How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  Leaguists accused politiques of untrustworthiness, but politiques, in turn, accused Leaguists of abandoning themselves to their passions and losing their judgment. How strange, reflected Montaigne, that Christianity should lead so often to violent excess, and thence to destruction and pain:

  Our zeal does wonders when it is seconding our leaning towards hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. Against the grain, toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless as by a miracle some rare nature bears it, it will neither walk nor fly.

  “There is no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility,” he even wrote at one point. In place of the figure of the burning-eyed Christian zealot, he preferred to contemplate that of the Stoic sage: a person who behaves morally, moderates his emotions, exercises good judgment, and knows how to live.

  There was indeed much of Stoic philosophy in the politiques. They did not urge revolution or regicide, but recommended acceptance of life as it is, on the Stoic principle of amor fati, or love of fate. They also promoted the Stoic sense of continuity: the belief that the world would probably continue to cycle through episodes of decay and rejuvenation, rather than accelerating into a one-directional rush towards the End. While the religious parties imagined the armies of Armageddon assembling in the sky, politiques suspected that sooner or later everything would calm down and people would come back to their senses. In millenarian times, they were the only people systematically to shift their perspective and think ahead to a time when the “troubles” would have become history—and to plan exactly how to build this future world.

  Montaigne’s Stoic side led him to downplay the wars to an astonishing extent in his writing. Biographers have invariably made much of his experience of war, and with good reason: it did affect his life profoundly. Some critics have based whole readings of Montaigne on the wars. But, after studying any such book, it can come as a surprise to turn back to the Essays and find Montaigne saying things like, “I am amazed to see our wars so gentle and mild,” and “It will be a lot if a hundred years from now people remember in a general way that in our time there were civil wars in France.” Those living through the present assume that things are worse than they are, he says, because they cannot escape their local perspective:

  Whoever considers as in a painting the great picture of our mother Nature in her full majesty; whoever reads such universal and constant variety in her face; whoever finds himself there, and not merely himself, but a whole kingdom, as a dot made with a very fine brush; that man alone estimates things according to their true proportions.

  Montaigne reminded his contemporaries of the old Stoic lesson: to avoid feeling swamped by a difficult situation, try imagining your world from different angles or at different scales of significance. This is what the ancients did when they looked down on their troubles from above, as upon a commotion in an ant colony. Astrologers now warn of “great and imminent alterations and mutations,” writes Montaigne, but they forget the simple fact that, however bad things are, most of life goes on undisturbed. “I do not despair about it,” he added lightly.

  Admittedly, Montaigne was lucky. The wars ruined his harvests, made him fear being murdered in bed, and forced him to take part in political activities he would have preferred to avoid. They would land him in even greater troubles in the 1580s, when the war entered its last and most desperate phase. But no one could claim that he was badly scarred by these experiences, and, if he ever took up arms himself, he says nothing about it in the Essays. In short, he had a good war. Yet that would not have stopped most people from indulging in lamentation.

  And Montaigne was right. Life did go on. The St. Bartholomew’s massacres, terrible as they were, gave way to years of inconclusive individual suffering rather than heralding the end of the world. The Antichrist did not come. Generation followed generation until a time came when, as Montaigne predicted, many people had only the vaguest idea that his century’s wars ever took place. This happened partly because of the work he and his fellow politiques did to restore sanity. Montaigne, affecting ease and comfort, contributed more to saving his country than his zealous contemporaries. Some of his work was directly political, but his greatest contribution was simply to stay out of it and write the Essays. This, in the eyes of many, makes him a hero.

  HERO

  Those who have adopted Montaigne in this role usually cast him as a hero of an unusual sort: the kind that resists all claim to heroism. Few revere him for doing great public deeds, though he did accomplish some noteworthy things in his later life. More often, he is admired for his stubborn insistence on maintaining normality in extraordinary circumstances, and his refusal to compromise his independence.

  Many contemporaries saw him in this light; the great Stoic political thinker Justus Lipsius told him to keep writing because people needed his example to follow. Long after the sixteenth-century Stoic Montaigne was forgotten, readers in troubled times continued to think of him as a role model. His Essays offered practical wisdom on questions such as how to face up to intimidation, and how to reconcile the conflicting demands of openness and security. He also provided something more nebulous: a sense of how one could survive public catastrophe without losing one’s self-respect. Just as you could seek mercy from an enemy forthrightly, without compromising yourself, or defend your property by electing to leave it undefended, so you could get through an inhumane war by remaining human. This message in Montaigne would have a particular appeal to twentieth-century readers who lived through wars, or through Fascist or Communist dictatorships. In such times, it could seem that the structure of civilized society had collapsed and that nothing would ever be the same again. Montaigne was at his most reassuring when he provided the least sympathy for this feeling—when he reminded the reader that, in the end, normality comes back and perspectives shift again.

  Among the many readers who have responded to this aspect of the Essays, one can stand for all: the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who, living in enforced exile in South America during the Second World War, calmed and distracted himself by writing a long personal essay on Montaigne—his nonheroic hero.

