Biancamaria Fontana: Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and Governance in the ‘Essais.’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Far from being politically detached or disengaged from the political life of his country, Montaigne worked in his provincial parliament (albeit not in its main assembly) and served at both the Parisian court of Henry III of Valois and the provincial court of Henry of Navarre, the future king. He spent four years as Mayor of Bordeaux during a period of civil unrest. France itself found itself torn by civil wars of religion throughout his lifetime, reason enough for his famed guardedness in writing. The certainty and indeed fanaticism of partisans and the confusion of authorities alike pointed him toward skepticism concerning all claims to rule. Biancamaria Fontana, a historian at the University of Lausanne, nonetheless defends Montaigne from suspicions of religious unbelief. She does notice divergences from Christian teachings: denial of original sin in view of the “plasticity” of “human nature”; adherence to Christian sentiments but not to articles of faith; appreciation for the “exotic kaleidoscope of human practices,” suggesting that “conscience” contains little “science” or knowledge; the suspicion that laws derive more from custom than from God; and Montaigne’s inclination to equate belief with opinion. Fontana equally defends Montaigne against charges of Machiavellianism, rightly considering him less openly audacious than the Florentine. I am reminded of young Henry Adams, who recalls asking the old political fixer Thurlow Weed, “Is no political man to be trusted?” Weed mused, “I never encourage a young man to begin by thinking so.” Fontana may be said to encourage new readers of the Essais not to begin by thinking Montaigne Machiavellian.
She begins by observing that Montaigne aims at redirecting his readers away from “abstract schemes and models” in politics and towards a consideration of “the complexity and instability of human circumstances.” Is it not wiser to stay closer to the experiences and sentiments of ordinary and practical people, “rather than addressing them”—indeed one another—”from above”? Appeals to the ‘above’ enable clever men to “commit crimes under the pretense of serving justice or religion, insulting their victims with their hypocrisy and arrogance”—’adding insult to injury,’ as we might say. “If he was an attentive reader of the City of God, and if he brought into the Essais echoes of its tragic vision of humanity, Montaigne placed his own analysis on rather different ground.” Indeed: But what was it?
Preliminarily, Fontana proposes that Montaigne grounded his thought on himself. “Against the tide of debased, deceitful discourse, the author of the Essais was determined to speak ‘by his own universal being,’ not ‘as a grammarian, poet, or jurisconsult but as Michel de Montaigne’; the expression of a personal viewpoint, divested of any technical authority, would alone prove truly universal,” universally understood and felt. Montaigne humbly presents himself as the least authoritative man, as a man nonetheless speaking to other men from and to what is common to them all. Which is to say that he humbly presents himself as the Universal Man, as distinct from God Who Became Man, and from men who claim to speak for that God.
Fontana divides her book into six chapters on six topics: laws, virtue, toleration, opinion (particularly conscience), trust (particularly political legitimacy), and politics. “The practice of the law representing Montaigne’s main public activity,” as his subcommittee work in the Bordeaux Assembly centered on litigation—what we today would call administrative law. He criticizes French law as “a judicial monstrosity,” an incoherent combination of Roman law, feudal custom, and kingly edicts, too numerous to be understood yet never enough to cover every case, and all further confused by a “vertiginous accumulation of interpretations and commentaries” by jurists. With the rule of law so profoundly compromised, corruption and sectarian cruelty took hold, sparking and fueling the civil wars. Tradition, long-established custom, offered no help in a country in which the Reformation decried existing customs as tainted, while Catholics denounced the Reformers as damnable heretics. At the same time, customs will always be with us; human beings need regular habits, some accepted way of life, even if the ways of life in one country differs sharply from those in another. To top matters off, appeals to a higher, divine law will also fail, inasmuch as “human beings had simply no access to a certain knowledge of the law of God and could never reach an agreement about its content.” At best, the law of God might enter through the individual conscience, whereby men “recogniz[e] instinctively when some obvious instance of injustice, abuse, or cruelty had occurred.” This too had evidently proved a weak reed, easily bent by passions secular and religious.
