Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Nîmes, ended by the Peace of Longjumeau.

Third Trouble (1568–70). Started by new anti-Protestant legislation, ended by the peace of Saint-Germain.

Fourth Trouble (1572–73). Started by the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres of Protestants in Paris and elsewhere, ended by the Peaceof La Rochelle.

Fifth Trouble (1574–76). Started by fighting in Poitou and Saintonge, ended by the “Peace of Monsieur.”

Sixth Trouble (1576–77). Started by anti-Protestant legislation at the Estates-General of Blois, ended by the Peace of Poitiers.

Seventh Trouble (1579–80). Started by Protestants seizing La Fère in Normandy, ended by the Peace of Fleix.

Eighth Trouble (1585–98). By far the longest and worst: started by Leaguist agitation, ended by the Treaty of Vervins and the Edict of Nantes.

Each followed the pattern established by the first and second wars. A period of peace would be interrupted by a sudden massacre or provocation. Battles, sieges, and general misery would ensue, until signs of weakness on one side or another led to a peace treaty. This would leave everyone dissatisfied, but would stay roughly in place until another provocation — and so the pattern cycled on. Even the last treaty did not please everyone. Nor were there always two clearly defined opponents. At least three factions were involved in most of the troubles, driven by desire for influence over the throne. These were wars of religion, like those brewing in other European countries during this period, but they were just as much wars of politics.

The end of one foreign conflict had made the civil wars possible in the first place, and the beginning of another would ultimately bring them to a close, after Henri IV declared war on Spain in 1595. The beneficial effect of this act was well understood at the time. During the final “trouble,” Montaigne observed that many wished for something like this. The violence needed draining out, like pus from an infection. He had mixed feelings about the ethics of the method: “I do not believe that God would favor so unjust an enterprise as to injure and pick a quarrel with others for our own convenience.” But it was what France needed, and what it got at last, from Henri IV, the first clever king it had had for years.

That was still a long way off in the 1560s, when no one dreamed that the horror could go on so long. Montaigne’s years in parlement spanned the first three troubles; even during periods of peace, there was much political tension. By the time the third war ended, he had had enough and was on his way to retirement from public life. Until then, his position in Bordeaux placed him in the thick of it, amid a particularly complex community. Bordeaux was a Catholic city, but surrounded by Protestant territories and with a significant Protestant minority, which did not hesitate to indulge in icon-smashing and other aggressive acts.

In one especially violent confrontation, on the night of June 26, 1562—a few months after the Vassy massacre — a Protestant mob attacked the city’s Château Trompette, bastion of government power. The riot was quelled, but, as with the salt-tax riots, the punishment proved worse than the crime. To teach a lesson to a city that seemed incapable of running its own affairs, the king sent in a new lieutenant-general named Blaise Monluc, and ordered him to “pacify” the troublesome area.

Monluc understood “pacification” to mean “mass slaughter.” He set to work hanging Protestants in large numbers without trial, or having them broken on the wheel. After one battle at the village of Terraube, he ordered so many of its residents killed and thrown in the well that you could put your hand in from above and touch the top of the pile. Writing his memoirs years later, he reminisced about one rebel leader who begged him personally for mercy after Monluc’s soldiers captured him. Monluc responded by grabbing the man’s throat and throwing him against a stone cross so violently that the stone was smashed and the man died. “If I had not acted thus,” wrote Monluc, “I would have been mocked.” In another incident, a Protestant captain who had served under Monluc himself in Italy, many years earlier, hoped that his former comrade would spare his life for old times’ sake. On the contrary, Monluc made a point of having him killed at once, and explained that he did this because he knew how brave the man was: he could never be anything other than a dangerous enemy. These were the kinds of scene that would recur frequently in Montaigne’s essays: one person seeks mercy, and the other decides whether or not to grant it. Montaigne was fascinated by the moral complexity involved. What moral complexity? Monluc would have said. Killing was always the right solution: “One man hanged is more effective than a hundred killed in battle.” Indeed, so many executions took place in the area that the supply of gallows equipment ran low: carpenters were commissioned to make more scaffolds, wheels for breaking limbs, and stakes for burning. When the scaffolds were full, Monluc used trees, and boasted that his travels through Guyenne could be traced in bodies swinging by the roadside. By the time he had finished, he said, nothing stirred in the whole region. All who survived kept their silence.

Montaigne knew Monluc, though mainly in later life, and took more interest in his private personality than his public deeds — especially his failings as a father and the regrets that tormented him after he lost a son, who died in his prime. Monluc confessed to Montaigne that he realized too late that he had never treated the boy with anything other than coldness, although in reality he loved him a great deal. This was partly because he had followed an unfortunate fashion in parenting, which advocated emotional frigidity in dealings with one’s children. “That poor boy saw nothing of me but a scowling and disdainful countenance,” Monluc would say. “I constrained and tortured myself to maintain this vain mask.” The talk of masks is apt, since, in 1571—around the time of Montaigne’s retirement — Monluc was disfigured by an arquebus shot. For the rest of his life, he never went out without covering his face to conceal the scars. One can imagine the disconcerting effect of an actual mask on top of the inexpressive mask-like face of a cruel man whom few people dared to look in the eye.

Throughout the troubled 1560s, Montaigne often went to Paris on parlement business, and apparently remained away through much of 1562 and early 1563, though he popped back to Bordeaux almost as readily as a modern car driver or train passenger might. He was certainly in the area in August 1563 when his friend Étienne de La Boétie died. And he must have been in Bordeaux in December 1563, for a strange incident occurred then, the most noteworthy of Montaigne’s few appearances in the city records.

The previous month, an extremist Catholic named François de Péruse d’Escars had launched a direct challenge to the parlement’ s moderate president, Jacques-Benoît de Lagebâton, marching into the chambers and accusing him of having no right to govern. Lagebâton successfully faced him down, but d’Escars challenged him again the following month, and in response Lagebâton produced a list of the court members he believed to be in cahoots with d’Escars, probably working for him for pay. Surprisingly, among these names appear those of Montaigne and of the recently deceased Étienne de La Boétie. One would have expected to find both firmly on Lagebâton’s side: La Boétie had been working actively for the chancellor L’Hôpital, of whom Lagebâton was a follower, and Montaigne too expressed admiration for that faction in his Essays . On the other hand, d’Escars was a family friend, and La Boétie had been at d’Escars’s home when he came down with the illness which would kill him. This was suspicious, and perhaps Montaigne came under scrutiny by association.