  When Zweig first came across the Essays as a young man in turn-of-the-century Vienna, he admitted, the book made little impression. Like Lamartine and Sand before him, he found it too dispassionate. It lacked “the leap of electricity from soul to soul”; he could see no relevance to his own life. “What appeal could there be to a 20-year-old youth in the rambling excursus of a Sieur de Montaigne on the ‘Ceremony of interview of kings’ or his ‘Considerations on Cicero’?” Even when Montaigne turned to topics that ought to have been more appealing, such as sex and politics, his “mild, temperate wisdom” and his feeling that it was wiser not to involve oneself too much in the world repelled Zweig. “It is in the nature of youth that it does not want to be advised to be mild or skeptical. Every doubt seems to it to be a limitation.” Young people crave beliefs; they want to be roused.

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  Moreover, in 1900, the freedom of the individual hardly seemed to require defense. “Had not all that long ago become a self-evident matter, guaranteed by law and custom to a humanity long since liberated from tyranny and serfdom?” Zweig’s generation—he was born in 1881—assumed that prosperity and personal freedom would just keep growing. Why should things go backwards? No one felt that civilization was in danger; no one had to retreat into their private selves to preserve their spiritual freedom. “Montaigne seemed pointlessly to rattle chains that we considered broken long ago.”

  Of course, history proved Zweig’s generation wrong. Just as Montaigne himself had grown up into a world full of hope only to see it degenerate, so Zweig was born into the luckiest of countries and centuries, and had it all fall apart around him. The chains were reforged, stronger and heavier than ever.

  Zweig survived the First World War, but this was followed by the rise of Hitler. He fled Austria and was forced to wander for years as a refugee, first to Britain, t
hen to the United States, and finally to Brazil. His exile made him “defenseless as a fly, helpless as a snail,” as he put it in his autobiography. He felt himself to be a condemned man, waiting in his cell for execution, and ever less able to engage with his hosts’ world around him. He kept sane by throwing himself into work. In his exile, he produced a biography of Balzac, a series of novellas and short stories, an autobiography, and, finally, the essay on Montaigne—all without proper sources or notes, since he was cut off from his possessions. He never achieved Montaigne’s attitude of nonchalance, but then, his situation was far worse than Montaigne’s:

  I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger, a guest at best. Europe, the homeland of my heart’s choice, is lost to me, since it has torn itself apart suicidally a second time in a war of brother against brother. Against my will I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages.

  By the time he reached Brazil in 1941, he was at several removes from any sense of home, and, although he was grateful to the country for taking him in, he found it hard to maintain hope. Finding a volume of the Essays in the house where he was staying, he reread it and discovered that it had transformed itself out of all recognition. The book that had once seemed stuffy and irrelevant now spoke to him with directness and intimacy, as if it were written for him alone, or perhaps for his whole generation. He at once thought of writing about Montaigne. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “The similarity of his epoch and situation to ours is astonishing. I am not writing a biography; I propose simply to present as an example his fight for interior freedom.” In the essay itself, he admitted: “In this brothership of fate, for me Montaigne has become the indispensable helper, confidant, and friend.”

  His Montaigne essay did turn out to be a biography of sorts, but a highly personal one, unapologetically bringing out the similarities between Montaigne’s experience and his own. In a time such as that of the Second World War, or in civil-war France, Zweig writes, ordinary people’s lives are sacrificed to the obsessions of fanatics, so the question for any person of integrity becomes not so much “How do I survive?” as “How do I remain fully human?” The question comes in many variants: How do I preserve my true self? How do I ensure that I go no further in my speech or actions than I think is right? How do I avoid losing my soul? Above all: How do I remain free? Montaigne was no freedom fighter in the usual sense, Zweig admits. “He has none of the rolling tirades and the beautiful verve of a Schiller or Lord Byron, none of the aggression of a Voltaire.” His constant assertions that he is lazy, feckless, and irresponsible make him sound a poor hero, yet these are not really failings at all. They are essential to his battle to preserve his particular self as it is.

  Zweig knew that Montaigne disliked preaching, yet he managed to extract a series of general rules from the Essays. He did not list them as such, but paraphrased them in such a way as to resolve them into eight separate commandments—which could also be called the eight freedoms:

  Be free from vanity and pride.

  Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties.

  Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed.

  Be free from family and surroundings.

  Be free from fanaticism.

  Be free from fate; be master of your own life.

  Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.

  Zweig was selecting a very Stoic Montaigne, thus returning to a sixteenth-century way of reading him. And, in the end, the freedom Zweig took most to heart was the last one on the list, which comes straight from Seneca. Having fallen into depression, Zweig chose the ultimate form of internal emigration. He killed himself, with the drug Vironal, on February 23, 1942; his wife chose to die with him. In his farewell message, Zweig expressed his gratitude to Brazil, “this wonderful land” which had taken him in so hospitably, and concluded, “I salute all my friends! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.”

  It seemed—and this was how Zweig himself saw it—that the real value of Montaigne could be seen only when one had been pushed close to this extreme point. One must reach a state where one had nothing left to defend but one’s naked “I”: one’s simple existence.

