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

Montaigne understood the appeal of the fantasy, and shared it. Like wild fruit, he wrote, wild people retain their full natural flavor. This was why they were capable of such bravery, for their behavior in war was untainted by greed. Even the Tupinambá cannibal rituals, far from being degrading, showed primitive people at their best. The victims displayed astonishing courage as they awaited their fate; they even defied their captors with taunts of their own. Montaigne was impressed by a song in which a doomed prisoner challenges his enemies to go ahead and eat their fill. As you do, sings the prisoner, remember that you are eating your own fathers and grandfathers. I have eaten them in the past, so it will be your flesh you will savor! This is another of those archetypal confrontation scenes: the defeated man is doomed, yet he shows Stoic firmness in the face of his enemy. This, it is implied, is what humans would always be capable of if they only followed their true nature.

The prisoner’s song is one of two “cannibal songs” to appear in Montaigne’s Essays . The other, also from the Tupinambá, is a love lyric which he may have heard performed in Rouen in 1562, for he praises the sound of it: he describes Tupinambá as “a soft language, with an agreeable sound, somewhat like Greek in its endings.” In his prose translation, the song goes:

Adder, stay; stay, adder, that from the pattern of your coloring my sister may draw the fashion and the workmanship of a rich girdle that I may give to my love; so may your beauty and your pattern be forever preferred to all other serpents.

Montaigne liked the simple elegance of this, by contrast with the over-refined European versifying of his day. In another essay, he wrote that such “purely natural poetry”—among which he counted the traditional villanelles of his own Guyenne as well as the songs brought back from the New World — rivaled the finest found in books. Even the classical poets could not compete.

Montaigne’s “cannibal love song” went on to have an impressive little afterlife of its own, independent of the rest of the Essays . Chateaubriand borrowed it for his Mémoires d’outre-tombe , where he had an attractive North American girl sing something similar. It then migrated to Germany, where it flourished as a Lied throughout the eighteenth century — this in a country which otherwise took little early interest in Montaigne. The two cannibal songs, together with some complimentary remarks about German stoves, were the only fragments of Montaignalia to make much impact at all in that part of the world until Nietzsche’s time. “Adder, Stay” was translated by some of the best German Romantic poets: Ewald Christian von Kleist, Johann Gottfried Herder, and the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself — who produced both a Liebeslied eines Amerikanischen Wilden (“Love Song of an American Savage”) and a Todeslied eines Gefangenen (“Death Song of a Prisoner”). German Romantics especially favored songs about love and death, so it is not surprising that they took so eagerly to Montaigne’s transcriptions. What is striking is that they seized them from the text while ignoring almost everything else — but this is what all readers do, to a greater or lesser extent.

Montaigne, like Léry, could be accused of romanticizing the peoples of the New World. But he understood too much about the complexity of human psychology to really want to wipe half of it out in order to live like wild fruit. He also recognized that American cultures could be just as stupid and cruel as European ones. Since cruelty was the vice he deplored most, it is significant that he made no attempt to gloss over its role in New World religions, some of which were bloodthirsty indeed. “They burn the victims alive, and take them out of the brazier half roasted to tear their entrails out. Others, even women, are flayed alive, and with their bloody skins they dress and disguise others.”

He described such atrocities, but then pointed out that they seemed excessive mainly because Europeans were unfamiliar with them. Equally terrible practices were accepted nearer home, because of the power of habit. “I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts,” he wrote of the New World sacrifices, “but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own.” Montaigne wanted his readers to open their eyes and see . The peoples of South America were not just fascinating for their own sake. They made an ideal mirror, in which Montaigne and his countrymen could “recognize themselves from the proper angle,” and which woke them out of their self-satisfied dream.

Eighteenth-century German readers may have found little of interest in Montaigne other than his Volkslieder , but a new generation of French readers rediscovering him in the same period made more of his cannibals and mirrors than even Montaigne himself could have anticipated.

They were encouraged in this by a sleek modern edition which appeared in 1724. The Essays were still outlawed in France — it had been fifty years since the ban — but now the country began receiving a stream of smuggled Montaigne texts from England, where the French Protestant exile Pierre Coste had put together an edition for the new century. Coste deliberately brought out Montaigne’s subversive side, not by interfering with the text but by adding extra paraphernalia, most dramatically La Boétie’s On Voluntary Servitude , which he included in full with the edition of 1727. This was the first time the Voluntary Servitude had been published at all since the Protestant tracts of the sixteenth century, and certainly the first time it had appeared joined to the Essays . It altered Montaigne by association, and gave him the aura of a political and personal rebel, the sort of writer whose calm philosophy might conceal more turbulent meanings. Coste helped to create a version of Montaigne still popular today: a secret radical, who conceals himself under a veil of discretion. In particular, Coste’s edition made Montaigne look like a free-thinking Enlightenment philosophe born two centuries too early. Eighteenth-century readers recognized themselves in him, as so many do, and they felt amazed that he had needed to wait so long before meeting the generation truly capable of understanding him.

This new breed of “enlightened” reader responded passionately to his portrayal of the courageous Tupinambá. Montaigne’s cannibal Stoics aligned themselved with a new fantasy figure: that of the noble savage, an impossibly perfect being who united primitive simplicity with classical heroism, and who now became the object of a cult. Adherents of the cult kept hold of Montaigne’s sense that cannibals had their own sense of honor, and that they held up a mirror to European civilization. What they lost was Montaigne’s understanding that “savages” were also as flawed, cruel, and barbarous as anyone else.

Among the writers to fall upon Montaigne’s Tupinambá with delight was Denis Diderot, a philosopher who became famous for his contributions to the era’s monumental compilation of knowledge, the Encyclopédie , as well as for countless philosophical novels and dialogues. Diderot read Montaigne early in his career, loved him, and paid him the compliment of quoting the Essays in his own writings — usually, but not always, with due credit. In his short Supplément au voyage de Bougainville , of 1796, Diderot wrote excitedly about the peoples of the South Pacific, recently encountered by Europeans, and thus his century’s equivalent to native Americans in Montaigne’s time. Like the Tupinambá, Pacific islanders seemed to lead a simple life, almost in a state of grace. Less palatable aspects of their culture were easy to ignore, because Europe knew little about them. This left plenty of room to make things up, notably the idea that the islanders enjoyed hedonistic sex with anyone they liked at any time. In the Supplément , Diderot had one of his Tahitian characters advise Europeans that they need only follow nature to be happy, for no other law applied. This was what his compatriots wanted to hear.