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

The noble savage was raised to a more exalted level by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another writer influenced by Montaigne — his annotated copy of the Essays survives. Unlike Diderot, Rousseau took primitive society to be something so perfect that it could not actually exist in any real part of the world, not even the Pacific. It functioned only as an ideal contrast to the mess that real societies had become. By definition, all existing civilization was corrupt.

In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality , Rousseau imagines what man might have been like without the chains of civilization. “I see an animal … eating his fill under an oak tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream, making his bed at the base of the same tree that supplied his meal.” The earth gives this natural man everything he needs. It does not pamper him, but he needs no pampering. Harsh conditions from infancy have made him resistant to illness, and he is strong enough to fight off wild beasts unarmed. He has no axes, but he uses his muscles to break thick branches unaided. He has no slingshots or guns, but he can throw a stone powerfully enough to bring down any prey. He needs no horses, for he can run as fast as one. Only when civilization makes man “sociable and a slave” does he lose his manliness, learning to be weak and to fear everything around him. He also learns despair: no one ever heard of a “free savage” killing himself, says Rousseau. He even loses his natural tendency to be compassionate. If someone slits a person’s throat under a philosopher’s window, the philosopher is likely to put his hands over his ears and pretend not to hear; a savage would never do this. A natural man could not fail to heed the voice within that makes him identify with his fellows — a voice that sounds very much like the one which calls Montaigne to feel sympathy for all suffering fellow beings.

If one reverses chronology and imagines Montaigne settling down in his armchair to read Rousseau, it is intriguing to wonder how far he would have followed this before tossing the book from him. In the early stages of this passage, he might have felt enchanted; here was a writer with whom he was in perfect harmony. A few paragraphs later, one imagines him faltering and frowning. “Though I don’t know …” he might murmur, as the wave of Rousseau’s rhetoric keeps swelling. Montaigne would want to pause and examine it all from alternative angles. Does society really make us callous? he would ask. Are we not better in company? Is man really born free; is he not filled with weaknesses and imperfections from the start? Do sociability and slavery go together? And by the way, could anyone really throw a stone powerfully enough to kill something at a distance without a slingshot?

Rousseau never stops or reverses direction. He sweeps along, and sweeps many readers with him too: he became the most popular author of his day. Reading a few pages of Rousseau makes one realize just how different he is from Montaigne, even when the latter seems to have been a source for his ideas. Montaigne is saved from flights of primitivist fantasy by his tendency to step aside from whatever he says even as he is saying it. His “though I don’t know” always intervenes. Moreover, his overall purpose is different from Rousseau’s. He does not want to show that modern civilization is corrupt, but that all human perspectives on the world are corrupt and partial by nature. This applies to the Tupinambá visitors, gazing at the French in Rouen, just as much as to Léry or Thevet in Brazil. The only hope of emerging from the fog of misinterpretation is to remain alert to its existence: that is, to become wise at one’s own expense. But even this only provides an imperfect solution. We can never escape our limitations altogether.

Writers like Diderot and Rousseau were drawn not only to the “cannibal” Montaigne, but to all the passages in which he wrote of simple and natural ways of life. The book in which Rousseau seems to have borrowed most from the Essays is Émile , a hugely successful pedagogical novel which changed the lives of a whole generation of fashionably educated children by promoting a “natural” upbringing. Parents and tutors should bring up children gently, he suggested, letting them learn about the world by following their own curiosity while surrounding them with opportunities for travel, conversation, and experience. At the same time, like little Stoics, they should also be inured to tough physical conditions. This is clearly traceable to Montaigne’s essay on education, although Rousseau mentions Montaigne only occasionally in the book, usually to attack him.

He insults Montaigne again at the outset of his autobiography, the Confessions —a work which might be thought to owe something to Montaigne’s project of self-portraiture. In his original preface (often omitted in later editions), Rousseau wards off such accusations by writing, “I place Montaigne foremost among those dissemblers who mean to deceive by telling the truth. He portrays himself with defects, but he gives himself only lovable ones.” If Montaigne, misleads the reader, then it is not he but Rousseau who is the first person in history to write an honest and full account of himself. This frees Rousseau to say, of his own book, “This is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth, that exists and will probably ever exist.”

The works do differ, and not just because the Confessions is a narrative, tracing a life from childhood on rather than capturing everything at once as the Essays does. There is also a difference of purpose. Rousseau wrote the book because he considered himself so exceptional, both in brilliance and sometimes in wickedness, that he wanted to capture himself before this unique combination of features was lost to the world.

I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist … As to whether Nature did well or ill to break the mold in which I was cast, that is something no one can judge until after they have read me.

Montaigne, by contrast, saw himself as a thoroughly ordinary man in every respect, except for his unusual habit of writing things down. He “bears the entire form of the human condition,” as everyone does, and is therefore happy to cast himself as a mirror for others — the same role he bestows on the Tupinambá. That is the whole point of the Essays . If no one could recognize themselves in him, why would anyone read him?

Some contemporaries noticed suspicious similarities between Rousseau and Montaigne. Rousseau was overtly accused of theft: a tract by Dom Joseph Cajot, bluntly called Rousseau’s Plagiarisms on Education , opined that the only difference was that Montaigne gushed less than Rousseau and was more concise — surely the only time the latter quality has ever been attributed to Montaigne. Another critic, Nicolas Bricaire de la Dixmerie, invented a dialogue in which Rousseau admits to having copied ideas from Montaigne, but argues that they have nothing in common because he writes “in inspiration” while Montaigne writes “coldly.”

Rousseau lived in an era when gushing, inspiration, and heat were admired. They meant, precisely, that you were in touch with “Nature,” rather than being a slave to the frigid requirements of civilization. You were savage and sincere; you had cannibal chic.

Eighteenth-century readers who embraced Montaigne for his praise of the Tupinambá, and for all his writings on nature, were gradually blossoming into full Romantics — a breed who would dominate the late years of that century and the early years of the following one. And Montaigne would never be quite the same again once the Romantics had finished with him.