Wit & Attitude Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne’s line lands like a moral mugging: the phrase “public weal” sounds clean, civic, almost hygienic, and then he stuffs it with betrayal, lying, and massacre. The whiplash is the point. He’s exposing the way politics launders violence through respectable vocabulary, turning atrocities into administrative necessities. “Requires” is doing heavy work here: it suggests inevitability, a demand issued by the state itself, as if conscience were an unaffordable luxury.

The intent isn’t to cheer on cruelty; it’s to strip the mask off reason-of-state arguments that were hardening in his lifetime. Montaigne wrote in the shadow of the French Wars of Religion, when governments and factions justified assassinations, massacres, and broken oaths as the price of stability or salvation. He lived through a world where public order was constantly invoked to excuse private ambition and sectarian rage. In that environment, “the common good” becomes a blank check: once you accept the premise that the collective must be saved at any cost, the cost will keep rising.

Subtextually, Montaigne is also taking aim at the psychological comfort of delegation. If “the public” requires it, then no single person has to own it. The sentence compresses a whole political alchemy: abstract nouns (“weal”) transform concrete acts (betrayal, murder) into policy. His cynicism is diagnostic, not decorative. He’s warning that the most dangerous lies are the ones told in the grammar of necessity.