The Book That Invented the First Person — Essays

Title: Essays Author: Michel de Montaigne Creation Date: 1580-1592 Location: France

Summary

Michel de Montaigne retired to his tower library in 1571 and spent the next two decades writing and revising his Essays — 107 chapters ranging from a few pages to book-length meditations, on subjects from cannibals to thumbs, from friendship to kidney stones. The word "essay" (essai, meaning "attempt" or "trial") was Montaigne's invention: these are not definitive statements but exploratory forays into thought. Across three books of increasing length and complexity, Montaigne examines himself with unprecedented honesty — his fears, his bowel movements, his sexual habits, his reading — and through self-examination arrives at a vision of human nature as irreducibly variable, contradictory, and resistant to system.

Why This Book Matters

Montaigne invented the essay as a literary form and, more profoundly, invented the modern practice of self-examination as a literary and philosophical act. Before Montaigne, introspection was the province of religious confession (Augustine) or philosophical meditation (Marcus Aurelius). Montaigne secularised it, making the ordinary, embodied self a worthy subject. His radical scepticism — "What do I know?" — undermined dogmatic certainty of every kind and helped lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment. His tolerance, his curiosity about non-European cultures, his insistence on the dignity of ordinary experience, and his refusal to moralise make him feel startlingly contemporary. The Essays are the origin point for a tradition running through Pascal, Rousseau, Emerson, Woolf, and every personal essayist since.

Historical Context

Montaigne wrote during the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), a period of savage sectarian violence between Catholics and Huguenots. The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572) occurred shortly after he began writing. His scepticism and tolerance were not abstract philosophical positions but responses to a society tearing itself apart over doctrinal certainty. Montaigne served as mayor of Bordeaux and as a diplomatic intermediary between the warring factions. The Essays also reflect the Renaissance encounter with the New World — his famous essay "Of Cannibals" used reports of Brazilian indigenous people to challenge European assumptions of cultural superiority.

Literary Significance

The essay form Montaigne created — digressive, personal, associative, resistant to system — remains one of literature's most versatile modes. His writing style mirrors his philosophy: sentences that start in one direction and veer into another, paragraphs that accumulate rather than argue, a voice that is simultaneously learned and casual. The Essays grow increasingly personal across their three books, moving from relatively impersonal compilations of classical wisdom to the radical self-portraiture of Book III. His influence on prose style is as significant as Shakespeare's influence on dramatic verse.

Research Notes

Chosen over Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel is brilliant but more niche in its appeal and more dependent on period-specific context. Montaigne's Essays are endlessly re-readable and accessible to modern readers in ways that most Renaissance literature is not. The complete Essays are very long; readers can profitably begin with selected essays ("Of Cannibals," "Of Experience," "Of Friendship," "Of the Education of Children"). The Screech translation is now standard.

The Reading

In 1571, Michel de Montaigne, a French nobleman of thirty-eight years, retired from public life to the tower of his family estate in the Dordogne. He had a library of a thousand books arranged in a circular room at the top of the tower. He had Latin inscriptions painted on the ceiling beams -- maxims from Sextus Empiricus, Ecclesiastes, Lucretius. He had a desk, and time, and a question that would occupy him for the rest of his life: "Que sais-je?" -- "What do I know?"

Over the next twenty years, revising continuously until his death in 1592, he wrote 107 chapters across three books, ranging in length from half a page to several hundred pages, on subjects that included cannibals, thumbs, coaches, the education of children, friendship, cruelty, experience, drunkenness, the custom of wearing clothes, the resemblance of children to fathers, riding post, smells, war horses, prayer, solitude, sleep, conscience, sadness, idleness, liars, constancy, ceremonies, age, kidney stones, fear, pedantry, books, and himself. Especially himself.

He called these writings "essais" -- attempts, trials, tests. The word was his invention. Before Montaigne, there were treatises, dialogues, confessions, and meditations. After Montaigne, there was the essay: a form defined by its refusal to arrive at conclusions, its delight in contradiction, its insistence that the writer's own experience -- however mundane, however embarrassing -- is a legitimate subject for philosophy.

Book One: The Classical Apprenticeship

The first book of the Essays, published in 1580, is the most impersonal and the most indebted to classical sources. Montaigne fills his pages with stories from Plutarch, Seneca, Caesar, and the ancient historians, arranging them in loose clusters around themes. But even here, the distinctive Montaigne voice is audible -- digressive, curious, sceptical of certainty, drawn to the exception rather than the rule.

