dearly. He finally obtained his revenge on Vaillac when Matignon disarmed Vaillac and deprived him of his command of the castle of Trompette in April 1585.

Lord Merville, captain and governor of the castle of Le Hâ, had decided to be a candidate in the municipal election of 1583. This was not the first time he had tried to seize the mayor’s office. Eight years earlier he had already campaigned to replace Charles de Montferrand, but had not succeeded in defeating the president Joseph Eymar, a man of the long robe. At that time, he had already tried to have the election nullified by arguing that Eymar did not come from the nobility. However, the king had reminded him that “this election was approved by His Majesty for this one time, without having any consequences, this office being reserved for gentlemen pursuing the profession of arms.”¹¹¹ Letters of ennoblement were conferred on Eymar in order to resolve the problem. In his Traité de la noblesse, Laroque explains that “the office of mayor of Bordeaux has always been so considerable that the people of Bordeaux, instead of seeking a noble origin in the mayor’s office, have had nobles of high rank as mayors.”¹¹² However, this remark is far from corresponding to reality, since at the time of Montaigne the “nobility” of several mayors of Bordeaux had been contested. Well informed about these disputes, the author of the Essais had no intention of allowing himself to be put on trial for false claims to nobility. Merville had numerous influential supporters, notably a large contingent of members of the parlement led by the second president of the parlement, Jean de Villeneuve (in reality, he was the true head of the parlement, because the first president, Benoît de Lagebaston, was very old and no longer exercised his office) and his wife, Marie Potier, who served as campaign directors for Merville. This Villeneuve was a first cousin of Montaigne’s mother, and we know the difficult relations that Montaigne had with her.

The Merville clan also included the archbishop of Bordeaux, Antoine Prévost de Sansac; a general prosecutor (not named); the councillors Léon de Merle, lord of Montsalut, and his son-in-law, Pierre de Termes; the councillors Jean de Lange, Pierre Dunoyer, and Bertrand Duplessis; and the clerk Jehan de Pontac. In all, more than fifty councillors overtly sided against Montaigne—more than two-thirds of the parlement. At this time, the parlement was largely dominated by intransigent Catholics who had all rallied behind Merville. It is likely that they disliked this former colleague who supported a policy of conciliation with the king of Navarre. In addition, Montaigne had not left a memorable trace of his service in the parlement, and many people were surprised that this gentleman raised to the office of mayor of Bordeaux had been able to form so quickly political alliances prejudicial to their interests as members of parlement.

During Montaigne’s reelection, we see emerging resentments that are not strictly speaking political but are also rooted in personal animosities within the Montaigne family. Among the opponents of Montaigne’s reelection were Montaigne’s own brother-in-law, Richard de Lestonnac, and also a “lord of Montaigne” who was a councillor, both of whom were very active in support of Merville and did all they could to get him elected. The “lord of Montaigne” was none other than Geoffroy de Montaigne, lord of Bussaguet and of Gaujac, a cousin of Michel de Montaigne who had become a councillor in the parlement in 1571. We will recall that when Montaigne retired from the parlement he had lent Geoffroy 2,000 livres to buy his office. The cousins did not get along, and this was not their first disagreement. The most serious of these occurred in 1575, during the settlement of the heritage of their uncle, the canon Pierre de Gaujac. Family relations were extremely tense, and the author of the Essais aroused a jealousy disguised behind religious dissensions. His brother, Thomas de Beauregard, and his sister, Jeanne de Lestonnac, had adhered to the Reformation and thus created a religious cleavage within the family. For almost three months, Geoffroy de Montaigne put pressure on his colleagues in the parlement to get Merville elected. We must also mention the repeated squabbles between Montaigne and his mother, especially at the time when Pierre Eyquem’s will was executed, which continued to feed resentments between members of the family. These divisions within a single phratry are in no way astonishing in a city like Bordeaux, where power had historically been held by a small number of great families that had exploded politically and were prepared to tear each other apart at any time.

The nobility, the members of parlement, and the clergy thus tended to lean toward Merville, but Montaigne retained the support of the bourgeoisie, which was on the whole rather satisfied with his first term as mayor. By manipulating the method of election Montaigne succeeded in short-circuiting Merville and his supporters. The role of the Council of Thirty (now reduced to twenty-four electors designated by the jurats) was to elect and to advise the jurats. This was the level at which the deck was stacked, since Montaigne and his friends nominated notables favorable to his reelection. In their turn, the notables named by the municipal administration elected three jurats aligned with the political program Montaigne had proposed. They were supposed to respect the secrecy of the deliberations, but leaks were inevitable. It was precisely this question of the nomination of the notables and the overrepresentation of the bourgeoisie among them that provided the grounds for the accusation of electoral “fraud” made by Montaigne’s enemies.

As was traditional, on August 1, 1583, the twenty-four electors forming the Council of Thirty met and reelected Montaigne to a second term of two years. They also elected three new jurats favorable to Montaigne. Merville and his friends contested this election. They found a technical legal problem in Montaigne’s election to the mayor’s office, and also considered the election of the three jurats irregular because it had not made sufficient appeal to the representation of the nobility. Their argument was based primarily on a point of interpretation regarding the election of the mayor and the jurats as it was described in the city’s statutes in the ordinance of 1550: the text says that “instead of the mayor who used to be elected for life, and received thirteen hundred eight-three livres and fifteen sols in wages per annum, henceforth one [mayor] will be elected every two years and will have no wages other than two robes a year, in the colors of the aforesaid city.”113 The election of a mayor “every two years” (de deux ans en deux ans) is subject to interpretation. Does the text say that a new and different mayor must be elected every two years, or that the election simply takes place every two years? In any case, Montaigne did not take the precaution of requesting a royal dispensation before running for a second term.

So far as the jurats were concerned, the city’s privileges did not specify more explicitly the former customary representation that consisted in electing two representatives for the nobility, two for the bourgeoisie, and two among the magistrates. The nobility’s consultation to name its representatives was also normally carried out on good terms, a practice that seems to have been forgotten in this election. After Merville’s complaint, a legal proceeding was instituted by the seneschal’s lieutenant, Thomas de Ram, who had the indictment introduced before the parlement. Montaigne replied to this attack by trying to have recused more than fifty councillors who had overtly sided with Merville during the campaign. Merville and President Villeneuve simply demanded the annulment of the election of the mayor and the three jurats, Raymond Budos, Jean de Lapeyre, and Jean Claveau. Meeting at first with no opposition, they won a semivictory, because while Montaigne’s reelection was upheld, the election of the three new jurats was declared invalid, and they were forbidden to take office until the Council of State had ruled on the matter. The jurats were suspended pending the completion of a complementary inquiry and the king’s decision. In fact, this suspension went into effect officially only after notification of the Council of State’s ruling in February 1584. The records of the Council’s deliberations have been preserved. They confirm Montaigne’s reelection but declare “null and abusive” the election of the jurats. Montaigne had barely avoided a political rout, probably thanks to Matignon’s direct intervention with the king.

Thus it was on technical points that Montaigne’s reelection was contested, but the true reason was obviously political. Since the publication of the city’s new statutes, it was not unusual for a mayor to be elected for a second term. In his Essais, Montaigne remarks that “the term is two years; but it can be extended by a second election, which happens very rarely. This was done in my case, and had been done only twice before: some years earlier to Monsieur de Lansac, and recently to Monsieur de Biron, Marshal of France, to whose place I succeeded.”114 But it is also true that an election or reelection required the consent of the king, who apparently was not consulted when Montaigne was reelected in 1583. Montaigne was accused of getting elected in secret, thanks to his “bourgeois friends” who had probably manipulated the notables to ensure that they had the necessary number of votes to defeat Merville. The claim that the election of the jurats had been rigged was not without foundation, and the king himself was troubled by this not very honorable stratagem used by a member of the nobility.

This incident directly implicating Montaigne at the time of his reelection allows us to assess the vague borders that existed between private interests and public offices. Unhappy about having been lectured by the Council of State, Montaigne and the jurats went on the offensive and denounced in turn the suspicious agreements between President Villeneuve and Lord Merville, the governor of the castle of Le Hâ. The petition filed by the jurats who had been recused by certain members of the parlement lists the links of family and friendship between Villeneuve and Merville:

They [the jurats] consider President Villeneuve very suspect …, because he is a great and close friend of Lord Merville, with whom he drinks and eats, and because of the great and close friendship existing between Merville and the president [Villeneuve] and his wife, Dame de la Terrasse, who insistently sought to cause Lord Merville to seek election as mayor of the city in the last election and to have Lord Merville preferred in that office over Messire Michel de Montaigne, knight of the king’s order and lord of the aforesaid place, a close relative of the aforesaid lord president [Villeneuve], this latter president having greater friendship for Lord Merville than for Montaigne his relative, and the president has conceived a great enmity against the aforesaid lord of Montaigne, petitioning because they could not have Lord Merville elected mayor, having pretended on several occasions, in their hatred for him [Montaigne], that he would make them and the city see his power and that they would pay a high price for the displeasure that [they] caused him in this place, which is so notorious that the aforesaid petitioners beg the court not to require more ample proof.115

The jurats’ petition contests the first inquiry conducted by Thomas de Ram, royal councillor and lieutenant general, who is said to have also organized a cabal to get Merville elected. Faced with the failure of this machination, Ram “is said to have had interjected the appellation … that would have been pleaded in court.” The jurats then accused Ram of being a difficult fellow who had quarreled with their “predecessors and conceived a mortal and capital enmity for them and is even supposed to have said that, in hatred of the fact that Lord Merville had not been elected mayor, he would now be a governor, referring, as might be expected, to the aforesaid lord.” The mayor and jurats also denounced Jehan de Pontac, the clerk, because he had married a close relative of Merville and was consequently one of his close friends and “insistently sought to get him elected mayor of the city in the last election and because the latter Lord Merville was not [elected] he conceived a great enmity against the petitioners.” One would think we had returned to the early 1560s, when the councillors in the parlement mutually challenged and recused each other. Montaigne had clearly left one nest of vipers only to find himself in another just as execrable.

