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

This was the kind of confrontation that could happen at any time, to any person, and Montaigne often wondered about the best way of dealing with it. Is it wiser to face up squarely to your enemy and challenge him, or should you curry favor by showing submission? Should you throw yourself on the aggressor’s mercy and hope that his sense of humanity will make him spare you? Or is that foolhardy?

The problem is that each response brings its own dangers. Defiance might impress the other, but it might also infuriate him. Submission might inspire pity, but it is just as likely to draw your enemy’s contempt, so that he wipes you out with no more thought than he would give to stamping on an insect. As for appealing to his sense of humanity, how can you be sure that he has one?

These questions were no easier to decide in the violent sixteenth century than on an ancient Mediterranean battlefield, or in an alleyway in a modern city, facing up to a mugger. They are perennial, and Montaigne did not see any one good answer. Yet he never tired of exploring the question. Again and again in the Essays , he sets up scenes featuring two individuals in confrontation, one defeated and obliged either to beg for his life or show defiance, the other required either to show mercy or deny it.

In one such incident, described in the first essay in the book, the fifteenth-century Albanian military hero Skanderbeg was on the point of killing one of his own soldiers in a rage. The man appealed for pity, but Skanderbeg remained unmoved. In desperation, the soldier grabbed his sword and fought back — which so impressed Skanderbeg that his anger evaporated and he let the man go. Another story tells of Edward, Prince of Wales, who strode through a defeated French town ordering mass killings of citizens to left and right. He stopped only when he came to three men, cornered but still fighting. Admiring them, he spared their lives, and added as an afterthought that everyone else in the town might be spared as well.

These stories imply that defiance is a better policy. But the same essay looks at incidents that turned out differently. When Alexander the Great attacked the city of Gaza, he found the enemy leader Betis “alone, abandoned by his men, his armor cut to pieces, all covered with blood and wounds, still fighting on.” Like Edward, Alexander admired this, but only for a moment. As Betis continued to defy him, staring him insolently in the face, Alexander lost patience. He had Betis pierced through the heels and dragged behind a cart until he was dead. The defeated leader had gone too far, and with the wrong opponent.

Other stories show, just as clearly, the dangers of submission. Montaigne vividly remembered the case of Tristan de Moneins, the lieutenant-general who was lynched in a Bordeaux street after he presented himself too humbly to the salt-tax rioters in 1548. Once one has shown weakness and triggered a sort of hunting instinct in the other, all is lost. And there is rarely any hope if one really is facing a hunter. Montaigne was haunted by the image of a stag at bay after hours of pursuit, exhausted and trapped, having no option but to give himself up to the hunters—“asking for our mercy by his tears.” Such mercy will never be granted.

However many confrontations Montaigne restaged in his mind’s eye, they all seemed to suggest different interpretations and different answers. This is why they fascinated him. In each case the defeated party must make a decision, but so must the victor, for things can go badly wrong for him if he misjudges the situation. If he spares someone who interprets his generosity as weakness, he may be killed in turn. If he is too harsh, he will attract rebellion and revenge.

Christianity seems to offer a simple answer: the victor should always show mercy, and the victim should always turn the other cheek. But the real world cannot be relied upon to work that way — and neither could most Christians in this era of violent religious war. Montaigne paid little attention to theology: he was immersed in his classical reading and, as usual, seemed to forget the Christian angle. For him, in any case, the true difficulties were psychological rather than moral. Or if they were moral, it was in the broader sense of that term used in classical philosophy, where it did not mean following precepts but knowing how to make just and intelligent decisions in real life.

Montaigne’s view, on balance, was that both victim and victor should take the path that entailed placing maximum trust in the other — that is, like good Christians, the defeated party should seek mercy and the victor should grant it. But both must do this boldly, with an “open countenance,” free of cringing and submissiveness. A “pure and clean confidence” should characterize the situation on both sides. Montaigne would have found his ideal encounter in the scene that took place in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, when tanks moved in to suppress a demonstration. One man, incongruously carrying an ordinary shopping bag, stood calm and still in front of them; in response, the first tank’s driver stopped. Had the man been cowering or trying to escape, or, conversely, had he been yelling and waving his fists, it would have been easier for the driver to kill him. Instead, the man’s “pure and clean confidence” brought out a similar resolution in his opponent.

This would not work for a stag, where fellow-feeling is blocked by the hunting relationship; perhaps it would not work between an accused witch and a torturer, where fanaticism and obedience to roles would get in the way. War disrupts normal psychology too, just as mob hysteria does. Although the Tiananmen Square scene was violent, it occurred in what was technically peacetime, whereas battle creates an altered state of mind. In the classical world, and to some extent in Montaigne’s time, it was considered only right that a soldier in battle should be incapable of restraint. He should be in a furor: a fearless, ecstatic frenzy in which no moderation or mercy could or should be expected.

Montaigne found furor appalling, as he did most extreme states. He disliked the way Julius Caesar reportedly whipped up his soldiers to savagery before a battle with speeches like this:

Of all famous warriors, Montaigne most admired the Theban general Epaminondas, who was known for his ability to keep furor in check: once, in mid-battle and “terrible with blood and iron,” Epaminondas found himself face to face with an acquaintance in whose house he had stayed. He turned aside and did not kill him. That might seem unremarkable, but in theory a soldier should no more be capable of such conscious restraint than would a shark in a feeding frenzy. Epaminondas proved himself “in command of war itself,” as Montaigne wrote; he made the battle “endure the curb of benignity” at the very height of the ecstasy.

Montaigne suspected that the furor tradition was often used merely as an excuse. “Let us take away from wicked, bloody, and treacherous natures this pretext of reason.” Brutality was bad enough in itself; brutality on the excuse of an elevated mental state was worse. Above all, he deplored the holy zeal of religious fanatics, who believed that God demanded such extreme, unreasoning violence as proof of devotion.

Cruelty nauseated Montaigne: he could not help himself. He hated it cruelly , as he wrote, making a point of the paradox. His revulsion was instinctive, as much a part of him as the openness written all over his face. This was why he could not stand hunting. Even seeing a chicken having its neck wrung, or a hare caught by dogs, horrified him. The same perspective-leaping tendency that enabled him to borrow his cat’s point of view made it impossible for him to see a hare being ripped apart without feeling it in his own guts.