Michel de Montaigne

French Renaissance writer, philosopher and statesman (1533–1592), born in the family château near Bordeaux, raised from infancy with Latin as his mother tongue at his father's express wish, and the creator of the literary genre of the essay, both in name and in conception. Judge and mayor of Bordeaux during the bloodiest years of the French Wars of Religion, he retired at thirty-eight to the tower of his library — where he had seventy-six Greek and Latin maxims of his favourite authors carved into the ceiling beams — to devote himself to writing his Essays (1580, expanded until his death), a work he continually reworked and enlarged over two decades and which constitutes, in the author's own words, an honest, unembellished portrait of a single subject: himself. 'Every man bears the whole form of the human condition,' he wrote, and it is precisely this conviction that makes his essays — on friendship, education, the cannibals of the New World, death, experience, vanity — a universal exploration of the human condition through the most radical introspection yet practised in Western literature. His moderate scepticism, summed up in the question he had engraved on his coat of arms, 'Que sais-je?' ('What do I know?'), rejects all philosophical or religious dogmatism in favour of a tolerant, curious acceptance of human and cultural diversity — including a remarkably advanced defence, for its time, of the indigenous peoples of America and a mordant critique of European ethnocentrism. His digressive, conversational and deeply personal style decisively influenced Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Nietzsche and Emerson, among many others, making him one of the founding fathers of modern introspection.

What are Michel de Montaigne's main ideas?What is Michel de Montaigne's most important work?How would you summarize Michel de Montaigne's thought?

11 works

Themes addressed

Human nature The self and self-knowledge God and the divine Reason and passion Freedom

Quotes

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