Then followed a career in the army and a period at court, until at the age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father, he retired from all active business and spent the last twenty-one years of his life, (with the exception of a few unwilling excursions into politics), among his horses and his dogs and his books and learned as much from the one as he did from the other.
Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered from several weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain affections and mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s grandson, believed to be a part of true gentility. Until the end of his days he protested that he was not really a writer at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random ideas upon subjects of a slightly philosophic nature. All this was pure buncombe. If ever a man put his heart and his soul and his virtues and his vices and everything he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the immortal d’Artagnan.
And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these vices were the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices of an essentially generous, well-bred and agreeable person, the sum total of Montaigne’s works has become something more than literature. It has developed into a definite philosophy of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary practical variety of decency.
Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic, and in his younger years he was an active member of that League of Catholic Noblemen which was formed among the French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.
But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572 when news reached him of the joy with which Pope Gregory XIII had celebrated the murder of thirty thousand French Protestants, he turned away from the Church for good. He never went so far as to join the other side. He continued to go through certain formalities that he might keep his neighbors’ tongues from wagging, but those of his chapters written after the night of Saint Bartholomew might just as well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And in one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,” he spoke as if he had been a contemporary of Pericles rather than a servant of Her Majesty Catherine de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the Apostate as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might hope to accomplish.
It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and you will find it in part nineteen of the second book.
Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy of both Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of absolute freedom, which (under the existing circumstances) could only provoke a new outbreak of civil war. But when circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and Catholics no longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep away as much as possible from interfering with other people’s consciences and should permit all of its subjects to love God as best suited the happiness of their own particular souls.
Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman who had hit upon this idea or had dared to express it in public. As early as the year 1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici and a graduate of half a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally suspected of being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He had based his somewhat startling opinion upon the ground that conscience being what it was, it could not possibly be changed by force, and two years later he had been instrumental in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration which had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their own, to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and in general to behave as if they were a free and independent denomination and not merely a tolerated little sect.
Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen (the man who had defended the rights of private property against the communistic tendencies expressed in Thomas More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar vein when he denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving their subjects to this or that church.