Michel de Montaigne was a renowned 16th-century French philosopher who popularized essay writing as a literary genre and wrote intellectual and thought-provoking essays on human existence and the truths of life. “Of Cannibals” is one of the essays from his 1580 collection of the same name that exposes Europe’s preoccupation with dualities by centering themselves as a model for the whole world. What Europeans think of barbarians and why they ascribe savagery to non-Europeans form the basis of this work. Montaigne analyses the lifestyle of barbarians i.e. the inhabitants of Brazil to create a discourse on knowledge and humanity’s capacity to inflict as well as bear cruelty.
Of Cannibals | Summary
The essay begins with Montaigne stating the “vulgar opinion” that Europeans have built about the non-Europeans as barbaric creatures by drawing on King Pyrrhus’ statement on the Roman army. Greeks’ belief of savagery prevailing in everyone who does not belong to their nationality is undermined when the king is impressed with the Roman army’s disciplinary welcome and disbelieves them to be barbaric. Montaigne insists on deploying reason and personal experience while forming an opinion. Similarly, Europeans during their expedition into South America came across Brazilians whom they considered barbaric because of their inhabitance of wild lands. However, Montaigne offers an alternate view of their life which is somewhat utopic and catalogs various customs and practices that stand in complete contrast to Europe’s. He draws on Plato’s story of Atlantis as the great island that faces the repercussions of a flood in its quest for expansion.
Montaigne further converses with a man whose life in the New World for a couple of years becomes a diary of life experiences without any filters as he is a plain man. Montaigne emphasizes the need to stop believing in the commonly held notions and rather believe in what you see or hear personally by employing the faculty of Reason.
Just like the Greeks’ opinion on Romans, Europeans think of Brazilians, and all non-Europeans for that matter as savages. But Montaigne says that their conditions of life are devoid of manipulation and poverty with equality prevailing and proximity to nature. They do not dispute over territories; have no concepts of finance, deceit, corruption, or any other vices except bloodshed and war which is equivalent to honor, glory, and valor. The will to surrender undermines the physical endurance of a captive. Physical submission is nothing until their will also submits. Montaigne realizes the barbaric tendencies in their treatment towards the prisoners who they cut into pieces and eat amongst themselves. There is no employment but only leisure activities where wives prepare drinks for the men and as a polygamous community, would often seek out other wives for their husbands because it would contribute to their husband’s grandiosity and stature. Religion operates outside their life and does not mediate in their daily activities.
With all this said Montaigne ventures to draw similarities as well as differences between Europeans and the citizens of the New World and concludes them to be not different from each other. Europe’s obsession with its own image blinds it to see faults in its own customs and civilization. For the so-called barbarians, humanity is one as they address the people in Europe as halves. They are astonished to see Europe having poor vagabonds suffering and begging when rich people are comfortable sleeping in their houses.
Of Cannibals | Analysis
Montaigne’s subtle critique of Europe’s perception of colonies’ barbaric and savage lifestyle is a literary masterpiece that compels all the readers to contemplate their own belief system as well as to scrutinize their opinion formation solely on the basis of hearsay. He wrote the essay during the era when Europe was battling with corruption and violence as a consequence of wars and conquests all over the world. He tempts the readers through his “discursive tossing” by implicitly exposing the latent hypocrisy in Europe’s conduct and mannerisms.
The essay is premised on the French expedition to South America in 1557 and subsequent accounts that delineated a meticulous description of the Brazilians who he admired for living in an idealistic setting but popularly became a victim of contempt for their cannibalism. Montaigne thus willingly bears the onus of critically commenting on the Brazilians’ way of living and determining the credibility of the said notions. He employs analogy and allusion especially to noble European philosophers as the key rhetorical strategies to accelerate his arguments with precision.
Of Cannibals | Key Arguments
The foremost observation Montaigne expresses is about the herd mentality people often engage in. One should always believe in what he/she sees rather than what he/she hears from others, like King Pyrrhus who casted his own take on the Romans as not barbaric but rather disciplined and mannered. Montaigne states- “we are to judge by the eye of reason, and not from the common report” and establishes the basis of his thought-provoking work.
Often when a new land is discovered, its essence is lost in the worldly hunger of absorbing what is naked to the eye. Explorers in their travelogues attempt to amass everything they see and their empirical accounts over the years formulate into theories that are biased and incomplete in a sense as Montaigne asserts that “our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.” The prosperity of discourse and literature on the communities settled in different parts of the world is an outcome of the glossing and altering of the stories by the “better-bred sort of men” like in the flourishing of an oriental discourse on the orients in the succeeding centuries. Things are presented as what they appear and mean to those men instead of what they actually are.
