Montaigne always claimed that he was consubstantial with his book: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me—a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.”1 In the chapter “Of experience” (III: 13), he even hints that the form of the essay is heavily dependent on a life’s “practices” (usages): “I have lived long enough to give an account of the practice that has guided me so far. For anyone who wants to try it I have tasted it like his cupbearer.”2 The events of Montaigne’s life exercise an incontestable influence on the composition of the Essais. On the basis of that obvious fact, I have undertaken to trace the practices, rules, decorum, rituals, etiquettes, conventions, habits, and customs that governed the milieus Montaigne frequented.
Where it was not possible to verify particular attitudes and actions, I have appealed to the habitus of orders, clans, families, clienteles, and constituted bodies; social and political practices that emerged from the rivalry between the different social orders in the Renaissance: clerics, nobles, robins, bourgeois. In this way, I hope to have brought out the importance of corporatist and clientelist behaviors, notably in the parlementary, diplomatic, and administrative milieus in Bordeaux, without forgetting Montaigne’s accession to the middle-level nobility of Guyenne, the outcome of the Eyquem family’s long social ascent. As an ambassador extraordinaire, representative, mayor and governor of Bordeaux, negotiator between Henry III and Henry of Navarre, and a man the League had imprisoned “as a reprisal,” Montaigne constantly saw himself as a political actor and navigated between different pressure groups, sometimes abandoning his natural allies to join his former enemies.
To evaluate the social, political, and religious context in which Montaigne lived, I have turned to other texts and other actors who, at some point in their own professional or political careers, shared with him the same convictions and political positions. Of course, it is always difficult to generalize political behaviors and to extrapolate on the basis of particular observations. Despite these reservations, I am nonetheless able to affirm that the case of Montaigne is not an isolated one, and that his public conduct frequently corresponded to the reactions typical of political groups or parties. His aspirations, as they appear in his public life and in his Essais, indicate a qualitative change in the ideological reconfiguration that operated in his time. For example, the opposition between honor and utility, the main theme of the first chapter of the third book of the Essais, raises the problem of the decline of aristocratic ideals and the rise of mercantile values in the society of the late sixteenth century. All these elements, which could be defined as a sociology of the Essais, seem to me indispensable for understanding Montaigne’s relation to his writings; they must consequently be taken into account before undertaking any reification of the text into a literary or philosophical object. The sociological and the political are the presuppositions of the philosophical and the literary. My approach does not seek to make Montaigne’s singular consciousness disappear, but rather to emphasize that Montaigne has to be understood on the basis of the social and political facts that led him to write and act. Historical time—that of the Wars of Religion and Montaigne’s successive careers—literally structures the Essais.
In what way does the conception of a “political Montaigne” affect our reading of the Essais? To answer this question, we must first recall that in the Renaissance, literature and politics were intrinsically linked. If today Montaigne is viewed primarily as a man of letters, and secondarily as a philosopher, in the sixteenth century he was simply an author, just like all those who published a book. The boundaries separating literature, philosophy, religion, and politics were extremely porous. Montaigne dabbled in everything, and in this sense he was an author before he became a writer. In his work the essay is not solely a literary form, it is also the expression of the judgment or the critical mark of the mind. More a way of thought than a form of thought, the new genre of the essay, as it was invented and practiced by Montaigne, includes the author’s political and social beliefs as subjects of reflection, because reading and writing are essentially social.
Having one’s work printed is also an activity governed by motivations that go far beyond the simple assertion of an individuality. In the Renaissance, the book market was an integral part of a symbolic economy in which publications served as means of approaching the Court and made it easier to obtain favors. Montaigne’s works express professional expectations—in the form of a return on investment—even if these expectations are often not mentioned. Montaigne was constantly concerned with realizing his political ambitions, and the publication—or nonpublication—of the various works he undertook (the translation of Raymond Sebond, the edition of La Boétie’s works, the writing of the Essais, and the composition of the travel journal) was situated in the context of careers (in the plural) that he considered primarily political.
