A Most Unusual Education . . .
As the scion of a noble family, Michel de Montaigne should have spent his early days surrounded by servants and coddled in luxury. Instead, his parents sent their boy to live with a local peasant family-not out of neglect, but to give him something priceless. Most wealthy children in the sixteenth century were handed over to wet nurses and nannies, but Montaigne, within sight of but a world away from the enormous estate that bore his name, was, in his words, "formed by fortune under the laws of the common people and of nature."
It was an unusual beginning to an unusual education, one that would continue until Montaigne took his last breath, at age fifty-nine.
After those early days in the bosom of his surrogate family, Montaigne was brought home, where his father decreed that no one would speak any language around his son but Latin. Instead of their local dialect of French, Montaigne lived in the world of Seneca and Cato, coming naturally to the language the same way the ancients had.
Even residents of the village went along with the plan, and years later, Montaigne was surprised to hear one of them casually refer to a tool by its Latin name, so ingrained had the habit become for his sake. With no other languages allowed within earshot-his Latin tutor was German and didn't even know French-the mother tongue of philosophy came to the boy quickly and painlessly. The Romans had first come to Bordeaux around 60 BC, and Rome had fallen in the centuries since, but for Montaigne, Urbs Aeterna still stood eternal.
Soon enough, Montaigne was more fluent than his parents and more proficient than his tutor. "As for me," Montaigne would later recall, "I was over six before I understood any more French . . . than Arabic."
One might expect that an education this strict and directed-not to mention strange-would be joyless. Montaigne was lucky, for he was formed as much by love and tenderness as he was by these experiments. He would be taught Greek later, a bit more traditionally, but his father envisioned it as a game. Montaigne would recall the fun of volleying "conjugations back and forth" with his instructors, not even aware that he was learning. Montaigne recalled that in his father's travels abroad, educational experts advised him to shape his son's soul "entirely through gentleness and freedom," that his choices should be respected and that he should love to learn. Is it any surprise that Montaigne would go to his deathbed believing that he had the best father there ever was?
Only twice in his life was Montaigne ever physically disciplined-gently, he noted-something that many children today could not say and few could have said in the sixteenth century. Most mornings, he was awakened not by a nagging parent or a stern schoolmaster, but by beautiful songs of the musicians whom his father had hired. It was a way to teach his son music, but it was also a way to address a rather touching concern-startling the "tender brains of children" awake with a shake or a shout, his father believed, was borderline cruel.
At seven, Montaigne was reading Ovid for fun, already tired of patronizing kids' stories. But he wasn't just a bookworm. In the Montaigne household, everything was an opportunity to learn-even pranks or mistakes were material for discussions or lessons. Everything was designed to "serve as an excellent book," every situation provided a takeaway, even "some cheating by a page, some stupidity on the part of a lackey, something said at table," was a chance to discuss, to debate, to analyze. Everything was to be questioned. Every idea to be traced back to its original source. Great thinkers were turned to for advice and for answers, but they were not exempt from challenges. "Pass everything through a sieve," Montaigne would later say about how to educate a child, "and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority or trust."
He was taught not to be precious about mistakes, even encouraged to admit he'd made them. The important thing to teach kids, he said of the real lesson he'd learned in his youth, was "that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues." In Montaigne's family, stubbornness was a vice, belief in one's infallibility or superiority the only screwup to be ashamed of.
It must have been strange the first time Montaigne stepped into a classroom, at the Collège de Guyenne, which his father had helped start. To suddenly be surrounded by other students, doing this thing called "school." As Montaigne would have known, the root of that word is the Greek word meaning "leisure." Then, as now, how distant the etymology is from reality.
Montaigne did not love how often he and his fellow students were "left to the melancholy humor of a furious schoolmaster." There was so much schoolwork, the days were interminable; he and his fellow students found it excruciating "slaving away for fourteen and fifteen hours a day like a porter." They were forced to memorize and recite and translate passages as if these noises and sounds and symbols were a replacement for understanding. It is tragic, Montaigne felt, but not a surprise, how many kids hate going to school and, sadder still, how many teachers hate their students.
Just as birds carry food in their beaks "without tasting it to stuff it down the beaks of their young," Montaigne said, "our schoolmasters go foraging for learning in their books and merely lodge it on the tip of their lips, only to spew it out and scatter it on the wind." His fellow students who could repeat what they'd learned from their teachers? They were no more than parrots. "To know by heart is not to know," Montaigne would say later, "it is to keep what they have given you and store it in your memory."
School taught him the basics: math, logic, poetry. But he dreamed of gaining control over his own studies, and later was envious to learn that Socrates would let his pupils do most of the talking.
Unlike his schooling, the rest of his early education was active. Dancing, horseback riding, handling a pike, playing an instrument, he took instruction in it all. Montaigne and his brothers both learned the French game of tennis, which was unusual, for athletics were not considered important. Montaigne joked that many of his fellow students would have been better off if they had only received tennis lessons, because they would have been spared the school and at least gotten in shape. They would have also been spared, he noted, the ego that came along with the sense that they were educated. In any case, he was raised to be not some effete intellectual, but an active and vigorous young man.
The saving grace of any institution of learning is its teachers. For all the flaws and frustrations of his traditional education, Montaigne was blessed with several great teachers. One, George Buchanan, was in Bordeaux fleeing religious persecution. The future tutor of kings was a long way from home, and he was able to give the young Montaigne a worldly perspective. Buchanan loved theater and staged many plays at school, dragging this unusual boy into performing in them.