It was not in the king’s interest to openly take sides in what was above all a petty squabble. Henry III tried to straddle the dispute, not wanting to alienate Montaigne, who, alongside Matignon, had always conducted himself as a loyal servant. But he also had to mollify the governors of his two strongholds in Bordeaux, especially because they had powerful supporters not only in the parlement but also among the religious authorities. For that reason, the Council of State’s document sought to split the difference, concluding that the nobles had to have equal representation in the jurade and that “those of the nobility of the city must be called upon to have a voice and give their votes, and be admitted and elected to the aforesaid offices like other residents.” The Council of State settled the argument with an arbitration in the form of a conciliation, hoping in that way to forestall an open war between the city’s administration and the parlement. Montaigne could “just this time” (pour cette fois) “be re-elected,” but his political practices were nonetheless condemned:

considering that for some good reasons it would be good that the election of the aforesaid Montaigne remain confirmed just this time, and that he be continued in the office of mayor for the two years that are extended for him without this having any consequence, prohibiting the residents of Bordeaux ever again to use such prorogations in the election of the mayor beyond and above the two years that were set by the order of the late King Henry in the year 1550, unless they are allowed to act in this way by the express concession of His Majesty.116

Two contradictory documents, dated February 4, 1584, simultaneously confirmed and invalidated the mayor’s tenure of his office but decided against the jurats Budos, Lapeyre, and Claveau. One of them charges Montaigne:

Regarding the petition that His Majesty referred to his Council of State and which the nobility and the more worthy part of the native bourgeois and citizens of the city of Bordeaux presented to him, requesting that the election carried out on the first day of August of the Lord of Montaigne to be the mayor of that city be continued for the next two years after having been mayor the two preceding years, and the election also carried out on the same day of messieurs Budos, Lapeyre, and Claveau to be new jurats of the city, both [elections] will be declared null and abusive and as such cancelled and annulled and thus proceed to hold new elections of a different mayor and jurats of the city.

We do not know exactly how Montaigne survived the invalidation of his election. Once more, Matignon probably appealed directly to the king. We have no further documentation of this reelection battle. Montaigne seems to have once again emerged victorious from this situation, because in the end his term of office was renewed.

Since the jurats remained suspended, the jurade now had only three active members. Deprived of half of its officials, the jurade moved slowly and could no longer serve as an intermediary with the king to restore the three jurats to their offices. Montaigne and the jurats let Matignon know they were unhappy about this, and they asked him once again to serve as an intermediary between them and the king to ensure the reinstatement of the jurats. To this end they sent Henry III a long petition—dated March 5, 1584—in which they replied point by point to the accusations that had been made against them. They presented a direct appeal to the king, referring to the “particular passions” of their enemies, and at the same time stressing that they had acted in accord with all the rules. Montaigne personally denounced the suspension of the three jurats, which resulted in slower public service (service publicq retardé) and hindered the proper functioning of the municipal administration:

Some residents of this city of yours having, out of particular passions, appealed the election and continuation of the mayor in the person of Lord Montaigne, and the election of three new jurats carried out last August, and pursued their appeal in your court of parlement, they abandoned their initial suit without having summoned us, and presented to Your Majesty a petition seeking new ends, full of false facts, and in our absence obtained a ruling from your Council of State by which, among other things, the aforesaid new jurats have been forbidden the exercise of their offices until they have been heard in your Council;

Sire,

Had we been so fortunate as to have been allowed to present our reasons we would have hoped to show Your Majesty that all the forms included in our statutes and privileges have been carefully and religiously observed in this election, and that it was a choice made by twenty-four wise men, notable and reliable citizens who all together duly carried out the election of these jurats, good, honorable men, as we have seen through experience with their conduct in their offices. The prohibition has since been made known to them, but without their being summoned to your Council, so that of six jurats there remain to us only three in office, who are by that much overloaded, and public service is slowed, something that requires prompt amendment and settlement which we very humbly beg Your Majesty to order for the preservation of our honor in the aforesaid election, and of the rights and privileges of the aforesaid city, in which we have been maintained by the kings who preceded you whom God absolve, and by Your Majesty up to the present, and not allow that such divisions be tolerated in the future, which can only engender disorder, confusion, and disrespect of our offices, as well as the decisions made by the rulings of your court of parlement, rendered in similar matters and confirmed by Your Majesty, the prosecutor and syndic of your city to cause you to hear more amply our complaints and grievances regarding this fact and others, had it not been that Monsieur the Marshal de Matignon, in his prudence, esteemed it not expedient for the present that any of us give up the service of your city.117

The petition was communicated to Matignon, who sent a report on the situation to Villeroy, a secretary of state. We can logically imagine that Matignon supported the three jurats who had been attacked and demanded their reinstatement. In any case, the affair came to an end in late April 1584, not without having created a profound resentment between Montaigne and a major fringe of the nobility and the parlement of Bordeaux. We do not know the exact outcome of this judicial challenge, but a few months later we find the names of the three jurats on several of the city’s administrative documents. It seems that they recovered the right to exercise their offices and that the affair was finally settled at the highest level.

Very much against his wishes, and perhaps because the political forces at play had already decided to which camp he was going to belong in order to get himself reelected mayor, Montaigne was unable to avoid forming political alliances that might have been unnatural and regarding which he preferred to remain silent in his Essais. We can understand that. Make no mistake, Montaigne was a political animal who must have taken into account the political situation, what Machiavelli had called “the conditions of the times.”118 The circumstances were such that Montaigne was obliged to defend the merchants’ cause to retain his power in Bordeaux and be reelected mayor. Practically, he chose a camp that he nonetheless rejected on ideological grounds. If we consider only these two incidents opposing Montaigne to the Bordeaux nobility, he seems to have been an ardent defender of the bourgeoisie and a sworn enemy of the two gentlemen who claimed to be the only true representatives of the king’s interests in Bordeaux. But one swallow does not make a spring, because the requirements of political governance do not always go hand in hand with personal affinities.

Manager of the City and “Tender Negotiator”

Although Montaigne was not “elected” (in the modern sense of the word) for his first term, he had acquired an incontestable political legitimacy when he was elected to a second term. He had gotten hooked on the play of alliances and political intrigues and henceforth took the measure of his responsibilities as the city’s leader. He was, moreover, very proud of his reelection, which he described as rare. He had been reelected thanks to the support of the bourgeoisie, and the time had come to keep his electoral promises. The beginning of a term in office is generally considered a propitious time to announce a political agenda for the coming years. It was in that spirit that, in early August 1583, Montaigne already undertook a revision of the Coutumier de Guyenne (Common Law of Guyenne).119 Similarly, shortly after his reelection, he cosigned with the jurats a letter of grievances that strongly resembled a list of political commitments he might have made during his reelection campaign. Here we find a Montaigne attentive to the people’s demands, especially those of the poor, who in a city like Bordeaux constituted around 20 percent of the population. The accelerated socioeconomic development of cities in France during the second half of the sixteenth century resulted in a decrease of population in the countryside. “Wanderers” came to take refuge in the cities and municipal administrations were sometimes confronted by serious problems of overpopulation and indigence.

Elected officials deplored the growing mendicancy in the city, and blamed it on the Wars of Religion that had led to an increase of poverty in the southwest. The jurats reaffirmed each parish’s responsibility to feed the poor and declared that “in addition the priors and administrators of the hospices, most of which were founded by the king and are dedicated to feeding pilgrims going to St. James and other religious sites, are obligated, on pain of having their temporal goods seized, to feed and house these pilgrims for the time stipulated by the aforesaid foundation, to prevent them from being forced to go begging through the city, as happens every day, to the great dismay of everyone.”120 This list of grievances, dated August 31, 1583, was an opportunity to remind the king that “the great mass of people has had to cope with new circumstances and calamities.” The mayor and the jurade expressed the wish that “all levies might be imposed equally on everyone, the strong carrying the poor, and suggest that it is very reasonable that those who have greater resources feel the burden more than those who survive only by chance and the sweat of their brows.”¹²¹ In the view of the jurats and the mayor, this social justice was supposed to make it possible to combat the increase in criminal activity inside the city walls. According to them, the fresh outbreak of thefts and attacks resulted from the impoverishment of the common people, who were being crushed by taxes. The city had paid a high tribute during the past two years, especially in the form of taxes levied to pay the wages of the members of the présidial courts, but also battling a deficit caused by the suppression of the tax during the fairs, the repair of the Cordouan tower, and the salaries of the chamber of justice, not to mention the contribution the king obliged it to make to the expenses of the Portuguese army.

Montaigne had hardly been reelected before he turned on the members of the parlement and denounced abuses related to tax evasion. Too many officers of the court were exempted from taxes, too many children of presidents and councillors had been declared noble and not subject to taxation, so that “now when it is necessary to levy some tax, it must be borne by the smallest and poorest part of the residents of the cities, which is completely impossible.”¹²² The mayor and the jurats complained about the fact that the richest and most opulent families of the city would have been exempt from these taxes “because of the privilege claimed by all the officers of the court and their widows, the officials handling your finances and elections, vice-seneschals, lieutenants, domestic officials in the service of Your Majesty and of the king and queen of Navarre, officials of the chancellery, of the mint, of the artillery, and soldiers garrisoned in castles and those who supply them.”¹²³

All these officials were considered nobles and escaped taxation. This was an astonishing reversal on Montaigne’s part, and it might be asked whether, in these attacks on the robins, he was not simply trying to get back at the group of members of the parlement who had actively opposed him during his campaign for reelection as mayor. His animosity toward the magistracy was not new, because he had suffered enough affronts in the course of the 1560s to retain a strong resentment against that profession. His Essais teem with barbs and mockeries aimed at the world of the magistracy. The time had come for him to express himself openly and take his revenge. In the course of the year 1583, Montaigne spoke out firmly regarding social justice and openly denounced the ennoblement of members of parlement and their families. At present, he spoke as a noble and seems to have forgotten his own family’s rise in society in another time when the Eyquems themselves benefited from the advantages and privileges he now denounced.

