Thinkers Timeline

Michel de Montaigne was a French nobleman and writer who invented the modern essay. He was born in 1533 at the Château de Montaigne in southwest France, near Bordeaux. His family had grown rich through the wine trade and bought their way into the minor nobility. His father had odd ideas about education. He sent the infant Michel to live with peasants for the first three years of his life, so the boy would understand ordinary people. Then he had Latin tutors speak to Michel only in Latin, so the boy grew up speaking Latin as fluently as French. The unusual education shaped him. Montaigne studied law and worked for thirteen years as a magistrate in the Bordeaux high court. He served twice as mayor of Bordeaux. He lived through the French Wars of Religion, a long, brutal series of civil conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that killed thousands and produced famous atrocities like the 1572 Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The wars shaped his thinking about cruelty, fanaticism, and the limits of human reason. In 1571, aged 38, he retired from public life. He moved to a tower in his château, lined the walls with about a thousand books, and began to write. He called what he wrote 'essais', from the French essayer, meaning 'to try' or 'to test'. They were attempts to think on the page, not finished arguments. He published the first edition of his Essays in 1580 and kept revising and expanding them until his death in 1592. He never quite finished. The book has been read by every educated person in the West for over four hundred years.

Voltaire was a French writer, philosopher, and campaigner who became the most famous voice of the European Enlightenment. His real name was François-Marie Arouet. He was born in Paris in 1694 to a middle-class family. As a young man, he wrote sharp poems and plays that mocked powerful people. Twice he was put in the Bastille prison for his words. He took the pen name 'Voltaire' around 1718. In his twenties he spent two years in exile in England. He admired the freer politics, the religious tolerance, and the science of Newton. Back in France, he spent his life writing across many forms: tragedies, histories, poems, novels, scientific essays, philosophical books, and thousands of letters. He wrote so much that his collected works fill more than 70 large volumes. He was always in trouble with the French government and the Catholic Church. To stay safe, he moved often. He spent years at the court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia, then in Switzerland, then in his own large estate at Ferney near the Swiss border. From Ferney, in his sixties and seventies, he became Europe's most famous writer. He defended people wrongly accused by the courts. He campaigned against torture, religious persecution, and superstition. He died in Paris in 1778, at the age of 83, treated like a hero by huge crowds. Eleven years later, his ideas helped fuel the French Revolution.