who let the author off lightly, merely admonishing him to let his conscience “redress what I should see was in bad taste.” In Verona, Montaigne visited a synagogue and talked with the rabbi. After visiting a synagogue in Rome, he witnessed a ceremony of circumcision. He was insatiably curious about the varieties of religious experience.
Meanwhile, back in France, the Essays had struck a nerve. The book had made its author famous. Legend has it that when King Henry III complimented Montaigne on the virtues of his work, he replied that if His Majesty liked the essays, then he should like him, too, “as they were simply an account of his life and actions.”
The first edition of his book was quickly followed by a second, slightly revised edition in 1582, also printed by Simon Millanges in Bordeaux; a third edition in 1584, printed in Rouen; and then a fourth, reproducing the second edition but printed by Jean Richer in Paris in 1587; and then a fifth and thoroughly revised edition, “enlarged by a third book and by six hundred additions to the first two,” printed by one of the best-known publishers in France, Abel L’Angelier in Paris in 1588.
Montaigne’s growing reputation as a writer, combined with his experience as a magistrate in the Parlement of Bordeaux, and his service to the king’s court in Paris as a diplomatic go-between, made his political skills and opinions of interest to a growing array of French notables. At the end of November 1581, Montaigne learned from King Henry III that in his absence he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux, apparently the unanimous choice of town officials and the relevant outside authorities, including not just Henry III but Henry of Navarre as well.
Montaigne hurried home to assume his new responsibilities. Most of Bordeaux’s elite were Catholic loyalists, but the surrounding countryside was largely Protestant and under the control of Navarre. Bordeaux’s mayor had at his disposal a company of lords and was expected to represent the interests of the region to the court in Paris. The historian de Thou, who first came to know Montaigne in these years, described the new mayor as “a man free in spirit and foreign to factions.”
Because he professed loyalty to the French Crown, it is not surprising that Montaigne had become a gentleman-in-ordinary—an official aide—at the court of King Henry III in 1573. But four years later, he had also been made a gentleman-in-ordinary at the court of Henry of Navarre. One of the rare noblemen trusted by both sides as a counselor and envoy, the mayor entered into a series of diplomatic missions in 1583 and 1585, trying to broker a cease-fire between Navarre and the king, in what proved a successful effort to isolate militants from the Holy League in Bordeaux who were loyal to Guise. The future of the French monarchy was also at issue in these negotiations, since the death of the king’s younger brother in 1584 had made Henry of Navarre the king’s heir apparent.
It was a merciless time, but Montaigne was a discreet advocate of clemency and of mercy, themes that recur in his Essays. As a result of his diplomacy in these years, he became friends with Philippe du Plessis Mornay, one of Navarre’s closest advisers and the Huguenot’s foremost philosopher (he was reputed to be the author of the Contra Vindiciae Tyrannos, A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, a radical justification of rebellion published in 1579 that was not dissmilar in substance to arguments advanced a generation earlier by Montaigne’s old friend La Boétie).
But Montaigne himself continued to eschew radical rhetoric of any kind. As he saw it, his job was not to defend to the death abstract principles but rather to secure local law and order, by keeping Bordeaux and its environs peaceful and its citizens obedient to the monarchy. He was successful in this, even if his moderate policies—and his willingness to negotiate with Protestants—inevitably struck militant Catholics as a failure of nerve.
Max Horkheimer, the founder of twentieth-century critical theory, in the 1930s attacked Montaigne and what he took to be his “skepticism” as an insidious if genteel form of spineless irrationalism, the perfect philosophy for a complacent bourgeois—a man of comfortable means, free in spirit, conformist in practice, and constitutionally incapable of taking sides in a struggle that demanded hard choices. (Horkheimer of course had in mind the complacent German burghers of his own day, who were paralyzed into indecision by the looming showdown between fascism and