In the early 1580s, the city had a serious liquidity problem and showed an alarming deficit. Less and less money was flowing into the public coffers. Along with the jurats, Montaigne criticized the excessively large number of exemptions, and the city officials blamed a particularly extravagant ruling of the parlement solemnly proclaimed on April 6, 1583, that declared noble, and thus not subject to taxes, all the children of the presidents and councillors of the court. The king was increasing his largess to members of the parlement and their families, but the city saw in these political gifts a considerable loss of revenue. It was only fair that Montaigne should remember that the members of the parlement had recently actively sought to prevent his reelection. These fiscal exemptions, granted for purely political reasons, were opposed to the very principle of good governance of a city like Bordeaux, whose merchants and craftsmen paid an ever larger portion of the taxes. To be sure, the richest families had countless ways of escaping taxes, because the city’s bourgeois were also “free,” that is, exempt from taxation. Faced by the exemptions granted by the king to members of the parlement and to the bourgeois, the city had to impose still heavier taxes on those who did not enjoy these titles.

The mayor and the jurats reminded the king that by the privileges accorded by the king, “the knowledge and provision of certificates to all craftsmen, and the enforcement of the aforesaid statutes that are registered in the city belongs to the mayor and the jurats.”124 Their area of authority included, for instance, the regulation of keepers of taverns and cabarets, certified and erected into an “estate” to sell wine in the city. The jurats worried more particularly about a recent practice that allowed keepers of taverns and cabarets who sold wine in Bordeaux to be directly certified by royal officials. The former had thus “found a way to obtain edicts to make these certifications venal, together with the freedom to sell wine, by erecting new estates of tavern and cabaret keepers, which is a direct violation of the terms of these privileges” confirmed on December 21, 1556, and verified in the court of the parlement. The wine merchants were constantly trying to get around the tax by obtaining royal edicts authorizing them to sell wine without the approval of the municipal authorities and by writing themselves new statutes for their profession. Montaigne reminded the king that these professions fell within the purview of the jurats and the mayor and that the city would be driven into bankruptcy “if by your generosity it is not provided for, and if the aforesaid edicts obtained by circumvention and great pressure, as may be presumed, are not revoked and nullified, as the mayors and jurats and residents very humbly request and beg of you.”125 Soon another reform regarding the sale of wine was undertaken by municipal officials. This modification of the statutes concerned “the knowledge and provision of certificates to all craftsmen, and the enforcement of the aforesaid statutes that are registered in the city.” On this point, Montaigne and the jurats reasserted their authority in administrative matters.

Several other professions circumvented the city’s privileges and had succeeded in obtaining royal edicts that gave them greater freedom. The tax burden had been significantly decreased, and the city was no longer able to tax its craftsmen. In this context, a “great alteration of the public welfare” prevailed in Bordeaux, and the city could no longer meet its obligations, for lack of money. Because of its high cost, the judicial system had ceased to be accessible to the disadvantaged; what had earlier cost one sol now cost two: “and for one clerk who had to be paid, three [now] had to be paid, namely: the court clerk, an ordinary clerk, and the clerk’s clerk.”¹²⁶ The poorest people were forced to give up defending their rights. This all-out attack on the cost of justice in Bordeaux seems to have been Montaigne’s preferred hobbyhorse during the second half of 1583. We wonder about the personal motivations of the mayor, who intended to make life difficult for his former colleagues in the parlement.

The last grievance filed by the jurats in August 1583 addressed specifically the sale of offices. Montaigne reminded Henry III that the king’s justice had to be administered free of charge and “to the smallest number of the mass of people as possible.” The sale of judicial offices was officially prohibited. However, in practice, and “through the injure of time,” the multiplication of officials was greater than ever, “with the result that the poor people suffers greatly, at the same time that in the last year the court clerks in the city and sénéchaussée have been elevated in office and their salary increased.” The judicial bureaucracy increased excessively in size, and officials’ salaries were directly paid by those who used the judicial system, “so that the poor, not having the means to meet so many expenses, are usually forced to abandon the pursuit of their rights and what should be used to support their families or to pay for public necessities is in this way spent to satisfy the ambition of certain individuals to the detriment of the public.”127 The jurats asked the king to reaffirm their authority in this still-undecided matter and to remind everyone of the authority and competence of each person. They requested that offices, functions, and responsibilities be clearly defined.

During Montaigne’s first term, the city had levied a large sum to pay for the repair of the Cordouan lighthouse. However, nothing had been done. Already in the hands of the tax collector, the money raised had been “used elsewhere to the great detriment of the public,” since no repairs or even preparations for the work had yet been made in August 1583. Montaigne and the jurats urged the king to order this money to be put back in the city’s coffers in order to cover current expenses. To that end, Montaigne proposed to supervise personally, together with one of the presidents of the parlement and one of the treasurers, the expenses necessary for the restoration of the Cordouan lighthouse and to see to it that the money already paid out would be used to repair as soon as possible this light, which was considered crucial for navigation and commerce on the river. For example, on December 10, 1583, the mayor had signed a letter of remonstrance to Henry of Navarre in order to defend freedom of commerce on the Garonne. In 1584, Montaigne participated in the drawing up of a contract between Louis de Foix, the king’s official architect, and the city of Bordeaux, represented by Matignon, François de Nesmond, and Ogier de Gourgues, the secretary general of finances in Guyenne. The subject of this contract was the reconstruction of the Cordouan tower that stood at the mouth of the Gironde estuary.¹²⁸ On May 2, 1584, an agreement was finally reached for the repair of the lighthouse and was initialed by Matignon and Montaigne.¹²⁹

The mayor’s everyday activity sometimes consisted of arbitrations and unusual problems that divided public opinion. Thus the first important matter in Montaigne’s second term had to do with a criminal case that is reported in an order issued by the mayor and the jurats and dated August 15, 1583.¹³⁰ The mayor of Blaye, Pierre Duboys, had been murdered in Bordeaux a few years earlier in the course of an altercation on a city street. This crime dated from the time when Biron was mayor. A certain Gailhard Baudet, known as La Reballerye, was found guilty. The mayor and the jurats of Bordeaux sentenced him in absentia, but the matter was brought before the parlement of Toulouse, which asked that the relevant documents be sent to it. This amounted to an attack on the authority of the mayor and the jurats in a criminal case, and Montaigne decided to file an appeal to preserve the city’s privileges. The jurats Geoffroy d’Alesme, Jean Gallopin, Pierre Régnier, Jean de Lapeyre, and Jean Claveau supported the mayor. After being reelected to a second term, Montaigne ordered that the copies of the interrogation and the verification of the witnesses be retained, but he lost his appeal and had to yield to judicial decisions made in Toulouse. He was even forced to pay a fine for having slowed the transfer of the documents. The recent problems with the governors of the castles in Bordeaux at least allowed the municipal team to emerge more united than ever from this difficult moment.

The poverty that afflicted a growing part of the population of Bordeaux also raised the problem of supplying bread inside the city walls. The jurats reformed the regulation of bakers to facilitate the distribution of bread. The bakers henceforth had to have a three-month reserve of wheat. If the city experienced a bread shortage, the bakers had to pay a fine of hundred Bordeaux livres. The mayor’s office set up an agency to supervise the flour supply. But it was commerce, the sale and serving of wine, that most occupied the municipal administration and was the subject of most of the city’s regulations. On the wine question, Montaigne played a prominent role and was directly involved in the drafting and revision of decrees protecting Bordeaux wines.131 The number of tavern keepers authorized to sell wine retail rose from 75 in 1548 to 120 in 1556. They had to receive letters from the city, a kind of license to serve drinks. They were placed under the authority of the mayor and the jurats and had to swear before the city’s officials that they would not “defame or sell at low prices, or fraudulently, the wine of the bourgeois and residents of the city.”¹³² Those who sold or served wine had to pay a tax at the rate of six jars of wine from each barrel sold retail in a tavern, a hostelry, or a cabaret.

During Montaigne’s second term as mayor, the protection of Bordeaux’s wines was strengthened. A ruling of June 26, 1584, stipulated that “bourgeois wine^ix shall be sold before any other.”¹³³ Montaigne was once again going along with the bourgeois who wanted to retain their commercial advantages and prohibit the entrance into the city of wines from the Haut Pays. The wines of Castillon, Montravel, Saint Antoine, Sainte-Foy, Saint Pey, Sainte Radegonde, Duras, Gensac, Rauzan, Pujols, Cyvrac, Blaignac, and the Côtes de Blaye had to be “clearly labeled on both ends of every barrel” and, once labeled, had to remain in the suburbs (Les Chartreux) of the city, “and not inside it.” Every barrel of wine so labeled was taxed two sols and six deniers. The sale of bourgeois wines within the city had to be protected. This protectionism for Bordeaux wines was, of course, exactly what the local bourgeoisie wanted, and Montaigne repeatedly found himself involved in drafting these increasingly strict regulations that sought to promote and sell bourgeois wines. For example, selling wines from the Haut Pays in the city’s taverns was forbidden. The bourgeois were not allowed to buy wines from the Haut Pays or any other region on pain of losing their status as citizens of Bordeaux. To avoid fraud, it was also forbidden to sell wine on the Grave along the river.

Other professions also succeeded in benefiting from Montaigne’s election and were able to take advantage of a mayor receptive to their concerns. Thus courretiers, brokers “living in the city, solid people of good character and decent conversation” who stored barrels of wine until a deal was made between the buyer and the seller, saw their salary double after public discussion before the city’s General Council in 1584. Their number grew to forty-six while Montaigne was mayor. Their revenues rose from the earlier six sols per barrel of wine to twelve sols. Courretiers were forbidden to lodge foreign merchants in their homes, to store their merchandise in their houses, or to engage in “any traffic for them.” These rulings had recently been confirmed by rulings of January 31 and March 30, 1579. While Montaigne was serving as mayor, a ruling dated September 6, 1584, forbade anyone to harvest grapes without the express permission of the jurats of the cities, officials, and the local judges. On August 11, 1584, he undertook the revision of the statutes of pin makers, and on August 22, 1584, he and the jurats of Bordeaux signed a contract with Jacques Gaultier to teach painting in the city.134 The mayor of Bordeaux intervened personally in the many municipal initiatives that sought to moralize public life and transform a city that was chiefly oriented toward commerce into a haven of culture propitious to the development of the arts and letters.

