Where to Start with Michel de Montaigne: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Michel de Montaigne — how to approach The Complete Essays, the collection that invented the essay form and remains the foundation of all first-person reflection in Western literature. A complete reading guide.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a French Renaissance writer, philosopher, and statesman who served as Mayor of Bordeaux but is remembered entirely for the book he wrote in retirement. In 1571, at age thirty-eight, he withdrew from public life to a tower in his château in Périgord, inscribed its walls with quotations from classical authors, and began writing. He called his pieces essais — the French word for attempts or trials — because they were not finished arguments or systematic treatises but thinking in progress. The form he invented has never been substantially improved on in four centuries.
Where to Start: The Complete Essays (1580–1592)
The essential Michel de Montaigne — and the founding text of an entire literary mode. The Complete Essays is simultaneously one of the most daunting and most approachable books in the Western canon: 1,344 pages in the Penguin Classics edition, but designed for selective entry, for dipping and returning across years, for opening at any point and finding something immediately alive. The essays are in constant dialogue with the reader’s own experience in ways that make reading them feel less like historical study than like having a conversation with someone who has been dead for four centuries but understood you anyway.
The invention of the form is Montaigne’s most significant cultural achievement. Before the Essais, writing was divided into recognisable kinds: history, philosophy, theology, poetry, the letter. Each kind had rules, expectations, and assumed a relationship between the writer and the truth — either the writer knew something and was transmitting it, or the writer was constructing an argument. Montaigne invented a different relationship: the writer as instrument of inquiry, examining their own experience and thought without the obligation to reach a conclusion. The essay is a mode of thinking in public rather than a mode of conveying conclusions already reached.
The defining characteristics of the form Montaigne created are the characteristics of thinking rather than of writing: digressiveness (the essay goes where thought goes, not where argument requires), self-contradiction (Montaigne changes his mind between sentences and between essays without considering this a failure), and the self as subject (the nominal topic of every essay is a pretext — the real subject is always Montaigne, his body, his reactions, his doubts). These are not stylistic quirks; they are the form’s philosophical premises.
The essay on cannibals — Des Cannibales, one of his most famous — is the place many readers are advised to start, and with reason. Montaigne had met three Tupinambá people brought to France from Brazil and spoken to them through a translator. His account of what they told him about their culture, and his reflection on what it reveals about European assumptions of civilisation, is one of the earliest extended statements of cultural relativism in Western writing — and one of the sharpest. What seems barbaric, Montaigne argues, often depends entirely on which side of the practice you were raised on. The essay was written in 1579. It reads like something from the twenty-first century.
The essay on friendship — De l’Amitié — is a meditation on his relationship with Étienne de La Boétie, who died in 1563 and whose loss was the defining grief of Montaigne’s life. Asked why he loved La Boétie, Montaigne gives the only honest answer: “Because it was him, because it was me.” The essay is brief, one of his shortest, and one of the most moving things written in the Renaissance.
The final essay, On Experience — De l’Experience, written in 1588 — is Montaigne’s philosophical testament: the things he has learned from his own body and life, the habits that define him, the accommodation with his own limitations and contradictions that constitutes wisdom. “Every man carries the whole form of the human condition within him,” he writes. The essays are the attempt to examine that form from the inside, with the understanding that the examination will never be complete and the incompleteness is not a failure.
Reading Michel de Montaigne
The Complete Essays is Montaigne’s essential and only prose work. It is best approached selectively: begin with On Cannibals, On Friendship, and On Experience, and return repeatedly rather than reading linearly. The M. A. Screech translation (Penguin Classics) is strongly recommended.
For the full Michel de Montaigne bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Michel de Montaigne author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Michel de Montaigne?
The Complete Essays (first published 1580–1588, with additions until 1592) is Montaigne's essential and only prose work — a collection of 107 essays that invented the form and remains the foundation of all first-person reflection in Western literature. The book is 1,344 pages but is designed for selective reading: start with On Cannibals, On Friendship, and On Experience, which are among the most accessible and most significant. Most readers dip, return, and read selectively across years.
What are the Essays about?
The Essays appear to be about everything — their nominal subjects range from cannibalism to friendship, thumbs to experience, cruelty to solitude, riding horses to the education of children. But the real subject of every essay, regardless of its stated topic, is Montaigne himself: how he thinks, what he knows, what he doubts, what his body feels, how his opinions have changed. The essays are a sustained inquiry into one particular person conducted over twenty years, and the person is their own instrument. The device on his seal was Que sais-je? — What do I know?
Which translation of Montaigne's Essays should I read?
The M. A. Screech translation (Penguin Classics, 1991, with a complete edition in 2003) is the most highly recommended. Screech captures Montaigne's tone — digressive, concrete, self-questioning, funny — better than any other translator, and provides essential footnotes that place the classical references in context. Donald Frame's translation (Stanford, 1958) is also respected and more widely available in older library copies. Both serve the reader well; Screech is preferred for the full experience.
What should I read after The Complete Essays?
After The Complete Essays, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer provides an ideal companion — part biography, part reader's guide, part philosophical reflection on the Essays' central questions, and one of the finest works of literary nonfiction about a writer. Virginia Woolf's essays extend the first-person digressive form Montaigne invented into the twentieth century with comparable intelligence and self-awareness. Francis Bacon's Essays provide an interesting contrast — a contemporary who used the same form with opposite priorities.
