When Fear Meets Justice — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne once heard a prince, and a great captain, sit at table over the case of Monsieur de Vervins, sentenced to death for surrendering Boulogne to the English. The captain maintained that a soldier could not justly be put to death for want of courage. Montaigne agrees that a wide gap should stand between faults that come from infirmity and those that show treachery and malice. In the second we act against the reason nature printed in us. In the first we may plead the same nature, which left us weak. Many have thought we are fairly questionable only for what we commit against conscience. The same rule, he notes, is used by those who reject blood punishments for heretics, and by those who would not hang a judge for a failure born of mere ignorance.

Cowardice, though, is most often chastised by ignominy. Charondas, it is said, replaced the old Greek death for flight with three days of public exposure in women's attire, hoping shame would wake courage and still leave a man fit for later service. Roman practice swung. Julian degraded ten men who turned their backs against the Parthians and then put them to death by ancient law, yet elsewhere sent like offenders to remain among the prisoners under the baggage ensign. The people of Rome did not extend death to those who fled Cannae, or who ran with Aeneius Fulvius. Montaigne fears disgrace may make such men desperate, and turn faint friends into enemies.

In living memory the Seigneur de Frauget surrendered Fuentarabia and was degraded from all nobility at Lyons, himself and his posterity declared ignoble, taxable, and forever incapable of bearing arms. The gentlemen in Guise when the Count of Nassau entered underwent the same. Still, when ignorance or cowardice exceeds all ordinary example, Montaigne says it is reason to take it as proof of treachery and malice, and to punish it as such. The lost town looks the same from the wall. The fault inside it may not.