Book: Essays

Overview
Published in 1580, Michel de Montaigne’s Essays inaugurate a new literary form devoted to probing the self and the everyday as a path to wisdom. Withdrawn to his tower library amid the French Wars of Religion, Montaigne experiments with short, digressive pieces that put personal experience and fallible judgment at the center. The first edition consists of two books whose subjects range from friendship and education to custom, cruelty, fear, and death. The goal is less to instruct than to test and weigh, an attitude crystallized in his motto "Que sais-je?", "What do I know?"

Form and Method
Montaigne calls each piece an essai, an attempt, signaling provisional inquiry rather than dogmatic conclusion. He combines anecdote, confession, and historical or classical examples in a conversational voice that admits doubt and contradiction. The pages move easily from Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch to stable boys, cooks, and his own quirks, making the low as illuminating as the high. He frames the book as a self-portrait in motion, "I am myself the matter of my book", where writing serves to catch the mind as it wanders, recoils, revises, and grows. Skeptical of abstract systems, he prefers judgment trained by experience, habit, and the comparative study of human variety.

Major Themes
Self-knowledge and moderation dominate. Montaigne distrusts certainty, denounces cruelty and torture, and champions a humane tolerance shaped by civil conflict around him. Death and fear receive steady attention: to "learn to die" is to learn to live, by bringing mortality into calm conversation rather than banishing it in superstition. The body is not an enemy to the mind but its partner; digestion, sleep, sex, and illness are treated as central to understanding ourselves. Custom, he argues, rules us more than reason; recognizing the power of habit is the first step toward freedom from its tyranny. Education, for Montaigne, should cultivate judgment, not rote recitation; the well-formed mind digests knowledge, questions authorities, and learns by living. Underlying many essays is a Pyrrhonian skepticism, drawn through Sextus Empiricus, that exposes the limits of sense, reason, and testimony, not to paralyze action but to temper zeal and pride.

Notable Portraits and Cases
"Of Friendship" offers an elegiac tribute to Étienne de La Boétie, presenting perfect friendship as rare and transformative, grounded in an "I because he was he, and I because I was I" affinity that exceeds utility. "Of the Education of Children" lays out a pedagogy of dialogue, travel, exercise, and moral formation, preferring a tutor who questions rather than lectures. "Of Cannibals" compares New World peoples with Europeans, dismantling facile hierarchies by showing how each culture calls foreign what is simply different. The true barbarism, he suggests, is cruelty. "That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die" brings Stoic and Epicurean counsel into the household, urging readers to domesticate mortality. Essays such as "Of Custom", "Of the Power of Imagination", and "Of Cruelty" display his method: an observation, a cluster of examples, a spiral of reflections, and a wary refusal to overreach.

Style, Context, and Legacy
Montaigne’s supple vernacular French, thick with Latin tags yet intimate in tone, pioneered a prose suited to uncertainty and candor. As a magistrate and former mayor of Bordeaux, he writes as a practical moralist, not a system-builder, seeking peace in a fractious age by counseling humility and mutual recognition. The 1580 Essays established the modern essay as a vehicle for thought in motion, influencing Bacon, Pascal, Emerson, and countless others. Their enduring power lies in the way they make a life, its habits, fears, pleasures, and limits, the testing ground for wisdom, and in the freedom they grant readers to think alongside a companionable, skeptical mind.