Early modern Europe · 1533–1592
Michel de Montaigne
French magistrate who invented the essay as self-examination
“What do I know?” was his motto: studying himself, he found human judgement shifting, custom-bound and fallible. He urged tolerance, since other peoples’ customs seem barbarous only to those who never question their own.
Life and thought
Michel de Montaigne grew up in a wealthy family near Bordeaux; his father had him spoken to only in Latin as a small child, so Latin was almost his first language. He served as a magistrate in the Bordeaux parlement, where he formed an intense friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 marked him for life. In 1571 he withdrew to the tower library of his château and began writing, while France was torn by its wars of religion; he later served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux.
He called his pieces essais — trials or attempts — and in them tested his own judgement on everything from friendship and cannibals to kidney stones. In the long “Apology for Raymond Sebond” he uses the ancient skeptics to show how weak reason is when it claims to know God or nature; his motto became “What do I know?” From self-knowledge comes humility and tolerance: in “Of Cannibals” he observes that each people calls barbarous whatever is not its own custom. Descartes, Pascal and every later essayist wrote in his shadow.