How to Live (34 page)

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:

“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:

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.

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.

(illustration credit i12.6)

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, then 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:

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:

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.