What then of virtue, an appeal to character? Augustine’s critique of “pagan” virtue, and Machiavelli’s invitation to transform Roman virtus into his commended virtù had left men without any clear, rational standard of morality. Montaigne doubted Augustine’s emphatic critique of classical virtue as refuted by the Biblical teaching on original sin, but he also saw substantial evidence before his eyes that any valorization of the military virtues, as seen either in Rome or, in a more sinister way in Machiavelli would not strengthen but weaken societies pervaded by its spirit. “People became fatalistic, careless of danger, indifferent to the sufferings of others as well as to their own, insensitive to cruelty”; in Montaigne’s words, with such an ethos “any opinion is strong enough to make men espouse it at the price of life.” Accordingly, Montaigne “pursued an emphatically unheroic, modern ideal of ‘ordinary’ virtue.” In Fontana’s estimation this amounts to a peaceable form of Christianity, although underneath this piety there may be a peaceable form of Machiavellianism. On that point, David Lewis Schaefer’s careful exegesis of the Essais in his The Political Philosophy of Montaigne remains persuasive.
Whether a tamed Christianity or a tamed Machiavellianism animates Montaigne’s soul, that soul does strive to tame other souls in addition to itself. One sees this in what Fontana aptly calls his “politics of toleration,” and specifically in the essay “Of Freedom of Conscience,” “set at the center of the text, in the middle of Book II.” In what some readers may see as a sobering feature, and others as a sly one, Montaigne constructs his argument “around a single historical figure, the Roman emperor Julian, known as ‘the Apostate,'” in the process “turning this traditional enemy of Christianity into a classical hero and a great tragic figure.” Fontana also notices that Montaigne doesn’t openly call for religious pluralism, quite understandably regarding religious contention dangerous to civic peace. Instead, he confines himself to castigating cruel treatment of heretics and to questioning the self-righteous certitude of those who practice such treatment. The political circumstances of sixteenth-century France differed radically from those of, say, 1920s America; H. L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow would not have survived. Montaigne was preeminently a ‘survivor.’
In treating matters of conscience generally, Fontana describes Montaigne’s Julian as a “heroic figure”—”a reborn Alexander the Great without the Macedonian’s drinking habits,” “the incarnation of a classical ideal that had sadly disappeared from the modern world.” One recalls Machiavelli’s similar use of ‘ancient’ figures for his own ‘modern’ purposes. Among those ‘modern’ purposes for Montaigne was his support of his patron Henry of Navarre, a man of very dubious faith in the eyes of French Catholics, for the French throne. A professing Protestant, Henry faced a problem: “If he chose to recant in order to take up his crown, the king was exposed to the risk of becoming ‘a state Catholic,’ while an opportunistic conversion would turn him into an atheist, with no particular attachment to any religion.” Henry successfully rose to this challenge by exercising a decidedly Montaignian skill, namely, obfuscation, “blurr[ing] in his statement some aspects of the Catholic doctrine he found especially unconvincing, such as the cult of saints and the existence of purgatory.” With Henry, “Catholic” meant “catholic” or universal, and not so much identification of Catholicism with “the Church of Rome.”
As philosophers will do, Montaigne deepened his analysis of a political dilemma into a consideration of “the puzzling nature of belief” itself. In the longest essai, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne denies that faith derives from “human reasons and discourses” but from “irrational, ultimately superhuman motivations.” This sounds like the work of the Holy Spirit. But Montaigne distinguishes the superhuman dimension of faith from its “imperfect human dimension,” which consists of “a package of myths, norms, and practices that defined a specific culture”; thus, “one was a Christian in the same way in which one happened to be German or from Périgord, by an accident of birth.” In “this anthropological dimension,” Christianity “was just like any other religion.” In this sense “Montaigne used opinion and croyance as synonymous.” Politically speaking, questions of faith have no spiritual dimension at all, but remain in the realm of eminently fallible but formidable public opinion. Opinion is neither rational nor spiritual but a matter of passion, imagination, and habit; “the content of opinion was generally arbitrary.” Given that, as Fontana finely phrases it, Montaigne thought that “Christianity had already accumulated a sufficient number of martyrs and did not need to add to an already impressive score.”