  Only a person who has lived through a time that threatens his life and that valuable substance, his individual freedom, with war, power, and tyrannical ideologies—only he knows how much courage, how much honesty and determination are needed to maintain the inner self in such a time of herd insanity.

  He would have agreed with Leonard Woolf, when Woolf said that Montaigne’s vision of interlinked I’s was the essence of civilization. It was the basis on which a future could be built once the terror had passed and the war was over—though Zweig could not wait that long.

  Does Montaigne’s vision of private integrity and political hope have the same moral authority today? Some certainly think so. Books have been written promoting Montaigne as a hero for the twenty-first century; French journalist Joseph Macé-Scaron specifically argues that Montaigne should be adopted as an antidote to the new wars of religion. Others might feel that the last thing needed today is someone who encourages us to relax and withdraw into our private realms. People spend enough time in isolation as it is, at the expense of civil responsibilities.

  Those who take Montaigne as a hero, or as a supportive companion, would argue that he did not advocate a “do-as-thou-wilt” approach to social duty. Instead, he thought that the solution to a world out of joint was for each person to get themselves back in joint: to learn “how to live,” beginning with the art of keeping your feet on the ground. You can indeed find a message of inactivity, laziness, and disengagement in Montaigne, and probably also a justification for doing nothing when tyranny takes over, rather than resisting it. But many passages in the Essays seem rather to suggest that you should engage with the future; specifically, you should not turn your back on the real historical world in order to dream of paradise and religious transcendence. Montaigne provides all the encouragement anyone could need to respect others, to refrain from murder on the pretense of pleasing God, and to resist the urge that periodically makes humans destroy everything around them and “set back life to its beginnings.” As Flaubert told his friends, “Read Montaigne … He will calm you.” But, as he also added: “Read him in order to live.”

  13. Q. How to live? A. Do something no one has done before

  BAROQUE BEST SELLER

  THROUGH THE 1570s, with their alternating episodes of peace and war, Montaigne got on with life, and with his book. He spent much of the decade writing and tinkering with his first crop of essays, then published them in 1580 at the press of local Bordeaux publisher Simon Millanges.

  Millanges was an interesting choice. He had only been established in the city for a few years—for about as long as Montaigne had been writing. Montaigne would have had little difficulty finding a Parisian publisher; he had dealt with them before, and the value of a work like the Essays would not have escaped them. Even in its first edition, it was unique, yet it slotted neatly into the established marketing genres of classical miscellanies and commonplace books. It had that perfect commercial combination: startling originality and easy classification. Yet Montaigne insisted on staying with a local man, either because of a personal connection or as a matter of Gascon principle.

  This first version of Montaigne’s book was quite different from the one usually read now. It filled only two fairly small volumes and, although the “Apology” was already outsized, most chapters remained relatively simple. They often oscillated between rival points of view, but they did not wash around like vast turbulent rivers or fan out into deltas, as later essays did. Some of them even kept to their supposed point. Yet they were already suffused with Montaigne’s curious, questioning, restless personality, and they often opened up puzzles or quirks in human behavior. Contemporary readers had an eye for qua
lity; the work at once found an enthusiastic audience.

  Millanges’s first edition was probably small, perhaps around five or six hundred copies, and it soon sold out. Two years later he issued another edition with a few changes. Five years later, in 1587, this edition was revised again and republished in Paris by Jean Richer. By now it had become the fashionable reading for the French nobility of the early 1580s. In 1584, the bibliographer La Croix du Maine held up Montaigne as the one contemporary author worth classing with the ancients—just four years after his publication by a modest press in Bordeaux. Montaigne himself wrote that the Essays did better than he had expected, and that it became a sort of coffee-table book, popular with ladies: “a public article of furniture, an article for the parlor.”

  Among its admirers was Henri III himself. When Montaigne traveled through Paris later in 1580, he presented the king with a copy, as was conventional. Henri told him that he liked the book, to which Montaigne is said to have replied, “Sir, then Your Majesty must like me”—because, as he always maintained, he and his book were the same.

  This, in fact, should have been an obstacle to its success. By writing so openly about his everyday observations and inner life, Montaigne was breaking a taboo. You were not supposed to record yourself in a book, only your great deeds, if you had any. The few Renaissance autobiographies so far written, such as Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita sua and Girolamo Cardano’s De vita propria, had been left unpublished largely for this reason. St. Augustine had written about himself, but as a spiritual exercise and to document his search for God, not to celebrate the wonders of being Augustine.

  Montaigne did celebrate being Montaigne. This disturbed some readers. The classical scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger was especially annoyed about Montaigne’s revelation, in his later edition of 1588, that he preferred white wine to red. (Actually Scaliger was oversimplifying. Montaigne tells us that he changed his tastes from red to white, then back to red, then to white again.) Pierre Dupuy, another scholar, asked, “Who the hell wants to know what he liked?” Naturally it annoyed Pascal and Malebranche too; Malebranche called it “effrontery,” and Pascal thought Montaigne should have been told to stop.