During his second term, Montaigne devoted himself fully to the service of the city and denounced the abuses committed by royal representatives who, with the parlement’s help, were succeeding in getting around the authority of the jurats and the mayor. This kind of dispute regarding the sale of wine in Bordeaux was certainly not new, but the liberalization of the wine trade through the sale of “new statutes” to cabaret or tavern owners made it possible to escape the old statutes of these professions and thus considerably decrease the city’s revenues. Another municipal ruling of October 23, 1584, forced hotel keepers and cabaret owners to pay for objects “lost” in their establishments or stolen by their servants or household staff.¹³⁵ At the beginning of his second term, Montaigne seems to have been much more interested in the management of the city. Although at first he had adopted an aloof attitude, by 1584 he was completely invested in what made Bordeaux an economically prosperous city, namely, the wine trade. In a letter to the jurats, he expresses his satisfaction with the favorable result of a deputation to the king seeking the repression of fraud concerning wines in Bordeaux.¹³⁶ Montaigne had become, so to speak, the herald of the local bourgeoisie and had found more allies among the rich wine merchants than among the nobility of the sword. Let us not forget that Montaigne was a wine producer. He had gradually transformed himself into a manager.

In 1584, Montaigne’s political career changed drastically. Although his first term had been relatively calm, his second began with turmoil before it settled back into administrative routine. In the middle of his second term, things took a radically different turn and gave Montaigne the status of a national political figure by allowing him to take advantage of his office as mayor to negotiate a peace agreement between Henry III and Henry of Navarre, while at the same time being well aware that he remained subordinate to Matignon. The sudden death of Francis of Anjou, the duke of Alençon, on June 10, 1584, significantly changed the political map. The last Valois prince, Francis of Anjou had died without an heir, and Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, found himself the presumptive heir to the French throne. Confronted by this intolerable possibility, the Catholic princes hastened to organize a counterstroke by creating a Paris branch of the League in late 1584. From that moment on, Montaigne began to frequent people of a different caliber, for instance, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay.

Expelled from the Court by her brother, Margaret of Valois was at that point on her way to join her husband at the Court of Nérac, humiliated after being very badly treated at Bourg-la-Reine. Margaret complained to her husband, who wrote a harangue delivered to the king by Pibrac, who was at that time serving as Margaret’s chancellor. Henry of Navarre protested vehemently. Duplessis-Mornay, Bellièvre, and finally Pibrac demanded that amends be made for the insults inflicted on the queen. What was at first simply a sister’s indignation against her brother quickly took a political turn. Pibrac had to defend himself against suspicions that he had been the queen of Navarre’s lover. Henry of Navarre was himself put in a difficult situation by the arrival of his wife in the southwest; during the preceding summer, he had fallen in love with Diane d’Andoins, who had since become his mistress. Montaigne found himself in the middle of all these political and amorous turpitudes.

In the autumn of 1584—that is, halfway through his second term—Montaigne seems to have spent more time in his château than in Bordeaux. In December 1584, the jurats demanded that he be present in Bordeaux, but Montaigne begged off on the pretext that he had “the whole Sainte-Foy Court … to deal with.”137 He was preparing for the arrival of Henry of Navarre and his Court at his château, and suddenly attending the deliberations of the jurade had ceased to be a priority. He had moved closer to Henry of Navarre and now had, in the person of Diane d’Andoins, a faithful ally in his entourage.¹³⁸ Montaigne had known the Countess of Guiche in the 1570s. She was the widow of Philibert de Guiche, Count of Gramont, who had been killed at the siege of La Fère, which Montaigne has witnessed. Montaigne had dedicated La Boétie’s twenty-nine sonnets to this woman famed for her beauty, going so far as to make suggestive remarks to her, “inflamed by a fine and noble ardor whose details, Madame, I shall one of these days whisper in your ear.”¹³⁹ That day had come. The Countess of Guiche had been Henry of Navarre’s mistress since May 1582,¹⁴⁰ and Montaigne could count on his friendship with the widow of one of his close friends to have access to Henry of Navarre. Whereas Épernon’s mission during the first months of the year 1584 had failed, Montaigne thought that his friendship with the Countess of Guiche and Henry of Navarre could help him bring Henry of Navarre back to bosom of the Catholic Church. At least that was the idea he broached with the king and Catherine de Medici, or perhaps it was the Marquis of Trans who had suggested this approach to him, in order to make himself a necessary intermediary.

Henry of Navarre and his entourage reached Montaigne’s château on December 19. Urged by the Marquis of Trans to play the role of a political intermediary, Montaigne suddenly recovered national political ambitions that the everyday work of the mayor’s office had caused him to forget for a time. Henry of Navarre’s stay at Montaigne’s château led to a new political awareness on the part of Montaigne, who began to think he could play a role as a negotiator between the two Henrys. He reported this meeting in his almanac, stressing the importance of the event:

1584, the King of Navarre came to see me at Montaigne, where he had never been, and stayed there for two days, served by my people, without any of his officers. He would neither have his food tasted nor utensils provided, and slept in my bed. He had with him Messieurs the Prince of Condé, de Rohan, de Turenne, de Rieus, de Béthune et son frère, de La Boulaye, d’Esternay, de Haraucourt, de Montmartin, de Montataire, de Lesdiguières, de Poe, de Blacon, de Lusignan, de Clervan, Savignac, Ruat, Sallebeuf, la Rocque, La Roche, de Rous, d’Aucourt, de Luns, Frontenac, de Fabas, de Vivas and his son, la Burte, Forget, Bissouse, de Saint Sevrin, d’Auberville. The lieutenant of Monsieur the Prince’s company, his squire, and about ten other lords slept here, along with the valets de chambre, pages, and the soldiers of his guard. About the same number were lodged in the villages. From here, I had a stag released in my forest, which led him a chase for 2 days.141

Henry of Navarre’s stay at Montaigne’s château represented one of the high-points of Montaigne’s second term as mayor of Bordeaux. However, it was the master of the château and not the mayor who received the king and about thirty gentlemen. Montaigne was not unhappy to have resumed for the occasion his titles of lord and knight of the king’s order, which allowed him to distance himself from usual quarrels of the mayor’s office. Henry of Navarre’s visit to Montaigne restored the image of the author of the Essais, who glimpsed the possibility of serving his country in a different way. Thus it was as a gentleman of Guyenne and not as the mayor of Bordeaux that he entertained Henry of Navarre.¹⁴² It occurred just before the official birth of the Catholic League created by the Guises and supported by the king of Spain to prevent the accession of a Protestant—Henry of Navarre—to the French throne. This visit’s goal was probably to test the waters and to see if an entente between the two Henrys against the Guises might be possible.

The end of the year 1584 was thus marked by a rapprochement between Montaigne and Henry of Navarre, very certainly through the mediation of the Marquis of Trans. Three successive meetings with Henry of Navarre reoriented Montaigne’s political ambitions and offered him an opportunity to serve the king in the role of negotiator. These consultations made him a privileged interlocutor: first, at Mont-de-Marsan in December 1583, then at Bergerac in April 1584, and finally the visit to his château in December 1584. Montaigne’s reelection as mayor and his victory over the commanders of the castles of Le Hâ and Trompette had given him an appreciable political weight by demonstrating that he had a firm hand and that his calculations could be redoubtable. From this time on we sense in Montaigne a renewal of interest in high political missions and the role he could play in a rapprochement between the two Henrys, and consequently between the two religions. The meeting between Henry of Navarre and Matignon that Montaigne organized for June 12, 1585, marks the apogee of his role as a negotiator, at a time when his second term as mayor was coming to an end. In fact, for the past six months he had practically ceased to perform his duties as administrator of the city in order to devote himself almost exclusively to his role as intermediary. The greater volume of correspondence with Matignon shows that Montaigne considered himself a central figure in the negotiations that were being conducted between Navarre and Henry III.

Montaigne thought he had an advantage in his position as negotiator. The expression “a tender and green negotiator”—that is, a neophyte, but also one who is flexible—that he uses to describe his superiority over others in matters of diplomacy refers to a form of candor and spontaneity overrated in the service of the political:

In what little negotiation I have had to do between our princes, in these divisions and subdivisions that tear our nation apart today, I have studiously avoided letting them be mistaken about me and deceived by my outward appearance. Professional negotiators make every effort within their power to conceal their thoughts and to feign a moderate and conciliatory attitude. As for me, I reveal myself by my most vigorous opinions, presented in my most personal manner—a tender and green negotiator, who would rather fail in my mission than fail to be true to myself.143

Montaigne’s pretense of naïveté allowed him to keep his distance from partisan commitments, just as his direct style allowed him to present the points to be negotiated without worrying about the status of his interlocutors. He returned to the message he had tried to send the king in 1580 and had finally found a political interest in his novice’s attitude. Monopolized by his mission as negotiator, Montaigne neglected the business of the mayor’s office. He now had other, much more pressing priorities.

In early February 1585, Montaigne once again excused himself to the jurats for his absence and congratulated them on having begun the new year so well, “hoping to enjoy it with you at the first opportunity.”144 Despite his assurances, he seemed more concerned with Matignon. Since March, fighting had flared up again in Guyenne, and everything suggested that the king was going to come to an agreement with Navarre to oppose the League. In the southwest, most of the large cities were experiencing serious grain shortages, and the people were starving. Montaigne and Duplessis-Mornay thought that whatever entente between Henry III and Guise might emerge, “they will never be united in will.”¹⁴⁵ Montaigne had found a new center of interest that allowed him to consider himself a key figure in the negotiation between the royal party and the Huguenots. The geographical location of his château made him an ideal mediator, because he was able to make numerous rapid round trips between the Court of Navarre and Bordeaux, where he received his orders from Matignon. His château was near both Bergerac and Sainte-Foy, which were Protestant strongholds. Thus it was as much the geographical situation of his noble estate as his acquaintances in Catholic and Protestant circles that made him indispensable.

