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

These sinister images would prove long-lived. In 1866, the literary scholar Guillaume Guizot was still calling Montaigne the great “seducer” among French writers. T. S. Eliot saw him the same way. And the modern critic Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani describes the Essays as “a prodigious seduction machine.” Montaigne works his spell through his nonchalance, his meandering and casual tone, and his pretense of not caring about the reader — all tricks designed to draw you in and take possession.

Subjected to such a machine, modern readers are often happy to lie back like Barbarella and enjoy it. Seventeenth-century readers felt more threatened, for serious matters of reason and religion were at stake.

Even during this period, however, other readers loved Montaigne for the pleasure he gave them. Several came overtly to his defense. In his Caractères , the aphorist Jean de La Bruyère suggested that Malebranche had missed the point of Montaigne because he was too intellectual and could not “appreciate thoughts which come naturally.” This easygoing naturalness, together with Skeptical doubt, would make Montaigne a hero to a new breed of thinker: the vague confederacy of wits and rebels known as the libertins .

In English, “libertine” brings to mind a disreputable Casanova-like figure, but there was more to them than that (as indeed there was to Casanova). Although some libertins did seek sexual freedom, they also wanted philosophical freedom: the right to think as they liked, politically, religiously, and in every other way. Skepticism was a natural route to this inner and outer liberty.

They were a varied group, ranging from the major philosopher Pierre Gassendi to more lightweight scholars like François La Mothe le Vayer and imaginative writers like Cyrano de Bergerac, then best known for his science-fiction novel about a voyage to the moon. (His role in a more famous story based on his protuberant nose came later.) Montaigne’s first editor, Marie de Gournay, may have been a secret libertine , along with many of her friends. Another was Jean de La Fontaine, author of Plutarch-style fables about animals’ cleverness and stupidity. He got away with these by keeping them gentle in tone, yet they still constituted a challenge to human dignity. Their premise was the same as Montaigne’s: that animals and humans are made of the same material.

Libertinism remained a minority pursuit, but a disproportionately influential one, because out of the libertins would evolve the Enlightenment philosophers of the following century. They gave Montaigne a dangerous yet positive new image, which would stick. They also spawned a less radical breed of salon socialites: aphorists such as La Bruyère, and La Rochefoucauld whose Maximes gathered together brief, Montaignean observations on human nature:

At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others.

The surest way to be taken in is to think oneself craftier than other people.

Chance and caprice rule the world.

And, as it happens, one La Rochefoucauld maxim provided a neat comment on Montaigne’s own seventeenth-century predicament:

We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.

As with Montaigne himself, much of what the libertins and aphorists said revolved around the question of how to live well. Libertins prized qualities such as bel esprit , which might be translated as “good spirits,” but was better defined by one writer of the time as being “gay, lively, full of fire like that displayed in the Essays of Montaigne.” They also aspired to honnêteté , “honesty,” which meant a life of good morals, but also of “good conversation” and “good company,” according to the French Académie’s dictionary of 1694.

Someone like Pascal did not even want to live like this; it would entail being distracted by the affairs of this world rather than keeping his eyes fixed on ultimate things. One imagines Pascal staring upwards into the open spaces of the universe, in mystical terror and bliss, just as Descartes stared with equal intensity into the blazing stove. In both cases, there is silence, and there is a fixed gaze: eyes rounded with awe, deep cogitation, alarm, or horror.

Libertins , and all those of the company of the bel esprit , did not stare. My dears! They would not dream of fixing anything, high or low in the universe, with gawping owl-eyes. Instead, they watched human beings slyly, from under half-closed lids, seeing them as they were — beginning with themselves. Those sleepy eyes perceived more about life than Descartes with his “clear and distinct ideas,” or Pascal with his spiritual ecstasies. As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychology — and thus also about philosophy—“were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.”

Nietzsche relished the irony of this because he abhorred professional philosophers as a class. For him, abstract systems were of no use; what counted was critical self-awareness: the ability to pry into one’s own motivations and yet to accept oneself as one was. This is why he loved the aphorists La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, as well as their forefather Montaigne. He called Montaigne “this freest and mightiest of souls,” and added: “That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth.” Montaigne apparently managed the trick of living as Nietzsche longed to do: without petty resentments or regrets, embracing everything that happened without the desire to change it. The essayist’s casual remark, “If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived,” embodied everything Nietzsche spent his life trying to attain. Not only did Montaigne achieve it, but he even wrote about it in a throwaway tone, as if it were nothing special.

Like Montaigne, Nietzsche simultaneously questioned everything and tried to accept everything. The very things that most repelled Pascal about Montaigne — his bottomless doubt, his “skeptical ease,” his poise, his readiness to accept imperfection — were the things that would always appeal to this other, very different tradition, running from the libertins through to Nietzsche and beyond, to many of his biggest fans today.

Unfortunately, in the seventeenth century, the resenters of Montaigne proved stronger than the devotees, especially once the former organized themselves and launched a direct campaign for suppression. In 1662, the year after Pascal’s death, his former colleagues Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld unleashed an assault on Montaigne in their best-selling book Logique du Port-Royal . Their second edition, in 1666, openly called for the Essays to be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books , as an irreligious and dangerous text. The call was heeded ten years later: the Essays appeared on the Index on January 28, 1676. Montaigne stood condemned, as much by association as anything else — for by now he was the favorite reading of a disreputable crew of fops, wits, atheists, skeptics, and rakes.

This marked the beginning of a dramatic decline in Montaigne’s fortunes in France. From their first publication in 1580 to 1669, new editions of the Essays had appeared every two or three years, together with popular reworkings by editors who often drew attention to the most Pyrrhonian passages. After the ban, this changed. The work in its full form could no longer be published or sold in full in Catholic countries; no French publisher would touch it. For years, it was available only in bowdlerized or foreign editions, the latter often in French and designed to be smuggled home for a nonconformist readership.