Faith suggests trust and, politically considered, trust constitutes the bulk of legitimacy or lawfulness. In this way Fontana recurs to the theme of her opening chapter, having guided the reader to a more thoughtful understanding of the foundation of law. Montaigne raises a rather high standard, when it comes to trust generally. “If an authoritative Christian writer like Saint Augustine described a miraculous event…supporting his narrative with the testimony of two learned bishops, one should perhaps suspend one’s judgment before dismissing the whole story as simply incredible.” He starts with distrust, hedging trust with a doubtful “perhaps,” thereby leaving the authority of the “authoritative Christian writer” in question.
In political societies, Machiavelli had argued that force crucially supplements trust or fidelity. Again, Montaigne holds back, given the malign effects of force seen in the French civil wars. He blames the recourse to violence on prior “corruption of public discourse,” on “the Machiavellian tradition” commending the use of “deceit and mendacity as suitable instruments of governance.” Similarly, violations of the rule of law lead societies to violence by destroying public trust. Despite his apparent support for monarchy, Montaigne then argues that the very position of the monarch, ruling alone, has proved “morally disabling,” inasmuch as they seldom experience any of “the essential components of a good moral education,” namely, “the sincere appraisal of their conduct and the confrontation, on a ground of equality, with the abilities and views of others.” Flattery corrupts them, from childhood on. He therefore applauds his patron Henry IV, who invited an assembly of notables at Rouen to give him their counsels, vowing to trust them. Even if Henry didn’t quite “transform the nature of the French monarchy” by such gestures, Montaigne “believed him at least capable of performing convincingly enough in this novel role of monarch ruling by popular consent.” One is left wondering if this is not really a Machiavellian adjustment of Machiavellianism misused.
Use and misuse are matters of practice, not theory, and Fontana concludes her book with a discussion of Montaigne as a practitioner of politics, or more precisely Montaigne’s reflections upon the practice of politics. Given the weakness of human reason in political life and men’s inability “to act consistently according to God’s law”—in other words the political inadequacy of both reason and revelation—the Machiavellian attempt to conquer fortune must be scaled back. It is not clear, even on Fontana’s account, that this means that the attempt must be abandoned altogether. If “mediocrity” must replace “grandeur,” and yet Aristotelian “mediocrity”—the location of virtue in the middle of extremes, with courage (for example) amounting to a “mean” between cowardice and rashness—also seems unattainably rational, what then? By Fontana’s accounting, Montaigne recommends that the prince turn not to God but to a wise advisor. And what might such a man look like? How will the prince know him when he meets him?
He will be “someone of middling condition, independent and satisfied with his own status,” a man who “would have nothing to lose from telling the truth, and nothing to gain from concealing it,” a man with connections “with ordinary people,” not only the elites. A man not unlike Michel de Montaigne, as he presents himself in the Essais, one is inclined to think. No fideist, no rationalist, but a man of experience. In America, two centuries later, Benjamin Franklin listened and learned.
Fontana avers that “Montaigne’s work shows a stern attachment to basic Christian principles such as individual responsibility, freedom, charity, and mercy, an attachment that is indicative of the writer’s moral disposition, even if it can tell us little about the precise nature of his religious beliefs”—such as, for example, whether he attached himself to Jesus as the Christ. “What was truly original about Montaigne’s contribution was not his defense of Christian values (or possibly of some unorthodox version of these), but the tension the Essais masterfully established between the values themselves, and their practical enforcement in the context of existing human societies.” In terms of the practice, the experience Fontana recognizes as Montaigne’s test for truth, “The Essais gradually but effectively dismantled the view that the legislation of human societies had its foundation in natural law; they also utterly destroyed the credibility of the claim that Christian states, and Christian rulers, were the guardians and enforcers of a divine order on earth.” There might still be natural law and/or a divine order, but no one quite knows what they are, if anyone ever did.
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