Montaigne had just learned of the reconciliation of Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois and hastened to tell Matignon about his discussions with the Protestants. He was delighted with the confidence Turenne showed in him, despite the fact that he “does not much rely on courtly words.”¹⁴⁶ Montaigne was extremely active in early 1585. He made several trips to the Fleix château, met Arnaud du Ferrier, the former ambassador to Venice who had recently converted to Protestantism, and met with emissaries from Henry of Navarre. One of Margaret’s couriers was arrested three leagues from Nérac while he was carrying a message from Catherine de Medici. As a loyal servant of the king, Montaigne informed Matignon of this episode and its possible consequences. Everything passed through him and he was in on all the secrets. He knew things that could not be written down. Matignon urged him to return to Bordeaux, but in a rare moment of independence from his superior’s orders, Montaigne refused, and suggested to the lieutenant governor that everything take place on his estate, or at least at Fleix. Montaigne was at the summit of his career as a negotiator and wrote to Matignon that “I shall never withdraw so deeply into solitude nor leave public affairs so far behind that I shall not retain a singular devotion to your service.”¹⁴⁷

However, Montaigne was not a member of Catherine de Medici’s diplomatic corps. Among the queen mother’s negotiators were Jean de Monluc (the brother of Blaise de Monlucx); Cardinal Charles of Bourbon; Guy du Faur de Pibrac; Louis de Saint-Gelais, lord of Lansac; Pomponne de Bellièvre; Louis II of Bourbon, duke of Montpensier; Paul de Foix; the brothers Nicolas d’Angennes and Louis d’Angennes; and Méry de Barbezières de La Roche-Chémerault.¹⁴⁸

But all these men, most of whom came from famous lineages, were too involved in the religious conflict that divided France. New men who were less aligned with one side had to be found, men on whom Protestants and Catholics could agree. A second tier of negotiators proposed by these experienced diplomats had the advantage of operating more freely and more secretly. When they traveled, they were not accompanied by an entourage as large as the one that accompanied first-tier negotiators. Confronted by the inflexible positions taken by the members of the League, it was also necessary to find men who were moderate while remaining loyal to the sovereign. There were not many such, because they ran the risk of being denounced as covert Gallicans.^xi This was the case for Paul de Foix, who had formerly advocated tolerance and had barely escaped being killed during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres. It was also the case for Lansac, who had been accused in 1556 of not having observed Lent. Most of these men knew Montaigne and proposed his name to Catherine de Medici, who had been informed of the twists and turns of Montaigne’s reelection as mayor of Bordeaux. As we have seen, she had known him since the early 1570s and certainly recalled the Roman episode of 1581. Indeed, four years earlier, Montaigne had almost obtained an ambassadorship, and thanks to Matignon’s recommendations, he had since acquired a reputation as a loyal servant of the king. He was to be among these less famous negotiators who brought the two Henrys together so that they could agree to oppose the Guises.

At this point, Montaigne began to correspond with Duplessis-Mornay, nicknamed “the Huguenots’ pope.”¹⁴⁹ Let us note that the exchange of messages between the two men was limited in time and was perhaps less amicable than has been said. Only six letters written in Duplessis-Mornay’s hand have been preserved. Since we cannot know for certain what Montaigne’s point of view was, we are reduced to imagining an essentially political dialogue that took place between November 25, 1583, and January 25, 1584.¹⁵⁰ These two months testify to an intense, remarkable political activity on Montaigne’s part. In a letter dated December 9, 1583, Duplessis-Mornay describes his exchanges with Montaigne as “profitable,” if not “pleasing”: “Monsieur, if my letters please you, yours profit me; and you know how much more valuable profit is than pleasure.”¹⁵¹ Duplessis-Mornay warns Montaigne and explains that the king’s actions against the Protestants have limits that will have to be respected. The reasons for this epistolary exchange have to do with the rise of Henry of Navarre, who, on the night of November 21/22, 1583, had retaken the town of Mont-de-Marsan, which had been in the hands of the Catholics since 1580. For Duplessis-Mornay, this was a legitimate operation, and he asked Montaigne to report it as such. The Fleix accords provided for the restitution of the Protestant cities, but this agreement had never been respected, and Navarre, who was furious with Matignon, had taken advantage of his military strength in the region.

For the Protestants in the southwest, the time for action had come. It is probable that Duplessis-Mornay saw in Montaigne an ideal go-between to present the king of Navarre’s point of view to Henry III. Duplessis-Mornay and the Protestants thought that Henry III was ill-informed about the situation in the region and saw in Montaigne a way of making their proposals heard. They had the wind at their backs, and someone like Montaigne was likely to understand better than anyone the true political stakes in the southwest. His character was far from being quick-tempered and this personal trait was considered an advantage. The Protestants also trusted his objectivity:

We are writing to you who are, in this tranquility of mind, neither moving nor moved by minor matters, for a different reason, not to assure you of our intention, which is well known to you and cannot be hidden from you, either because of your frankness, or because of the wit of your mind, but rather to pledge and testify to it for you, if need be, with regard to those who judge us ill, because they do not see us, and because they see instead through the eyes of others rather than through their own.152

These lines describe rather well the reputation Montaigne enjoyed at this time—that of a calm, peaceful, frank man independent of the conflicting parties. He was trusted to report objectively the reality on the ground. Duplessis-Mornay also seems to warn Montaigne that wit and frankness are one thing, but the Protestants have deep beliefs that will not be weakened by court gesticulation or diplomatic posturing.

Montaigne was now perceived as an ideal intermediary for the Huguenots, who were counting on him to open a dialogue between the two sovereigns and thus avoid an alliance between Henry III and the Guises. Montaigne responded favorably to this request to serve as intermediary between the two Henrys. From one day to the next, he abandoned his responsibilities at the mayor’s office and withdrew to his estate to be closer to the Court of Navarre. This was also a sign of independence. He considered this situation the logical continuation of his service to the king, and he wrote more and more reports to Matignon. Duplessis-Mornay explained Navarre’s new policy to Montaigne. His patience had been interpreted as weakness, and he was now obliged to make war to respond to the Catholics’ intransigence: “Our goal has been only to show that our peaceful behavior proceeded not from necessity, but from goodwill. This prince has realized that his patience was seen as the result of a lack of means. He wants it henceforth to have the name of patience, moderation, and virtue.”153 After the duke of Alençon’s death early in the summer, Henry of Navarre had to act as the future sovereign of the kingdom. Duplessis-Mornay trusted in Montaigne to convey the Protestants’ opinion: “I know that you are doing it as well as you can.” Although he was in the service of Matignon and Henry III, Montaigne considered himself to be working for Henry of Navarre as well. The political initiative had come from the Protestant camp, and Montaigne now felt himself to be above the usual ideological and religious lines. This situation as a privileged political actor did not last long.

The ephemeral correspondence between Duplessis-Mornay and Montaigne abruptly halted. Was that a sign of failure? Could Montaigne succeed, after all, in convincing the Catholic extremists that the Protestant demands were well founded? Certainly not. The last letter of January 25, 1584, alludes to the queen of Navarre’s mistreatment by her brother, which had more to do “with vinegar than with oil, and ill-suited to such a painful wound.” After having scoffed at the king of Navarre’s honor, the intransigent Catholics were no longer believed to be sincere, “and now quibble over trivialities.”¹⁵⁴ Duplessis-Mornay soon began to doubt that the negotiations would produce results. Montaigne tried to calm people down, at first with a certain success, but his policy of openness was doomed to fail. A letter from Turenne, undated but probably written at the end of the year 1584, attests to Montaigne’s influence at Navarre’s Court:

When he returned, the king of Navarre decided to see Marshal Matignon; I beg you to keep your hand in this, because we are well aware here that with your persuasion and depending on how you push, this can be done for the good of the service, for the king, for the peace of the government, and to the contentment of all good people…. I beg you to believe that I greatly cherish your friendship, and thus you can make use of me as a humble and sure friend who will obey you.¹⁵⁵

The League appeared as a third party and urged the king to fight Navarre. The Navarre’s conversion to the Catholic faith seemed the only compromise hoped for by Henry III, who sent the duke of Épernon to Navarre to convince him to convert. The Protestants put pressure on Navarre not to yield on any point and forced him to remain faithful to Protestantism.

In September 1584, Montaigne was able to ask Duplessis-Mornay to intercede on behalf of his youngest brother, Bertrand de Mattecoulon, to help him obtain the title of ordinary gentleman of the chamber of the king of Navarre, and, as if to recall his family’s ties with the regional aristocracy, he thus put his brother in the highest rank of the nobility of Guyenne. Montaigne carried the letter of receipt written from Montauban by Duplessis-Mornay to Macé Duperray, Navarre’s treasurer general, so that his brother might receive the wages of his office, which came to 500 livres per annum.156 This letter emphasizes that it concerns the “brother of M. de Montagne [sic], mayor of Bordeaux.” Montaigne’s recent political visibility allowed him to obtain a few favors for his family.

Montaigne felt close enough to Navarre to be able to hope that his mission as a negotiator might be successful. A letter addressed to Matignon, dated January 18, 1585, allows us to divine Montaigne’s strategy, particularly the pressure he put on Diane d’Andoins to convince Navarre to come to an agreement with Henry III to oppose the League. This was an intermediate avenue that still seemed to him possible:

My lord, according to several accounts given me by M. de Bissonse, on behalf of M. de Turenne, regarding the judgment that he makes of you and of the trust that this prince [the king of Navarre] has in my views, even though I do not much rely on courtly words, it occurred to me, at dinner, to write to M. de Turenne: that I bid him farewell by letter; that I had received the letter from the king of Navarre, who seemed to me to take good advice in trusting in the affection that you offer him to do him service; that I had written to Mme de Guissen to make use of his boat for convenience, this while I would work with you, and that I had advised him to display his passions only for this prince’s interest and fortune, and, since she had so much influence over him, to attend more to his utility than to his particular humors.¹⁵⁷

In this letter, Montaigne informs Matignon that he could hope to manipulate the Countess of Guiche and to use her to advance the king’s plans. This was a major advantage for him, and in the name of an old friendship, he was still counting on Diane d’Andoins to get the king of Navarre to convert.¹⁵⁸

On March 30, 1585, the League proclaimed, in a manifesto, its leaders’ decision to oppose the enemies of the Catholic religion and designated the Cardinal of Bourbon as the presumptive heir to the throne. Their man in Bordeaux was Louis Ricard Bourdon de Genouillac, baron of Vaillac and commander of the Trompette castle. The city was swarming with members of the League, and they were happy to cause Montaigne’s negotiations to fail. Facing the danger of seeing the city in the hands of supporters of the Guises, Matignon intervened with the authority given him by his title as lieutenant governor of Guyenne. The commanders of the castles of Le Hâ and Trompette had been a constant source of concern for the past two years, and Matignon feared that they might set up a counterauthority too favorable to the League.