Art has gained preeminence over its subject i.e. nature and this in Montaigne’s opinion is itself barbarism for we have made additions to its existing beauty through our own inventions which is equivalent to smothering her. The few remote areas which have managed to escape such victimization tend to appear primitive and savage to us for they don’t suit our vanity. Barbarism hence is nothing but any foreign practice that is alien to us, that we are not accustomed to.
Calling out to Plato and other great historical and literary icons, he articulates satirically about their lack of belief in a:
“human society [which] could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork.”
To further substantiate his stand, Montaigne enlists the various features of the New World, near to perfection yet incomprehensible to a man residing in the “lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy [and] detraction” operated environment.
Ahead in the essay, he draws a comparison between the Europeans and the Brazilians concluding the former to be barbaric too. Their exotic and ‘othered’ status in the penmanship of various travelers is expelled by Montaigne who allows their assimilation into civilization just like the rest of the world. Indigenousness and proximity to nature had always kept them at bay in the Eurocentric world but primitivism has rather enabled them to be free of corrupting influences of the world. The people of Brazil live harmoniously with no power conflicts amongst themselves due to the expansion of land, which Europe was, and to some extent, even today is notoriously famous for. The women of the New World also follow the dictates of domesticity and gender hierarchy as Europe’s women do in their subservience to their husbands. They even believe in the immortality of the soul- a philosophy proposed by Plato thus connecting them with the European thought process.
However, there is some incivility to their conduct too when they do not hesitate to rip their priest into thousand pieces for his false divination. Viewing it from two perspectives, the sheer brutality involving the act deems them closer to savagery but the driving force i.e. to punish falsity is an ethical justification for the act. Church and thus religion has always dominated European nations and has in effect become the impetus for the colonial enterprise.
War too is a bloody phenomenon in their culture where they only fight with nations within the mainland and beyond the mountains:
“Everyone for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his house. After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being. done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, dispatch him with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think, for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation of extreme revenge; as will appear by this: that having observed the Portuguese, who were in league with their enemies, to inflict another sort of death upon any of them they took prisoners, which was to set them up to the girdle in the earth, to shoot at the remaining part till it was stuck full of arrows, and then to hang them, they thought those people of the other world …did not exercise this sort of revenge without a meaning…”
To focus on the faults of the barbarians, one has to turn a blind eye toward their own faults. Montaigne further maintains calling out these people
“barbarous [is], in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them. Their wars are throughout noble and generous, and carry as much excuse and fair pretense, as that human malady is capable of; having with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy of valor. Their disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labor or concern, with all things necessary, in such abundance that they have no need to enlarge their borders.”
Thus, they don’t charge weapons against other nations for superficial reasons. They demand their prisoners only an “acknowledgment that they are overcome: but there is not one found in an age, who will not rather choose to die than make such a confession, or either by word or look recede from the entire grandeur of an invincible courage. There is not a man amongst them who had not rather be killed and eaten, than so much as to open his mouth to entreat he may not.” The men thus strive to prove their valor whenever a war situation demands them to.
Montaigne declares that in the degree of comparison, the Brazilians are savage but they have to be or else it’s the Europeans who are! These people otherwise live in contention without aspiring for anything more. Interestingly, polygamy works well in their culture which for European wives would be unacceptable but if looked through Biblical strictures, is not that big of an issue.
Lastly, he pronounces the three Brazilians’ possible regret of visiting Europe to gaze at the novelty. They were dumbfounded by the citizen’s adherence to a child (referring to King Charles IX who ascended the throne at a young age) instead of choosing a leader amongst themselves. The second sight of spectacle was witnessing the disparity between the rich and the poor where the latter does not rebel or fight for their rights.
The essay’s closing statement is ironic at its best when a native chief spills about his visit to the village of his dependence who “planed his paths through the thick of their woods, by which he might pass at his ease” and “they wear no breeches” signifying the lack of façade the barbarians adopt who prefer to be naked and transparent both in attire and their mannerism.
Of Cannibals | Literary Devices
Metaphor
Brazilians or the inhabitants of the new world are thought of as “wild fruits” due to their conditions of living as intimate to nature.
Analogy
Flooding of Atlantis
It is analogous to colonialism where Europe’s thirst for expansion never satiates and revolutions in the later years topple their power and system.
Allusion
Montaigne makes an allusion to the 10th century author Suidas who wrote the encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world.
Conclusion
While Montaigne’s essay speaks about his outlook on the whole debate between civilization and barbarism, it is a matter of contestation that he is too drawing his remarks from the accounts and observations of a man who was a part of the Villegaignon’s landing in Brazil in 1557 which addressed the South American nation the “Antarctic France.” Montaigne, like the rest of the world, is too removed from the immediate reality.