"Of Sadness" begins by noting that extreme grief often produces no tears at all -- that the deepest sorrow is silent and dry-eyed, while lesser griefs weep extravagantly. This observation, drawn from classical anecdotes, leads Montaigne to a broader reflection: human emotions are unreliable, contradictory, and resist systematisation. A man who faints at bad news may laugh at worse. A woman who seems unmoved at her husband's funeral may collapse in grief weeks later over a trifle. We are not consistent creatures, and any philosophy that assumes we are is building on sand.

"Of Idleness" -- one of the shortest essays -- describes what happened when Montaigne retired to his tower. He expected that solitude and leisure would produce wisdom. Instead, his mind "bolted like a runaway horse," producing "chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness." He began to write the essays, he says, precisely to give his unruly mind something to do -- to pin it down on paper and examine it. The essays are not the product of a disciplined intellect. They are the bridle on an undisciplined one.

"Of the Education of Children" lays out a philosophy of learning that was revolutionary in the sixteenth century and remains radical today. Montaigne argues against rote memorisation, against the authority of teachers, against the stuffing of young minds with dead knowledge. A child should learn by doing, by questioning, by testing everything against experience. "Let him not be taught so much the histories as how to judge them." The goal of education is not a full head but a well-made one -- not information but judgement.

"Of Cannibals"

This is the essay that established Montaigne as one of the first European thinkers to challenge the assumption of European cultural superiority. Based on reports from travellers to Brazil and on his own conversation with Brazilian indigenous people brought to Rouen, Montaigne constructs a devastating comparison between the "savages" of the New World and the "civilised" Europeans of his own.

The Brazilians, he concedes, eat their enemies. This is cannibalism. But Montaigne asks: is this worse than what Europeans do to each other? "I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, in tearing by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, in roasting it piecemeal and having it bitten and gnawed by dogs and swine -- as we have not only read about but seen within recent memory, not between ancient enemies but between neighbours and fellow citizens, and, what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion -- than in roasting and eating him after he is dead."

The reference is to the Wars of Religion then tearing France apart -- to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, in which Catholic mobs murdered thousands of Protestants in Paris and across France, mutilating bodies and dragging them through the streets. Montaigne does not idealise the Brazilians. He uses them as a mirror in which European self-regard is reflected back as what it actually is: hypocrisy.

The essay ends with a remark of stunning dryness: the Brazilians who visited Rouen, Montaigne reports, were astonished that so many tall, armed Frenchmen would submit to the rule of a child (the young king). They also wondered why the poor did not simply "seize the others by the throat or set fire to their houses." Montaigne adds: "All this is not too badly observed -- but then, they don't wear trousers."

"Of Friendship"

This is the most personal essay in the first book, and it aches. Montaigne writes about Etienne de la Boetie, his closest friend, who died of the plague in 1563 at the age of thirty-two. Their friendship, Montaigne says, was unlike any other human relationship he has known. It was not friendship based on utility or pleasure, the categories Aristotle describes. It was something else entirely -- a union of souls so complete that neither man could say where one ended and the other began.

"If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I."

The sentence is one of the most famous in French literature, and its power lies in its refusal to explain. The friendship was its own reason. It admitted no analysis. When La Boetie died, something in Montaigne died with him, and the essays -- all of them, the entire enterprise of self-examination -- are, in some sense, a substitute for the conversation that death interrupted. "Since I lost him, I do but drag on a weary life. The very pleasures that come my way, instead of consoling me, redouble my grief for his loss."

Book Two: The Body and Doubt

The second book, also published in 1580 but revised extensively in later editions, moves deeper into Montaigne's own experience and into the philosophical scepticism that would become his defining intellectual posture.

"Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions" states the principle that governs the entire project: "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others." We are not one self but many. The brave man is sometimes a coward. The generous man is sometimes mean. The wise man is sometimes a fool. This is not a moral failing. It is the human condition. Any philosophy, any religion, any political system that requires human beings to be consistent is demanding the impossible.

"Of Drunkenness" is a sly meditation on altered states. Montaigne catalogues the varieties of intoxication with the eye of a naturalist, noting that drunkenness, for all its dangers, sometimes produces effects indistinguishable from virtue: courage, eloquence, generosity. This is not an endorsement of drinking. It is a demonstration that the line between virtue and vice is blurrier than moralists admit.

