Montaigne’s Vagabond Styles: Political Homelessness in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract This article analyses political homelessness in French literature during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), using Montaigne’s ‘De la vanité’ (‘Of Vanity’) as a case study. In that chapter, in which Montaigne discusses travel extensively, he aligns writers and vagabonds, later describing his writing style and way of thinking as vagabondage. There is no direct equivalent of the term ‘homelessness’ in early modern French, but ‘vagabond’ is frequently used to describe those of no fixed abode. Montaigne’s brief appropriations of the vagabond figure enable a reassessment of his relation to home and to politics, understood in the broader context of mass displacement and renewed philosophical reflection on home in this period. Firstly, the alignment between writers and vagabonds is read as a reference to Montaigne’s experience of papal censorship in Rome and an anticipation of his claim to be a citizen of the world. Montaigne’s creative vagabondage has affinities with Rosi Braidotti’s theory of ‘nomadic subjectivity’ (another kind of world-citizenship), which is both an aesthetic principle and a way of interrogating – and affirming – political agency. The article then goes on to analyse the extent to which Montaigne is ‘politically homeless’, in the sense that he is alienated by politics and refuses factionalism. Lastly, we consider Montaigne’s relation to homelessness in the context of contemporary print culture: the existence of clandestine ‘homeless texts’ reveals the limits of Montaigne’s strategic vagabondage. The conclusion then returns to the stakes of Montaigne’s claim that his style of writing is a ‘vagabond’ movement.