The Complete Essays

The Invention of the Essay

In 1571, Montaigne retired from public life to a tower in his château in Périgord. He had recently inherited his father’s estate after a series of career disappointments. He began writing about whatever came to mind: his body, his opinions, his reading, his doubts, the customs of other peoples, the nature of experience. He called these pieces essais — attempts, trials — because they were not finished arguments but thinking in progress.

The form he invented has never been improved on. Its defining characteristics — digressiveness, self-contradiction, the use of the self as instrument of inquiry rather than authority — are exactly what makes the essay different from the treatise or the sermon.

On Experience

The final essay, ‘On Experience’, is Montaigne’s self-portrait and philosophical testament: the things he has learned from his own body and life, the habits that define him, the acceptance of his own limitations and contradictions. ‘Every man carries the whole form of the human condition within him,’ he wrote. The essays are the attempt to examine that form from the inside.

The Skeptic’s Motto

Carved into a beam of his study, Montaigne kept the question that organises the whole project: Que sais-je? — “What do I know?” It is not rhetorical. Montaigne genuinely distrusted the systematic certainties of the philosophers and theologians of his age, an age convulsed by the French Wars of Religion, in which Catholics and Protestants slaughtered one another over doctrines each held with absolute confidence. Against that murderous certainty he set a temperament of suspended judgement — the conviction that human reason is fallible, that custom masquerades as truth, and that the honest mind catches itself contradicting its own positions from one paragraph to the next. His great essay ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’ pushes this skepticism to its limit, dismantling the pretensions of human knowledge with a thoroughness that influenced Descartes and Pascal in turn.

The same humility produces his most strikingly modern thinking. In ‘On Cannibals’, written after meeting Tupinambá people brought from Brazil to Rouen, Montaigne turns the lens back on his fellow Europeans: the so-called savages, he argues, are no more barbarous than the Christians who tear living men apart on the rack in the name of religion. It is one of the earliest sustained statements of cultural relativism in Western thought, and it lost none of its force across the centuries that followed.

Influence, Translation, and How to Begin

Montaigne’s reach is almost impossible to overstate. Shakespeare read him in John Florio’s exuberant Elizabethan translation and borrowed from ‘On Cannibals’ for Gonzalo’s speech in The Tempest; Bacon, Pascal, Rousseau, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf all defined themselves partly in response to him. Every memoirist, every personal essayist, every blogger confessing a contradiction is working in the form he opened. Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, a biography organised around twenty answers Montaigne’s life suggests to the question of how to live, remains the most inviting modern companion to him.

For the English reader, M. A. Screech’s complete Penguin translation is the standard — colloquial, precise, and alert to Montaigne’s habit of thinking on the page — and it is the edition reviewed here. But 1,344 pages should not be approached as a marathon. The essays were written to be dipped into, abandoned, and returned to over years, exactly as Montaigne wrote them. Begin with ‘On Cannibals’, ‘On Friendship’ (his moving memorial to Étienne de La Boétie), and the late, sprawling ‘On Experience’, and let the rest accumulate. Read this way, the book becomes less a monument than a lifelong conversation with the most companionable mind in the canon.

The Man in the Tower

The biographical circumstances behind the essays matter, because the form grew directly out of them. Montaigne had trained in law and served as a magistrate in Bordeaux, but the public career left him disillusioned, and the death in 1563 of his closest friend, Étienne de La Boétie, deprived him of the one relationship he prized above all others. In 1571, at thirty-seven, he withdrew to the round tower of his family château, lined the walls of its upper room with books, and inscribed Latin and Greek maxims across the beams. There he wrote, revising and expanding the essays continuously across three editions until his death in 1592, layering later thoughts on top of earlier ones so that the text itself enacts a mind changing over time.

That layered, self-correcting quality is part of the reading experience. Montaigne never deletes his earlier self; he annotates it. The result is a book in which a man grows older in front of the reader, his preoccupations shifting from public virtue and Stoic resolve toward an acceptance of the body, the appetites, and the ordinary texture of daily life. By the final essays he has arrived at a serene, almost epicurean wisdom — the conviction that the great and glorious masterpiece of humankind is simply to live one’s life well and fully.

Limitations

1,344 pages is genuinely daunting — most readers dip and return rather than reading linearly. The Renaissance classical references require some background knowledge for full appreciation. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of literary non-fiction and philosophy — approach selectively at first: ‘On Cannibals’, ‘On Friendship’, ‘On Experience’ are ideal starting points.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The invention of the essay — Montaigne’s self-examination is the foundation of all first-person reflection in Western literature.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Michel De Montaigne
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit — Full Review