By Tim Shaw
A supposed quote from a sassy teenager at the beginning of the UK Covid-19 crisis: “Oh God, I can’t believe I’m living through a GCSE history question!”. Now it might be a new thing to her, but in the grand scheme of things, we have been here before, and a whole lot of other stuff besides. But how do we choose to tell our stories, and who should do the telling? What qualities should the chroniclers of events bring to the task?
History has a tendency towards dryness and it is entirely possible that future historians will look back at these current times and feel the same way. A history including the telling of Covid-19, BLM and ‘Me Too’ made up of excavated Tweets, Blogs and on-line journals; may cause the future historians to complain that the stories are twisted, biased and desiccated; lacking in honesty, missing the thoughts of real people with real feelings and doubts, all too often fogged by over-inflated self-importance, posturing and virtue signalling.
Where is the vulnerability, the humanness with its weaknesses and misgivings? Maybe it is too much to ask, and that we as a species with all our sophisticated communication skills find it just impossible to reach inside ourselves and (in the vernacular) spill our guts for all to see.
Let me return to what we are going through now; ‘unprecedented times’, ‘not in living memory…’ etc. etc. we are all tired of hearing it. But I would like to draw a line back into history and introduce an individual who also could have made the same claims about his times.
This character is Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533 – 1592), a minor nobleman, who lived in a relative backwater of the Bordeaux region in 16th century France.
Curiously, this is the person who is perhaps single-handedly responsible for the invention of the ‘Essay’, a title he used for his collected musing and ramblings; a word which at that time meant something like ‘trying it out’, or maybe ‘attempts’. For this is the title he gave to his published works.
Montaigne can be called a ‘complex character’ only because he was prepared to ‘spill his guts’ onto the page, his inner-most workings, his doubts, his misgivings are all there for us to read, and completely lacking in pomposity.
I came to Montaigne’s works by pure chance, and for me dipping into the ‘Essays’ became a guilty pleasure. Reading through his meandering thoughts created a constant feeling of expectation; you just didn’t know where the conversation was going to end up; like a boozy chat with your best friend; you start off on a subject like; ‘the lack of investment in transport infrastructure’ and end up on ‘the breeding of rabbits’, and wonder how the hell you got there! Reading Montaigne is like being sat at his fireside with a bottle of Chateau Montaigne and listening to him, surprised and warmed by his candour, impressed by his modesty and self-effacing humour and tickled by his bawdy references, example; the often quoted, “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit on our own arse”. It is very easy to like Michel de Montaigne.
Montaigne placed himself under self-imposed lock-down and shut himself away to contemplate his navel; like many of us in these recent times. He read books, or tried to, openly admitting that he flitted from book to book like a butterfly. He had famous quotes from the classics painted on the beams of his tower-library (yes, he had his own eyrie, his ‘man cave’), like a teenager’s bedroom with inspirational imagery and reminders.
He had been a kind of magistrate in Bordeaux for a number of years and then made a decision just to ‘retire’ at the age of 38. Some say that he wrote during a ten-year exile, but this is not true, for it was never really an ‘exile’. For example, at a later stage of this so-called period of isolation he took off on a seventeen-month tour of southern Europe before being summoned back to take up the rank of mayor of Bordeaux; admittedly he did this reluctantly and found himself in a world of politics and sometimes murky dealings.
Allegedly there is a Chinese curse that says, “May you live through interesting times”, obviously for the Chinese ‘interesting times’ meant times of extreme disruption, famine and warfare, whereas, conversely, ‘boring times’ are settled times of peace and harmony; for us 2020 is our own version of ‘interesting times’. France in that period was also going through some very ‘interesting’ times, not so very different from our own.
Throughout the whole of Montaigne’s life France was busy pulling itself apart along religious lines; Protestants and Catholics were tearing lumps out of each other and the whole country was having to deal with flare ups of wildfire violence, with neither side giving quarter; the worst of which was the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre, which was no minor localised bloodletting, not too far removed from a Rawandan-scale of savagery rather than a piece of internecine venting of passions. Contemporary accounts of the events are truly shocking.
Bands of what we would call ‘insurgents’ or ‘paramilitaries’ roamed the countryside reaping holy hell on unsuspecting citizens of any class or level of society. Montaigne never locked his doors and when a group of these bandits actually did come knocking, he welcomed them in, and his warmth and hospitality persuaded them to just leave him alone and go on their way; foolhardy or calculated, who can tell? At some levels Montaigne is a cypher.
For example, much has been made of his ill-fated friendship with Étienne de la Boétie, this ‘bromance’ ended tragically as Montaigne volunteered to remain at La Boétie’s side as he succumbed to illness in an epidemic of plague sweeping the region. Montaigne wrote a detailed account of his friend’s final hours; heart-breaking in its description, recounted in a very factual, typically masculine style of reporting, reminiscent of Hemmingway’s brand of reportage; clipped, objective and to the point.
This wasn’t Montaigne’s only brush with pandemic. When he was mayor in 1585 Bordeaux was under a kind of chaotic lock-down. The default reaction to epidemic in those times was to flee, all the same, in only a few months 14,000 people died in the city, nearly one third of the total population, this was a significant event. (Historians may have heard of the plague being halted by the heroic efforts of rector William Mompesson who in 1666 in the village of Eyam (Derbyshire) contained the plague by imposing a lock-down on the whole village, thus preventing other villages in the locality from being infected; this was not the normal response, more in line with how we would operate today [See, the origin of the word ‘Quarantine’]). Montaigne did the smart thing and remained at his châteaux. Twenty-two years earlier he had witnessed La Boétie’s death at close quarters and was realistic enough to operate a cautious ‘social distancing’. He didn’t go around glad-handing with the good people of Bordeaux, he was very much a realist.
In 1586 both plague and warfare (two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse) arrived at the Montaigne châteaux; this was another flare up of Protestant and Catholic violence, plus the plague. Montaigne’s response this time was to take his family and flee, effectively sofa-surfing with any of his contacts who would be brave (or loyal) enough to take in refugees from a plague zone.
Montaigne only lived to the age of fifty-nine, still reasonable as the average lifespan taken across the social classes at that time was about forty. He had suffered all his life with debilitating kidney stones – something he wrote about in detail – his father had also had the same condition and both had to cope with crippling pain; but it was quinsy (Peritonsillar abscess) that finally took him, a condition that can bring about any number of fatal circumstances.
Reading Montaigne you get the feeling that he will have a go at anything, no examination, no subject seems out of bounds; but seldom does he offer hard and fast conclusions; he meanders, he pokes whatever it is that interests him, like a curious scientist at a petri dish; but his failures, his ‘efforts’ nevertheless seem to supply granular examinations of all manner of very human themes. Despite this he says of himself, “But to come to my own case, I think it would be difficult for any man to have a poorer opinion of himself, or indeed to have a poorer opinion of me, than I have of myself”. It would be intriguing to speculate what Montaigne would have made of our current age, specifically 2020? If he were here now, would he be ferocious blogging; a voice among many clamouring for attention, lost in the crowd; would he even be given a platform? In his own time his political involvement brought him into the circles of King Henri III, Catherine de’ Medici, Henri de Navarre (Henri IV) as well as kissing the foot of Pope Gregory VIII, what would he have made of Emmanuelle Macron, Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson or even Donald Trump? What would he have had to say about, ‘Wokeness’, ‘No Platform’ or ‘Cancel Culture’?
For anyone wishing to plunge into the world of Montaigne, of course read the ‘Essays’ but for historical context and finer details of his life I would recommend the highly engaging book by Sarah Bakewell, ‘How to Live – or A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’.