In late April, Matignon summoned the presidents of the parlement, the mayor, the jurats, the main city officials, and Vaillac. During this meeting, he set forth the schemes of the members of the League who were fomenting a revolt against the sovereign and thus disturbing the peace in Bordeaux. He publicly accused Vaillac of disloyalty to the king and told him that the king wanted him to put Trompette castle back in his (Matignon’s) hands. Despite Vaillac’s protests, Matignon ordered the commander disarmed. Matignon’s determination took Vaillac by surprise. Turning to Montaigne, Matignon ordered him “to make the king’s intentions and his own known throughout the city, to dispose the bourgeois, truly faithful servants of His Majesty, to join his troops to subdue the soldiers in the garrison in the event that Vaillac’s punishment did not force them to surrender.” After a little hesitation, Vaillac agreed to surrender. Brantôme lauds Matignon’s skill in this affair. The disarming of Vaillac and his public humiliation was a kind of revenge for Montaigne as well.

Thus it was toward the end of his second term that the mayor acquired a national stature that made him think he might have a political career as a negotiator. However, this window quickly closed. In late July 1585, the Treaty of Nemours forced Henry III to accept the League’s demands and canceled the treaties of tolerance, the better to prepare for a test of strength with the Protestants. The policy of negotiation had fizzled out. Starting in July, 1585, Henry III chose rapprochement with the League, because no other military option was available to him. There was no longer any question of Henry of Navarre abjuring his Protestant faith. The whole policy of negotiation had been based on this sole possibility, which evaporated once again. Montaigne’s career as a negotiator had lasted only a few months, and his second term as mayor was drawing to a close. In this climate of bitterness and consternation, Montaigne briefly returned to the city’s current affairs.

In May 1585, a general review of the troops in Bordeaux had been the occasion for a political reflection on Montaigne’s part. Faced with the rise of the League’s power in Bordeaux, it was feared that there might be attempted assassinations of members of the city government, perhaps even including the mayor, who was perceived as close to the Protestants. Matignon was not in Bordeaux at this time, and the mayor’s office discussed the attitude to adopt and the precautions to take during this military review. In the chapter “Various outcomes of the same plan” (I: 24) Montaigne explains his decision:

Once it was planned to have a general review of various troops under arms. That is an excellent occasion for secret vengeances; never can they be executed with greater security. There were public and notorious evidences that things would go badly for some who had the principal and necessary responsibility for the reviewing. Various plans were proposed, since the matter was difficult and had much weight and consequence. Mine was that they should above all avoid giving any sign of fear, and should show up and mingle in the ranks, head high and countenance open, and that instead of cutting out anything (as other opinions mostly aimed to do), they should on the contrary urge the captains to instruct their soldiers to make their volleys fine and lusty in honor of the spectators, and not spare their powder. This served to gratify the suspected troops, and engendered from then on a useful mutual confidence.159

In this passage we find once again Montaigne’s favored strategy that consisted in putting himself above political agitations while at the same time displaying a certain naïveté that he erected into a means of political activity.

A few weeks later, Montaigne wrote to Matignon to inform him of the movements of the League armies commanded by Mayenne and Charles I of Lorraine. Bordeaux feared an armed intervention, and the mayor spent “every night either in the city in arms, or outside the city at the port.”¹⁶⁰ In particular, he kept an eye on Trompette castle and distrusted Vaillac and the king’s garrisons, which had been infiltrated by supporters of the duke of Guise.

As if the point was to remind Montaigne of the everyday duties of the mayor of a large city in France, from March to June 1585, when Montaigne was almost at the end of his second term, the city once again took up the recurrent problem of the refuse that had piled up on the streets, and, more generally, the pervasive unsanitary conditions.¹⁶¹ It was a public health question, and the mayor’s office set out to combat “the infection and stench of sewage, manure, refuse, and other filth” that was strewn on the streets, leading to “serious illnesses and deaths.” Once again, it was forbidden to throw garbage out the windows, including water in which cod, herring, and other fish had been soaked. The city forced business owners to replace broken or missing paving stones in front of their shops. It even went so far as to forbid flowerpots on windowsills, because they could fall and wound or kill passersby. In the Essais, Montaigne dedicated a short chapter on odors in cities, “Of smells” (I: 55), in which he expressed his annoyance with this problem created by the too rapid expansion of cities during the Renaissance.¹⁶² The Bordeaux mayor’s office had left a bad smell! Several contemporary testimonies indicate that despite disappointments that were in no way unusual for such an administrative responsibility, Montaigne took his role as mayor seriously, especially at the beginning of his second term, and that he was liked by the majority of the members of the jurade. His task had not been easy. He had tried to show consideration for the three political forces represented in the jurade, but he alienated the nobility and the robins.

In June 1585, Montaigne was back in his château. At that point, plague broke out in Bordeaux. The contagion was to last until November, and according to the chronicler Gabriel de Lurbe, it killed more than 14,000 persons. Coming from Libourne, a traditional refuge for the notables, where he had been along with Matignon, Montaigne went as far as the city’s suburbs in order to transfer his powers to the jurats. His last meeting with municipal officials did not go as planned. It occurred at the end of his term, and Montaigne had spent a large part of his time defying his enemies in a divided city. He felt that he had done his duty and considered himself no longer obligated to his fellow citizens, thinking he had performed his function as best he could. It was dangerous to stay in a city still affected by an epidemic, and a few years earlier Montaigne had avoided Paris for the same reason. His contemporaries, like his biographers, reproached him for his lack of courage. However, this accusation is unfair to a man who had concerned himself on several occasions with problems of public sanitation and health. It was a matter of good sense, and besides, he was mayor for only a few more days. He refused to go to Bordeaux to preside over the election of his successor and three new jurats, and proposed to meet the jurats outside the city.

Some people took offense at the cowardice of a lame-duck mayor who no longer had any political influence. They criticized Montaigne who, according to them, was abandoning his post and his responsibilities faced with the peril of the plague. Montaigne’s term was almost over; he had only two days to go, and the game was not worth the candle. He decided not to go and presented his excuses to the jurats, admitting that he was refusing to “take the chance of going into the city, in view of the bad condition it is in, especially for people who come from such good air, as I do.”163 He preferred to remain on his estate, which was not yet affected by the contagion. Who could blame him? The city had not yet adopted regulations for times of plague, and it was only in June 1588 that the responsibilities of each elected official in the event of an epidemic were clearly defined.

Moreover, the religious troubles had led to a new outbreak of pillaging by armed bands, and Montaigne had to protect his home from the picoreurs—marauders and brigands—who were operating in the region. After an initial refusal, he finally agreed to meet with the jurats in the little village of Feuillas to convey to them Matignon’s latest instructions as lieutenant governor of Guyenne. It was a question of electing a new administrator for the city. The elections took place and Matignon, now considered a Gascon, was named mayor of Bordeaux and remained in that office for twelve years, until his death in 1597. Although Montaigne’s term as mayor had begun with his absence, it ended with what his biographers have often described as a flight.

An “Administration … without a Mark or a Trace”?

A brief glance at Montaigne’s everyday routine as mayor of Bordeaux has allowed us to see the diversity of his activities and the amplitude of his ambitions during the years 1581–85. Although he had begun his term with an open political affinity that placed him resolutely on the side of the nobility to which he belonged, political reality on the ground quickly led him to adopt a pragmatic politics that often contradicted his own convictions and aristocratic aspirations. It was only after 1585 that his political career was considerably compromised, though not entirely halted. The failure of the negotiations between Henry III and Henry of Navarre pushed Montaigne to the sidelines. His subdued passage through the mayor’s office in Bordeaux led him to glimpse a new orientation for his literary activity. Thus the third book of the Essais—written after this experience as mayor of Bordeaux—offers us several testimonies to his recent disillusion with offices and honorific rewards.

Montaigne shows an attitude that is critical of but no less grateful to the “duties of honor” and “civil restraint,” because he had entered politics as a result of a favor or reward. On this point, the addition of the word recompense (reward) in the Bordeaux Copy is revealing:

Now I hold that we should live by right and authority, not by [Bordeaux Copy: recompense or by] favor. How many gallant men have chosen rather to lose their lives than to owe them! I avoid subjecting myself to any sort of obligation, but especially any that binds me by a debt of honor. I find nothing so expensive as that which is given me and for which my will remains mortgaged by the claim of gratitude, and I more willingly accept services that are for sale. Rightly so, I think: for the latter I give only money, for the others I give myself. The tie that binds me by the law of honesty seems to me much tighter and more oppressive than is that of legal constraint.164

What conclusion can we draw from Montaigne’s two terms as mayor of Bordeaux? The economic situation at the time of the Wars of Religion greatly influenced his contemporaries’ judgment. In October 1585, Gabriel de Lurbe sketched a rather critical picture of the city’s economic activity. According to him, the city and the region were in a wretched state, but he admits that the religious conflicts were largely responsible for this crisis.