Seeking to grasp the variety of the points of view Montaigne expressed in his Essais has led critics to regroup and reduce the different printings of this book to a single text, a single edition, thanks to the representation on the same page of the famous strata of the text (A, B, and C) that refer to the 1580 and 1588 editions and to the manuscript additions on the Bordeaux Copy. However, when Montaigne published his first Essais in 1580, he did not yet enjoy the fame that was to make him one of the most celebrated authors of the French Renaissance. He had submitted to the Bordeaux publisher Simon Millanges the manuscript of a book that lay outside the publishing categories of the time. Eight years later, in Paris this time, he had his book published again, but the horizon of his expectations had changed considerably. For that reason, the Essais of 1580 are in no way comparable to what Montaigne’s project became starting in the years between 1585 and 1588.
The biographical approach has allowed us to bring out the way in which Montaigne accumulated text between 1572 and 1592, and to see how his relationship to writing was motivated by expectations that developed in relation to his political experiences. When he added a third book to the Essais in 1588 and revised most of the chapters in the first two books, Montaigne was fully aware that he was giving an unprecedented shape to his project, which was transformed forever by a withdrawal from public life. From that point on, it is impossible to generalize practices of reading and writing that changed in response to what was happening in the author’s life, from the first chapters—which were probably dictated to a secretary—to the last additions written in Montaigne’s hand in the margins of a printed copy of the Essais of 1588.
These philological and editorial observations help us understand better the reasons that encouraged Montaigne to publish his Essais in 1580, 1582, and 1588, and to prepare the new edition that he was working on when he died in 1592. Montaigne’s different enterprises in the literary domain, first as translator, then as editor, and finally as author, accompanied and promoted his political ambitions. These activities were ways of attaining his goals and are part of career strategies. However, late in life, Montaigne became a writer and a philosopher, and that is how he has been viewed by his posterity. This transformation of the text of the Essais followed a path marked by political successes and setbacks that led Montaigne to gauge the extent of his failure in public life and to withdraw into writing, for lack of a better alternative. Nonetheless, and no matter what the author of the Essais says about it, his public life remains inseparable from his private life, because after many trials and tribulations during the civil wars, it was his political efforts (essais en politique) that enabled him to find the right tone for a literary and philosophical genre that prefigured modernity.
Today, readers are still struck by the differences in content that radically oppose the Essais printed in 1580 and the last manuscript additions of the Bordeaux Copy. These variations, which concern both the form and the content of the text, reflect aims that changed over time. It has been necessary to “decompress” the text that we read in modern editions to restore a temporality that has disappeared from it. The object of this biography of Montaigne consists in recovering the time of writing the Essais and superimposing it on the time of history. Montaigne’s work on his Essais was far from homogeneous between 1572 and 1592; it almost always corresponded to successive intentions that were antithetical. As I have suggested, for that reason it is preferable to speak of “campaigns of writing” whose publishing history can be traced in the light of historical events and Montaigne’s political experiences. Montaigne found time to write during short periods of political inactivity, especially just after his second term as mayor of Bordeaux and again after his imprisonment in 1588. The first Essais of 1580 were a completely different kind of work; conceived in an aristocratic logic, they were presented as an activity very suitable for a country gentleman who had recently retired to his estate. Montaigne had not yet held public office, but he was already seeking to satisfy political ambitions that remained ill-defined and completely dependent on the goodwill of his patrons and the king. The relationship to writing changed in the course of the different editions and the author’s experiences; it was marked by career disappointments and successes whose ups and downs this study has described.
Approaching the Essais on the basis of Montaigne’s social and political motivations gives a new and often unexpected dimension to the text. This biography of Montaigne has led me to inquire into the process of the mutation of the publishing project of the Essais over time. It is in the relationship between public life and private life—which was already complex between 1570 and 1580, and became paradoxical after 1588—that we can find the keys to interpret a text that had distinct objectives for its author at different points in his life.