Essaying Hatred: Montaigne's Poetics of Ethical Allusiveness

Are not certain things to be covered up in a speech, either because they ought not to be disclosed or because they cannot be expressed adequately?

Quintilian¹

Montaigne is usually presented as an unconditional apostle of tolerance, moving defender of conciliation, and a staunch enemy of hatred. As recent criticism has shown, the essayist rejects the Cannibals' "ideology of vengeance" to embrace clemency and exalt a profoundly human "quality of mercy."² He resolutely moves from a preoccupation with the Stoic care of the self to a more Christian-inspired care of the other.³ Yet the vocabulary of hatred is not absent from the Essais. There are 47 entries for the noun "haine(s)" [hatred], and 73 for the verb "haïr" [to hate], in its different forms.⁴ When the essayist uses the first-person "je hay" [I hate], it is usually to express his strong dislike for "passions vitieuses" [vicious passions], like cruelty (II, 11, 429a), flattery (I, 40, 253b), hypocrisy (II, 17, 646a), pedantry (I, 25, 133b; III, 8, 927b), snobbery (I, 25, 139b), and all types of excessive sophistication, which the "sage" must avoid.⁵ Indeed hatred is what he hates above everything. It is useless to pray to God, he tells us, unless we have our soul clean and rid of vicious passions; instead of redressing our fault, we redouble it if our feelings are still full of hatred: "Il faut avoir l'ame nette […] et deschargée de passions vitieuses. […] Au lieu de rabiller nostre faute, nous la redoublons, presentans à celuy qui nous avons à demander pardon, une affection pleine d'irreverence et de haine" (I, 56, 319a). Moreover, Montaigne claims that he is incapable of hating people ("Aussi ne hay je personne"), simply because he is so squeamish about hurting anybody ("et suis si lache à offencer que, pour le service de la raison mesme, je ne le puis faire"). He agrees with Aristotle, who said that he hated wickedness, but could never bring himself to hate a wicked person (III, 12, 1063b).

At the same time, the essayist realizes that he himself lives in a world dominated by antipathy, animosity, and detestation. Although Christianity is supposed to foster love for one's neighbor, around him Catholics loathe Protestants, and vice versa. He does not hesitate to use strong language to attack religious fanaticism, the principal source of hatred in his time as in our time: "Il n'est point d'hostilité excellente comme la chrestienne. Notre zele faict merveilles, quand il va secondant notre pente vers la haine, la cruauté, l'ambition, l'avarice, la detraction, la rebellion" (II, 12, 444c). On the contrary, nobody seems to care any more about goodness, civility and moderation; unless by miracle some rare nature appears on the horizon, these essential virtues are hardly ever put into practice.

This paper examines one test case of unprecedented hatred in French history, the infamous Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. One should talk about "massacres" in the plural, since the hysterical rage, begun in Paris on August 24, 1572, spread to several other cities in France. The killing and looting continued for two months. Although no one knows the exact number of victims, estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000.⁶ It is one of the darkest pages of French history, and it occurred at the time when Montaigne started writing his Essais. Yet he apparently never mentions it, and generations of diligent readers have wondered why.

In the following pages, I would like to suggest that Montaigne's so-called silence was not as total as it might seem. In a rhetorical twist much attuned to the Renaissance practice of præteritio, I will try to show how Montaigne addressed the Massacre issue in an indirect, yet remarkably clear way, giving the alert reader specific clues to read his discourse on American Indians allegorically as a sustained metaphor of the hateful things which happened in France on Saint Bartholomew's Day.⁷

The essayist who is often portrayed as the unconditional defender of American Indians and the sharp censor of European colonization—a...