Montaigne by Arlette Jouanna (review)

In 1571, Montaigne took the curious decision to retire from public service, at the relatively young age of 38 and in rather good health, in order to dedicate himself to his 'inner life' by writing his Essays in the refuge of his own domain. This mid-life retraite, commemorated on a wall of Montaigne's tower library, epitomizes his paradoxical notion of freedom, which is woven as an unobtrusive common thread throughout Arlette Jouanna's study. She argues that until 1571 Montaigne's desire to be free from the stifling familial and social obligations of a family recently promoted to nobility and from the servitudes of court and parlement had been fanned by the unconditional freedom of his perfect friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, by his encounter with the unspoiled nature of the New World sauvages (displayed in France), and by translating Sebond's Natural Theology, which would allow him to take position against rational dogmatism. After 1571, Montaigne's liberating 'trying out' (essayer) of the Self and judgment through the writing of his co-substantial book in the isolation of his chateau remains intertwined with an ever-present outside world. In Jouanna's study, we witness him engaging with this world through humanist travel (Germany and Italy) and the publication both of La Boétie's works and of his own Essays. Jouanna also foregrounds Montaigne's challenging political commitments (mayor of Bordeaux) and his volatile interconfessional allegiances pursued for the sake of conciliation in religious strife. For instance, she highlights Montaigne's purported attempt to act as mediator between Henri de Navarre and the duc de Guise. Rather than clinging to radical ideals of freedom, Jouanna depicts Montaigne realistically and warily cultivating tradition and custom as life-saving comfort zones in the world outside his tower. Her biography offers no eye-opening revelations on larger questions that have occupied critics for decades, nor is it driven by an over-arching thesis, as is Philippe Desan's Montaigne: une biographie politique (Odile Jacob, 2014), which claims that Montaigne was more a politician than he was a writer. Rather, it is guided by the author's wish to reconstruct the "ambiguities" and the "vigorous originality" (16) with which the humanist from Bordeaux probed himself and the world. But for anyone familiar with the sterling work of this prominent historian of Renaissance France and its wars of religion, it comes as no surprise that Jouanna meticulously, and with great clarity, reconstructs an image of Montaigne intricately embedded in the French kingdom's complex social and political networks. A case in point is her contextualization of the puzzling moment when Montaigne is made knight in the Order of Saint Michael, an honor normally reserved for nobles of higher lineage. Wielding profound knowledge of the mechanisms of loyalty in early modern France, Jouanna paints a compelling picture of Montaigne's multiple regional and royal allegiances that brought about this distinction. Last but not least, Jouanna's lucid style and enticing narrative make this biography especially welcoming to non-specialists.