"An Apology for Raymond Sebond" is the longest and most philosophically dense essay, a book within a book. Ostensibly a defence of a fifteenth-century theologian's argument that God's existence can be proved by reason, it actually demolishes the pretensions of reason itself. Montaigne marshals argument after argument -- from Pyrrhonian scepticism, from the unreliability of the senses, from the variation of human customs, from the intelligence of animals -- to show that human reason is a weak and flickering instrument, incapable of reaching certainty about anything.

"We have no communication with being, because every human nature is always midway between being born and dying, offering only a dim semblance and shadow of itself, an uncertain and feeble opinion. And if, by chance, you fix your thought on grasping its essence, it will be neither more nor less than trying to grasp water."

This radical scepticism is not nihilism. Montaigne does not conclude that nothing matters. He concludes that we should be humble about our claims to knowledge, tolerant of other ways of life, and attentive to the evidence of our own experience rather than the authority of received dogma.

Book Three: The Self Unmasked

The third book, published in 1588 and revised until Montaigne's death in 1592, is where the essays achieve their full power. Here, the classical quotations thin out, the personal voice deepens, and Montaigne writes with a directness about his own body, mind, and habits that has no precedent in European literature.

"Of Repentance" opens with one of the most extraordinary declarations in the history of philosophy: "Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done." Montaigne is not presenting himself as an example to be followed. He is presenting himself as a specimen to be examined -- a particular, flawed, contradictory human being whose particular contradictions might illuminate the general condition.

He refuses to repent his past actions, not because they were all wise but because he was a different person when he committed them. The man who sinned at twenty is not the man who sits in the tower at fifty-eight. To repent would be to claim a consistency of self that does not exist. "I should not dare to speak of myself if I did not know myself to be other than I was."

"Of Vanity" is an essay about travel, digression, and the impossibility of staying still -- both physically and mentally. Montaigne loves travel because it takes him away from routine, from the accumulation of domestic duties and expectations that encrust a man's life like barnacles on a hull. He also loves it because it mirrors the movement of his mind, which never stays on one subject but wanders, doubles back, takes unexpected turns. The essay itself enacts this restlessness: it meanders through Italy, through Paris, through reflections on death, property, marriage, and the management of a household, never arriving at a conclusion because the essay form, like travel, is about the journey, not the destination.

"Of Experience" is the final and culminating essay, and it is Montaigne's masterpiece. It begins with Aristotle's statement that all men desire to know, and it ends with a meditation on the body -- on eating, sleeping, scratching, making love, and dying. Between these poles, Montaigne lays out his mature philosophy: that experience is the only reliable teacher, that the body's knowledge is as valid as the mind's, that the ordinary business of living -- digestion, conversation, gardening, sex -- is the proper material of philosophy.

"When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I am walking alone in a beautiful orchard, even if my thoughts are occupied for part of the time with other things, for part of the time I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me."

This passage -- so simple, so difficult to achieve -- is the distillation of everything Montaigne spent twenty years learning. Be where you are. Attend to what is happening. The body is not a prison to be escaped. It is the medium through which the world reaches you. The orchard is real. The sweetness is real. You are here.

He writes extensively about his kidney stones, which caused him agonising pain in his later years. Far from treating this as a private indignity, he examines the experience with the same curiosity he brings to everything else. Pain teaches. The body, even in its failures, is instructive. A man who knows his own body -- its pleasures, its limitations, its inevitable decline -- knows something essential about what it means to be human.

"Of Physiognomy" and "Of Cripples" continue the exploration, but the final pages of "Of Experience" are the essay tradition's highest achievement. Montaigne, nearing death, surveys the life he has lived and finds it -- not good, not bad, but his. He does not claim to have understood it. He does not claim to have lived it well. He claims only to have paid attention.

"It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump."

This is the final word of the Essays: you are a body on a chair, in a world you did not make and cannot fully understand, surrounded by other bodies equally confused, and the best you can do is pay attention, be honest about what you find, and refrain from persecuting others for arriving at different conclusions. It is a modest philosophy. It has proved more durable than most ambitious ones.

This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →

M.A. Screech's complete translation for Penguin Classics (ISBN 0140446044) is now the standard English edition — distinguished, authoritative, and exhaustively annotated. For readers who want to start with a selection before committing to 1,300 pages, Screech's Essays: A Selection (Penguin, ISBN 0140446028) is an excellent entry point, covering "Of Cannibals," "Of Experience," "Of Friendship," and many others.

Translated by M.A. Screech. The definitive complete edition — all 107 essays with extensive notes.