Michel de Montaigne

About this figure

Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533 at the family château near Bordeaux, into a family recently risen to wealth and minor nobility. Educated from infancy in Latin as his first language under his father's unusual pedagogical program, he trained as a lawyer and served as a magistrate in the Bordeaux parlement, where he formed a deep friendship with the writer Étienne de La Boétie, whose early death affected him profoundly. In 1571, in his late thirties, Montaigne largely withdrew from public life to the tower library of his estate, intending, as an inscription there declared, to devote his remaining years to freedom and repose.

There he began writing the essais, a term he effectively invented for the loosely structured, exploratory prose pieces he produced in expanding editions from 1580 until his death. Ranging over subjects from cannibals to thumbs to the education of children, the Essays are less arguments than a record of a mind testing itself, built on the conviction, summed up in his motto "Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?"), that self-knowledge and honest doubt were more valuable than dogmatic certainty. He drew heavily on classical authors, especially the Stoics and Skeptics, but filtered them through frank, often self-deprecating personal observation, a mode of writing with no real precedent in European literature.

Montaigne did not remain wholly retired: he served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux in the 1580s, a period of religious civil war in France, and worked to mediate between Catholic and Protestant factions, including an audience with King Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV. He continued revising the Essays until his death in 1592. The book was translated into English by John Florio in 1603, a translation that influenced Shakespeare, and later by Charles Cotton in the seventeenth century; it remains one of the foundational works of personal essay writing.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.