Abstract
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne, was born in 1533, the son of a successful fish merchant. After an education focusing on Latin (he spoke it as a native), he studied law at Toulouse. He had made a career as a provincial magistrate. He travelled one year in Germany and Italy, and was mayor of Bordeaux for five years (1581-1585). In 1571, he left public affairs, and started to write his Essais; for the remind of his life he never left his castle in Périgord where he was born (and where he died).
In the Sixteenth Century, the European colonization of the New World discovered in 1492 was continuing, especially by the Spanish and Portuguese who shared South and Central America. This discovery of a new area and its inhabitants led the intellectuals of the Old World to think about these new societies but also, by comparison, about European societies. Montaigne was one of them, in Des Cannibales (1580) and Des Coches (1588); he depicts these unknown people called savages, barbarians or cannibals because of their strangeness.
In Des Cannibales (book 1, chapter XXXI), Michel de Montaigne tries to show that these populations (from Brazil) are not the barbarians Europeans think they are, but straightforwardly they are different, another kind of humanity. Then he displays that they are savages but only because they are nearer the Nature than the Europeans. At last, he explains the causes of their alleged barbarism and demonstrates that the Old World is much more barbarous than them.
We are going to see what is the basis of Montaigne's vision of these Brazilians, and what are the goals of the author when he wrote this Essay about the New World. We will notice the different steps of his argumentation and why he was one of the forerunners of some ideas.