A few people spoke out to reproach Montaigne for his political weakness and lack of involvement in the everyday affairs of the mayor’s office. He was a decent manager, but no one ever saw him as a visionary. Some read the Essais in the light of Montaigne’s administrative functions. For example, in his Entretiens, Guez de Balzac recounts the following anecdote:

Our man still tried to persuade us that the selfsame Montaigne had not had much success as mayor of Bordeaux. This news did not surprise Monsieur De La Thibaudiere, and he remembered well that in my presence he had one day told Monsieur De Plassac-Méré, an admirer of Montaigne who praised him that day to the disadvantage of Cicero: you can esteem your Montaigne more than our Cicero all you want; I could not imagine that a man who knew how to govern the whole earth was not worth at least as much as a man who did not know how to govern Bordeaux.165

The question raised is whether Montaigne’s supposed failures as mayor of Bordeaux should influence our reading of the Essais. Can we give a theoretical account of the works without taking an interest in their author’s social existence?

The author of the Essais did not contradict his critics: “Some say that my administration passed without a mark or a trace. That’s a good one! They accuse me of inactivity in a time when almost everyone was convicted of doing too much.”¹⁶⁶ Montaigne could have done more, but the political price would have been even higher. The acceleration of public life resulted in the multiplication of negative judgments after Montaigne’s two terms as mayor, but most of these reproaches ignored the necessity of social stability in times of political and religious troubles—this constant preoccupation for social stability was perhaps less visible for his critics but no less essential for Montaigne. In politics, Montaigne never felt at ease with quantifiable results. He always defended the qualitative to the disadvantage of the quantitative, even if it made him seem nonchalant and indolent: “Some say about this municipal service of mine (and I am glad to say a word about it, not that it is worth it, but to serve as an example of my conduct in such things) that I went about it like a man who exerts himself too weakly and with a languishing zeal; and they are not at all far from having a case.”¹⁶⁷ Haste was never his strong point, and he almost always favored reflection and the status quo.

Obviously, Montaigne’s role was more that of an intermediary than that of a leader. He was expected to promote dialogue between Navarre and the king, under Matignon’s supervision, nothing more. From the outset, he had been chosen as mayor of Bordeaux to calm people down and slow somewhat the rhythm of political actions in the region. And on this point Montaigne had succeeded in calming things. A letter he sent Matignon makes his role perfectly clear: “My lord, I have just now received your [letter] of July 6, and very humbly thank you for indicating that you do not find my assistance disagreeable, by commanding me to get back to you. That is the greatest good I hope to receive from this public service of mine, and I hope to go meet you as soon as possible.”168 We must not forget that, as a “Protestant,” Henry of Navarre was forbidden to sojourn within the city walls. Nonetheless, he was the uncontested political and military leader in the southwest because he had succeeded in gaining the support of an appreciable number of members of the middle-level nobility.

Montaigne considered the mayor’s office a privileged space that could have positive repercussions on the national scale, and on this point he was not wrong.¹⁶⁹ Aware of the reproaches being made against him, he nevertheless said that his conscience was clear and that he felt he had done his duty: “I did not leave undone, as far as I know, any action that duty genuinely required of me.”¹⁷⁰ However, this claim—made shortly after the fact, since Montaigne expresses it in the edition of the Essais published in 1588—still shows a trace of bitterness. As had already been the case fifteen years earlier at the parlement of Bordeaux, Montaigne was unable to avoid personal conflicts. The mayor’s office had never been a goal in itself, because managing the city had remained rather distant from his conception of public life. On the other hand, from the moment that his administrative function allowed him to acquire visibility on the national level, he distanced himself from the jurats to play in the big leagues and to try to influence politics on the national scale. He took up his duties as mayor almost a year late, and we see that he detached himself from activities related to that office before the end of his second term. Montaigne was engaged full time in the work of this office a little more than two years out of the four that he held it. Thus as we might expect for a mayor of the fifth-largest city in France who managed to be absent half the time, his record of achievement is rather slim. The political situation in Guyenne might have required greater attention, but Montaigne—in the course of 1585—had finally ceased to believe that he could influence a state of affairs that was constantly being redefined by the various episodes of a merciless war between Catholics and Protestants.

During the summer of 1585, a single lesson could be learned: Montaigne’s service as mayor was a failure so far as the reconciliation between Henry III and Henry of Navarre was concerned. The duke of Guise and his supporters in Bordeaux had not made this rapprochement any easier. The edict of Nemours issued on July 7, 1585, made Navarre an outlaw. When Montaigne left the mayor’s office, nothing remained of the compromises envisaged a few months earlier. Like many politiques, and in view of recent developments, Montaigne shared the feeling that the League had become the kingdom’s true enemy. In this sense, the end of Montaigne’s term as mayor marked the beginning of a new chapter in the Wars of Religion. The division between Catholics and Protestants was greatly surpassed by the rise in power of the duke of Guise, who was now acting on his own. The house of Lorraine was gaining the ascendant among the people, and particularly among the bourgeoisie in the large cities. In his role as negotiator between the two Henrys, Montaigne was sidelined by the omnipresence of the Catholic extremists. His political experience in Guyenne had legitimately given him an opportunity to hope for responsibilities on the national level, but the rise of a third party upstaged him and complicated his plans.

In the third book of his Essais, Montaigne inserted a chapter devoted almost entirely to his experience in the public sphere. “On husbanding your will” (III: 10) answers many of the questions and reproaches that were addressed to him by his friends and contemporaries regarding his management of the city or his style of governance. Montaigne explains himself, presenting an image that is distinguished from the realpolitik often formulated at the time, first of all by Machiavelli. This chapter was for the most part written immediately after his service as mayor, when he returned to his château after having been on the road for almost six months, keeping far away from the plague that was raging in Guyenne. It was during this second withdrawal from the world that Montaigne wrote the third book of the Essais, from March 1587 to January 1588, in a period of political inactivity that led to a redefinition of his literary project.

Montaigne admits that he could sometimes seem detached from the responsibilities incumbent on him: “I do not engage myself easily. As much as I can, I employ myself entirely upon myself.”171 He develops an individualist position with regard to social relationships: “My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves,”¹⁷² or again: “The main responsibility of each of us is his own conduct.”¹⁷³ This judgment after the fact is an understandable reaction. Montaigne’s setbacks in politics forced him to work out a theory of turning inward on himself. That was when what modern criticism learned to appreciate in him was born: an introspection that allows the subject to judge and “taste” himself. The isolation provided by writing confirms a forced distancing from public life; literary introspection results from a political failure. It might even be suggested that the form of the essay is the product of a political reality that forced Montaigne to withdraw to his estate, because he had failed to have a career in the service of the state and the king. Not being able to list or comment on his successes as an administrator and politician, Montaigne began to talk about himself, for lack of a better subject. His political defects thus naturally became human qualities. For example, he confesses his lack of commitment, which he transforms into a positive attribute: “I do not know how to involve myself so deeply and so entirely. When my will gives me over to one party, it is not with so violent an obligation that my understanding is infected by it. In the present broils of this state, my own interest has not made me blind to either the laudable qualities in our adversaries or those that are reproachable in the men I have followed.”174

Montaigne failed in politics because he was “too human”; that, at least, is the idea that he would like to spread after his two terms as mayor of Bordeaux. His unconditional confidence in people is supposed to have caused him to be deceived. In the same way, his alleged difficulty in conceiving of people as aggregates or groups sharing a single ideology is supposed to be revealed as a disadvantage for someone who felt at ease only in individual relationships. He was never a party man, and his personal judgment was ill adapted to political platforms or positions based on unnatural alliances. Ultimately, Montaigne was a lone wolf in his political behavior. The Essais allowed him to invert his experiences and to emphasize the positive flipside of a coin that had been considerably tarnished by his experience as a public man.

Montaigne’s humanism, as it was conceptualized starting in 1585, implies a renunciation of politics. His book, which was first published in 1580 as an essentially political book, was gradually transformed into a humanist book that testifies to an individual experience presented as universal. The 1588 edition marks a decisive turning point, that of reflection on and evaluation of earlier experiences. He had done his work seriously, but without ever confusing private and public life: “If people have sometimes pushed me into the management of other men’s affairs, I have promised to take them in hand, not in lungs and liver; to take them on my shoulders, not incorporate them into me; to be concerned over them, yes; to be impassioned over them, never. I look at them, but I do not brood over them.”¹⁷⁵ This is more an observation than a philosophy. Montaigne notes that by nature, people like to serve, continuing in the voluntary servitude that had fascinated him in La Boétie. “Men give themselves for hire,”¹⁷⁶ he writes. In serving others, people lose their judgment and their freedom, Montaigne seems to say, as if by drawing this distinction he was situating himself outside the social and the political. For example, we might wonder about his election to a second term. Did he not owe it to the temporary alliances he was able to form—in a purely political way—with the bourgeoisie? Did he really think that chance alone made it possible for him to be elected? That is what he claimed immediately after his experience as mayor of Bordeaux: “Fortune willed to have a hand in my promotion.”¹⁷⁷ However, this remark is contradicted by reality. Even if politics always involves an element of chance, since Machiavelli we know that the essence of politics consists in minimizing the role played by fortune in order to increase the role played by free will. Whatever he says, Montaigne knew Machiavelli well enough to be aware of this fundamental rule of politics.

Montaigne engaged in a literary exercise that consisted in producing a theory of detachment when faced with the proximity of events: “We never conduct well the thing that possesses and conducts us.”178 For Montaigne, when a politician is called upon to serve, he must become a technician or a technocrat:

He who employs in it only his judgment and skill proceeds more gaily. He feints, he bends, he postpones entirely at his ease according to the need of the occasions; he misses the target without torment or affliction, and remains intact and ready for a new undertaking; he always walks bridle in hand. In the man who is intoxicated with a violent and tyrannical intensity of purpose we see of necessity much imprudence and injustice; the impetuosity of his desire carries him away. These are reckless movements, and, unless fortune lends them a great hand, of little fruit.¹⁷⁹

Montaigne justifies his service as mayor by explaining that his detachment was the only way to properly manage the city’s affairs. Moving things along without becoming too involved is in a way the good manager’s modus operandi. What was perhaps only a character trait thus becomes a political philosophy.

