Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is one of the most important philosophers of the Renaissance and one of the most influential writers in Western literature. He was born into a bourgeois family that had risen to nobility in less than two generations. It is thought that his father's family had Marrano origins (a name given to Spanish or Portuguese Jews). Young Michel's education was based on a plan drawn up by his father after consulting several humanist friends. Among the many eccentricities of this educational process, note, for example, that the first three years of his life were spent in an isolated hut within a peasant family, as his father understood that it was vital for his son to absorb from a very young age the hardships and way of life of the peasants whom his family was obliged to protect. A second objective was to make Latin the young man's primary language, so from the age of 4, and back at his father's house, he had a German tutor who did not speak French, only Latin; and all the servants who came into contact with the young man had to know Latin. Thus, the whole family spoke Latin. Through an innovative learning method that, in addition to books, involved games, conversation, meditation, and various activities, he learned classical Greek. This educational foundation, based on rules that prioritized the development of curiosity and the absorption of knowledge by the young man, led him, as an adult, to admit that his education had made him appreciate the notion of duty and duty fulfilled without it carrying a negative burden or any kind of weight. From the age of 7, he studied at a prestigious college in Bordeaux and graduated in Law, although it is not known for sure which was his alma mater. His rise was meteoric: from legal consultant to advisor to parliament to member of the Court of Charles IX, eventually achieving the most prestigious distinction conferred upon a French nobleman: the Order of Saint Michael. While still in Bordeaux, he had become friends with the poet Étienne de La Boétie, and upon La Boétie's death in 1563, some experts suggest, Montaigne felt the desire to communicate in a book that would replace his deceased friend, and there, perhaps, the genesis of his Essays. After his father's death, having inherited the family title, he dedicated himself to translations and the editing of the works of his late friend La Boétie. In 1571, he withdrew from public life, cutting off social and family contacts to live in almost total isolation in the tower of his castle, in a room lined with more than 1500 books. At this time, he began to write his masterpiece. Even from his isolation, and through letters written to the various people involved, he attempted a pacifying influence during the so-called Religious Wars that ravaged the end of the 16th century. After 10 years of isolation, and having begun to suffer from kidney stones, he still decided to travel through Europe, having published the first volume of his essays. Beyond the journey itself, Montaigne sought a cure for his ailment, having visited several thermal baths. He also completed a pilgrimage to Italy. During his absence, he was elected Mayor of Bordeaux, as his father had been before him. He returned to France to take up the office and was actively involved in local and national politics during a very turbulent period, while continuing to write, edit, and publish the remaining volumes of his essays (the last of which was published posthumously). He died in 1592, supposedly of throat cancer, an ungrateful death for someone who considered the art of conversation the most important. His Essays quickly became one of the most translated books of his time and had a clear and acknowledged influence on authors as diverse as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Joseph De Maistre, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Virginia Woolf, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jean Meslier, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Alexander Pushkin, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer, Isaac Asimov, Fulton Sheen, Albert Camus, and the second phase of William Shakespeare's works, to name just a few.