“Cannibals All? A Discourse on Michel de Montaigne’s Essay, ‘On the Cannibals’”

“Cannibals All? A Discourse on Michel de Montaigne’s Essay, ‘On the Cannibals’” Chapter One Introduction: Cannibals all? This essay is an exploration of Michel de Montaigne’s (1533- 1592) “On the Cannibals.” It will assess Montaigne’s reaction to several views of “the other” in the sixteenth century. The first view is that all non-Europeans were savages, cannibals, less than human and not to be respected or trusted. This was the view that permeated much of Western civilization at the time. Following the era of exploration and conquest of the new world, European royal officials and explorers were forced to reckon with the place of new world cultures in an expanding globe. For some, the new world cultures seemed more primitive than the culture of Europeans. The result was a fear or rejection of what seemed to “civilized” Europeans as a savage society. For many, a negative characterization was an excuse to exploit the resources of the new world to enrich old world nations. Such exploration and colonization was the outgrowth of the European economic system called mercantilism. The second view is that “the others,” the primitive tribal peoples that were “discovered,” were really “noble savages,” whose life was found in an idyllic state of nature, reflecting the original ideal of human community. In the sixteenth century, nature was often contrasted with art, as a symbol of human invention and artifice, a contrived4 and even distortion of humanity. For Montaigne, the appeal to nature was a way to critique the corruption and pretension of European, specifically French civilization.