The mayor had not proposed any great reforms—apart from those desired by the bourgeois representatives in the jurade, particularly the revision of the statutes of the artisanal professions—but faced with the urgency of the national situation, he could hardly be blamed for that. Politics too often amounted to a series of hasty reactions, and Montaigne wanted to preserve his image as a reflective man. For him, the time of politics, like the time of the Essais, was not linear, and it is in this sense that his perspective on the events of his age constantly forced him to compare the present situation with examples from the distant past. Thus being reproached for inaction became a mark of honor for Montaigne, who criticizes those who act without having weighed the consequences of their actions. The author of the Essais thinks that “most of our occupations are low comedy,”¹⁸⁰ scenes independent of one another and of limited value in the tragedy of the Wars of Religion.

Politics comes down to a question of the roles that we play at a given moment and in relation to the circumstances in which we find ourselves: “We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.”¹⁸¹ After 1588, Montaigne added the following observation to this passage: “It is enough to make up our face, without making up our heart.”¹⁸² He had learned to play roles in his scholarly curriculum at the College of Guyenne, but he always remained aware of this very clear difference between appearances and reality. The mayor was a borrowed role, or rather a series of roles that had been able to disconcert those who believed they could situate him politically. With a certain success, Montaigne covered the whole of the religious and political spectrum of his period, even giving the impression that he occupied no stable place in it. He had the qualities of a chameleon, at least in the eyes of others. However, he had never fallen into the Machiavellian trap of confusing means with ends. His judgments, Montaigne tells us in “Of husbanding your will,” bore on persons rather than on what they represented. Appearances had never impressed him, and he had learned to sound out people to discover what they really were deep within themselves. After 1588, Montaigne developed further this position that consists in emptying out the social part of life and relating it to a universal model or a human condition.

In the early 1580s, politics looked very much like the form of the essay. Everything was in movement and contested: “Notably in political matters, there is a fine field open for vacillation and dispute.”183 But politics also had its uses, and it was an honorable profession that our author was proud to have practiced: “Political philosophy may condemn, for all I care, the meanness and sterility of my occupation, if I can once acquire a taste for it…. I am of the opinion that the most honorable occupation is to serve the public and to be useful to many.”¹⁸⁴ Montaigne had made a different choice: “For my part, I stay out of it; partly out of conscience (for in the same way that I see the weight attached to such employments, I see also what little qualification I have for them; partly out of laziness [poltronerie].^xii I am content to enjoy the world without being all wrapped up in it, to live a merely excusable life, which will merely be no burden to myself or others.”¹⁸⁵ Poltronerie is not a word associated with our usual image of Montaigne. But “living his life” was a new priority, and this life no longer gave politics and public service a major place.

After 1588, Montaigne even claimed to have always been motivated by the search to discover the character of the men he had met in the course of his public service. The political realism prevailing at that time was based on the Machiavellian principle that gave priority to appearances over reality. Montaigne very early opposed this modern paradigm of politics and defended the possibility of judging human actions in a general way, apart from particular actions and words. This idealism with regard to politics was nonetheless contrary to his experiences as mayor of Bordeaux, four years during which he had to show realism and political pragmatism. Despite this Machiavellian apprenticeship, Montaigne persisted in believing in a form of sincerity that transcended history and its events, leaving to others what he called “the chicanery of the Palace of Justice”: “You must not consider whether your action or your word may have another interpretation; it is your true and sincere interpretation that you must henceforth maintain, whatever it costs you. Your virtue and our conscience are addressed; these are not parts to be put behind a mask. Let us leave these vile means and expedients to the chicanery of the Palace of Justice.”186

Montaigne knew what he was talking about: his first career as a member of parlement had led him to be a better judge of the true stakes involved in family or clan quarrels; his second career as a public servant had revealed to him another logic of interests that were often petty and partisan. In both cases, these political experiences reinforced in him the desire for an ethics separated from any social practice. The de-historicized, de-politicized, and de-socialized individual was gradually becoming his subject of study. After 1585, Montaigne made more and more declarations intended to distance him from the events of his time, even going so far as to state that a century later, no one would remember the Wars of Religion. Renown itself was changed by this: “Renown does not prostitute itself at so cheap a rate. The rare and exemplary actions to which it is due would not endure the company of that innumerable crowd of petty everyday actions.”¹⁸⁷ From that time on, Montaigne repeated to anyone who would listen that he never confused his private being with his public life: “I have been able to take part in public office without departing one nail’s breadth from myself,” and he adds after 1588, “and to give myself to other without taking myself from myself.”¹⁸⁸ His political attitude is thus supposed to be modeled on his temperament: “In short, the occasions in my term of office were suited to my disposition, for which I am very grateful to them.”¹⁸⁹

The military operations that were breaking out in the region led to an increasing lack of security. In the chapter “Of physiognomy” (III: 12), Montaigne reports that marauders were at the gates of his château and were threatening his family: “I was writing this about the time when a mighty load of our disturbances settled down for several months with all its weight right on me. I had on the one hand the enemy at my door, on the other hand the freebooters, worse enemies.”¹⁹⁰ The civil wars had caused people to lose their moral compasses and had become a fatal disease. Good and evil were inseparable and the final judgment remained in suspense. Politics had been transformed into an illness whose advanced state made it impossible to distinguish the limbs affected: “In these epidemics one can distinguish at the beginning the well from the sick, but when they come to last, like ours, the whole body is affected, head and heels alike; no part is free from corruption.”¹⁹¹ All the usual ethical reference points had disappeared. Montaigne expresses, for example, his shame at seeing these armies composed mainly of foreigners with corrupt commanders leading them. He mentions Roman models, in which war was honorable and armies disciplined. To this “monstrous war” he opposes the noble war of the Cannibals, which corresponded more to a chivalric ritual than to the liquidation of one’s enemies. Although he preferred to keep silent about the Wars of Religion, he took pleasure in describing the warlike customs of the inhabitants of the New World, which confirmed him in his idea of the political.

After a first year as mayor in which he was rather proud to have been a “nonmayor,” Montaigne rapidly got caught up in the political game, hoping to make use of his position to seek further responsibilities on the national level. He had done his best to administer a city that could serve him as a springboard toward public offices closer to his ambitions in the service of princes. Confronted by the rising power of regional parlements, the mayor’s office was supposed to serve as a counterauthority to provide a firmer basis for royal power and to emphasize Montaigne’s competence as a proven negotiator. His mission was to be Matignon’s eyes and Henry III’s herald in a city that had a long tradition of administrative and political independence, indeed even of uprising against royal authority. The Wars of Religion had only poisoned a situation that had been tense for several generations, and Montaigne had not succeeded in imposing his conception of politics. He did not regret any of his decisions, and ended up attributing success—and his failure—in politics to chance. In the chapter “Of repentance” (III: 2), he claims that he had always “proceeded wisely”:

In business matters, several good opportunities have escaped me for want of successful management. However, my counsels have been good, according to the circumstances they were faced with; their way is always to take the easiest and surest course. I find that in my past deliberations, according to my rule, I have proceeded wisely considering the state of the matter proposed to me, and I should do the same a thousand years from now in similar situations. I am not considering what it is at this moment, but what it was when I was deliberating about it.192

Leaving office after two terms as mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne felt that he had performed his function well. If he had been able to do it over again, he would have made exactly the same decisions. A good administrator judges things on the spot, while a good humanist puts things in a universal perspective. The two positions were thus irreconcilable, and that is perhaps why Montaigne’s municipal service can be considered a failure. Too humanist to become a good manager, and too concerned with resolving current problems to leave a mark on the political history of his time, Montaigne did not succeed in establishing his way of seeing politics during his term as mayor of a municipality riven into pressure groups defending irreconcilable interests and ideologies. The practice of politics led him to discover what he called his “natural disposition,”¹⁹³ and the self could then be constructed on the ruins of politics.

ⁱ That is, a nobleman. [Trans.]

ⁱⁱ Here we are only counting the months spent abroad, and not his stay in the Paris region before he left for Rome.

ⁱⁱⁱ A unit of weight used by jewelers, equivalent to approximately half a pound. [Trans.]

^iv Les vins du haut pays were those produced inland from Bordeaux, as far away as Cahors and Gaillac, but “marked” and shipped through Bordeaux. [Trans.]

^v The coutume was a sales tax. [Trans.]

^vi The complete list of this chamber is as follows: Jean Séguier (maître des requêtes), Jehan de Lavau, Estienne Fleury, Jérosme Angenoust Jérosme de Montholon, Jehan Scarron, Guillaume Bernard, Adrien du Drac, Pierre Séguier (first president), Lazare Coquilley, Jehan de Thumery, Claude du Puy, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Michel Hurault de L’Hospital, Antoine Loisel (king’s advocate), Pierre Pithou (king’s prosecutor), Charles Poussemothe (notary, king’s secretary and clerk), Loys Perrot (king’s secretary and comptroller), Maître Truejan (clerk for the civil party), Rolland Neufbourg (huissier), and Jacques Le Maistre (bailiff).

^vii In November 1582 Loisel thanked and warmly praised the mayor for his work at the head of the city: “You will find there more particularities of your city and lands of the Bordeaux area. As in fact I don’t know to whom I could better address this conclusion than to the man who, having been mayor and one of the first magistrates of Bordeaux, and is also one of the main ornaments not only of Guyenne, but also of France as a whole.” La Continuation a Monsieur de Harlay, a speech given in January 1582 at the Jacobin convent in Bordeaux, was published only in 1595, in De l’œil des rois et de la justice (Paris: Abel L’Angelier), 78.

^viii A secondary defensive wall outside the main rampart. [Trans.]

^ix Wine produced by residents of Bordeaux. [Trans.]

^x Marshal of France since 1574 and later the author of the famous Commentaires de Messire Blaise de Montluc (1592), which Henry IV called “the soldier’s Bible.” [Trans.]

^xi Members of the French Catholic clergy who advocated limiting the pope’s control over governments and churches. [Trans.]

^xii Poltronerie. Frame translates this word as “laziness,” but it could also mean “cowardice”; both meanings are given in contemporary dictionaries. [Trans.]