Montaigne's Critique of Cicero

I. Discussion of Cicero in the Essais. Montaigne's adverse judgments of Cicero are part of a process which one might call the critical domestication of humanism. As he mediates between the Latin culture of the Renaissance and the urbane vernacular culture that succeeded it, Montaigne rejects the Ciceronian style and many of the ethical, psychological, and political ideas and values that are associated with it. He seeks clarify his own ideas about literature and its aims, using his opposition Cicero as a guide. The quality of Montaigne's remarks on Cicero is that of the Essais generally. Montaigne is more concerned with Cicero's character than with his doctrines, more with his writings about morality and life than with his writings about writing and speech. He responds with subtle psychological insight Cicero's personality, and draws from that insight, rather than from a priori notions about literature and style, the basis of his criticism. Cicero is not a major presence in the Essais. One finds many scattered references him, a certain number of translated passages, and numerous Latin citations from his philosophical writings, with which Montaigne adorned the Essais after 1588. But he treats Cicero at length in only two places: Consideration sur Ciceron (I, 40) and Des livres (II, 10).1 The first of these follows one of the most important of the Essais, De la solitude, and Montaigne explicitly ties the two together. The famous arriere boutique appears in De la solitude, closely associated with an austere Stoicism which Montaigne relaxed subsequently in revisions of the essay. The solitude he speaks for is a form of self-reliance, not necessarily withdrawal. Yet his experience as a magistrate in Bordeaux has embittered him. He has seen that a man commonly enters public affairs to take his private profit from the

Art · Cicero · Epistemology · Literature · French Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Renaissance Literature and Culture

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