Perhaps Buchanan was the teacher Montaigne later credited for encouraging his reading habit. In a time when books were expensive and censorship commonplace, this teacher understood that Montaigne's curiosity could not be satisfied by the school syllabus. They came to an agreement: As long as Montaigne could keep up with the school's assignments, he was free to explore on his own. We can imagine Buchanan nudging Montaigne this way and that, even lending him copies from his own library. "Pretending to see nothing," Montaigne said gratefully, "he whetted my appetite, letting me gorge myself with these books only in secret."
It was a brilliant stroke too, for Montaigne watched as so many of his fellow students came away from school hating to read.
One of the books he found was a beautiful folio copy of the works of Terence, edited by the scholar Erasmus, which Montaigne bought for himself in 1549, at age sixteen. He was still reading and rereading it late in life, finding it impossible, each time he picked Terence up, "not to find in him some new beauty and grace."
He finished school several years ahead of schedule. He had done well. He had had a better experience than most. "But for all that," he said, summarizing his college experience, "it was still school." What did he have to show for his years there? Nothing compared to what he'd gotten at home, where he'd learned to love to learn early.
The aim of education has always been to spark curiosity, the desire to understand the world and one's place in it. Often, this is precisely what is later snuffed out.
Of all the inheritances the boy would get-which would include enormous tracts of land, a winery, and a castle-this was his greatest blessing. "He grew up constrained by some of the most bizarre limits ever imposed on a child," Montaigne's biographer Sarah Bakewell observed, "and at the same time had almost unlimited freedom. He was a world unto himself."
Yet eventually, like all graduates, Montaigne had to enter the actual world. His father had always understood that his son's education was not merely for its own sake but to prepare the boy to run the family business, to hold office, to be a leader, to contribute to society by being a torchbearer for values that not long ago had been lost in a "dark age." Perhaps Montaigne would have loved to remain a scholar, but life-and his father-had other plans.
"To school-learning he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life," Montaigne wrote later; "the rest is owed to action." We all face this transition, from school to experience, from the classroom to the school of life. All the things that Montaigne had read about-Greek democracy, the Roman Empire, the law cases of Cicero, the power of the medieval church-he would now come face-to-face with, not in the glow of the golden age but in the messy, muddy present moment.
After his legal studies, Montaigne found himself working as a magistrate in the Bordeaux Parlement, a job that involved assessing complex legal cases and liaising with different courts. In those days, magistrates were considered and interviewed along two very different lines. One approach, which is used to this day, was to evaluate an applicant's academic performance and ability by testing them on their knowledge. A simpler approach was to give a future magistrate a case to judge and see how they performed, which would reveal how their mind worked.
The latter was a superior procedure, Montaigne noted, "even though both those are necessary and both needed together, nevertheless the talent for knowledge is less to be prized than that for judging. Judgment can do without knowledge, but not knowledge without judgment."
Montaigne almost certainly got his job through the connections of his father, but over the fifteen years he held the job, he came to understand that knowing the law and understanding it were very different things. He would have learned, as great legal minds have all learned, that theory has to be made to fit reality and not the other way around, and that only real, painful experience can teach someone how to master their profession.
Much had been left out of the books, Montaigne quickly realized when he encountered the complexities of the human heart or considered the ambiguity of outcomes. Not that his colleagues approached their profession with much thought. Montaigne would recall with horror watching a judge he knew to be unfaithful to his wife sentence a defendant for the very same crime, just before writing his mistress a love note.
Year after year on the job, Montaigne developed this judgment-about what makes people tick, how to spot a liar, how to get to the truth of the matter. It was for this reason that he was recruited to serve at the court of King Charles IX and why, at the end of his legal career, he was awarded the Order of Saint Michael, effectively French knighthood.
To enter the real world is a shock to all young people. The transition from the realm of ideas to the realm of kings and criminal courts was always going to be a messy and disappointing one, but the France that Montaigne navigated and inhabited must have seemed like it was unraveling.
A generation earlier, Michelangelo had painted the Sistine Chapel. Magellan had circumnavigated the globe. Copernicus had displaced the earth from the center of the universe. The Renaissance had flowered, bringing with it beautiful art and earth-shattering awakenings. A new world was discovered across the Atlantic. As word of different cultures trickled back, even man's sense of the size and shape of the globe had to be reconsidered.
Alongside discovery and invention, however, came destabilization. The church, which had long been a unifying force, had been undermined by these new forms of thought, by the new technologies that spread new ideas. The was, in Montaigne's expression, a common belief that "the world is turned upside down." For the first time, people began to question the oppressive role that priests played in society, and even more generally, they began to ask, Why are things this way? and Should they continue this way?
Martin Luther tacked his theses to the door of the church. Reformation and Counter-Reformation followed. Riots and unrest ensued. New faiths emerged, and they battled not just for their right to exist but for the power to crush all others as heresies. Inquisitions and persecution raged. The flower of the Renaissance withered up there on the scaffold. The tolerance and acceptance of the Enlightenment lay centuries in the future. It was, and remained, as one scholar said, a world still lit only by fire.
In 1562, Montaigne, then serving Charles IX, witnessed the carnage from the siege of Rouen, a violent Catholic insurrection in which more than a thousand people were killed in a bloody clash over religious tensions dividing France. Just a few months earlier, the Duke of Guise had massacred dozens of French Huguenots attending a church service in the town of Vassey. A year later, the duke himself would be gunned down by the side of the road by another French nobleman who lay in wait. When the assassin was caught, he was drawn and quartered-except the sentence was botched, and when the man's limbs failed to be ripped from their sockets after multiple attempts, he was finally put out of his misery by the executioner's sword.
Copyright © 2025 by Ryan Holiday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
