Michel de Montaigne
1533–1592 4 entries
Biography
Michel de Montaigne was a French writer and philosopher, the inventor of the essay. He was born in 1533 at the château of Montaigne in Périgord, and his father had him taught Latin before French, so that Latin became his first language. He studied law and served for some thirteen years as a magistrate in the parliament of Bordeaux, where he formed a deep friendship with the writer Étienne de La Boétie, of which he later wrote: “Because it was he, because it was I.”
In 1571 he withdrew to the tower library of his château to read, think and write, and in 1580 he published the first books of his Essays, which he went on enlarging until his death. In them he takes himself as his subject, observing his own doubts, habits and contradictions, and finds in one man the whole form of the human condition. His motto was the question “What do I know?”, and his open, sceptical and humane voice influenced Shakespeare, Pascal, Descartes, Emerson and Nietzsche. Twice elected mayor of Bordeaux, he died at his château in 1592.
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