he concludes that the finest lives are those lived after ‘a common and
human model, in an orderly way but without marvels or extravagances’.
People must have a sense of right and wrong which is instilled by
reason, though religion and laws ought to perfect and sanction it: no
idea was more ruinous to the polity than that religious belief, without
morality, would satisfy divine justice.^60
The natural laws of the philosophers were too sublime and abstract
to be of help, and no two countries could agree what they were. Indeed,
Montaigne was sceptical about the ability of law of any sort to com-
prehend the infinite variety of human behaviour, and about the justice
of French laws in particular, as he had seen them administered when he
practised in the parlement of Bordeaux. He pitied the poor devils
sacrificed to the forms of justice, and expressed unpopular doubts that
Old Testament descriptions of witches could be applied to the detection
of witches in his own time. If it was so difficult to establish ethical laws
for a private individual, how was it possible to establish them for a
multitude? ‘The laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature,
are born of custom’; and ‘the laws maintain their credit, not because
they are just, but because they are laws.’ There was no other basis for
their authority than custom and long use, which made it perilous to
trace them back and find how disreputable their origins might be.^61
Yet Montaigne’s conclusion is that no good comes of changing
traditional laws: he had seen the English do it three or four times in his
lifetime, on matters of religion as well as politics, and in France, too,
offences previously capital had been made lawful, and through the
fortunes of war ‘any one of us may be convicted of lèse-majesté against
man and God’ just for following the old laws. ‘In public affairs there is
no course so bad, provided that it is stable and traditional, that is not
better than change and alteration.’ Many French laws were barbarous:
people were obliged to obey rules which they had never understood
even in domestic affairs such as marriages, gifts, wills, and buying and
selling. But the evil that could come from changing a traditional law
outweighed the good, for a polity was like a building—moving one
State, nation, and politics in France 325(^60) Montaigne, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat (Paris, 1962), 305 (On
prayers), 346 (On conscience), 553 (Apology for Raymond Sebond), 600 (That difficulty
increases our desire), 651 (On liberty of conscience), 768–70 (On what is useful and
honourable), 919–20 (On the art of conversation), 929, 933 (On vanity), 989 (On restraining
one’s will), 1019, 1023, 1037 (On physiognomy); Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early
Modern State, 66 ff.; on Montaigne’s politics, see P. Burke’s Montaigne(Oxford UP: ‘Past
Masters’, 1981) and his ch. on ‘Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state’ in The Cambridge
History of Political Thought, 1450–1700.
(^61) Montaigne, Oeuvres Complètes,114–15, 118 (On custom and not readily changing a
traditional law), 562–4, 567 (Apology for Raymond Sebond), 638–9 (On presumption), 773
(On what is useful and honourable), 1008 (On the lame), 1041 (On physiognomy), 1049–50,
1056, 1088, 1096 (On experience).