Les Essais Reading Order

Les Essais (Essays, 1580–1595) by Michel de Montaigne is one of the supreme works of French literature and the founding text of the personal essay as a literary form — a work in which Montaigne invented a new way of thinking in writing, turning the act of self-observation into a literary genre. The Essais grew across three books and multiple editions (1580, 1582, 1588, and the posthumous 1595 edition with the 'allongeails,' the passages Montaigne added in the margins of his copy between 1588 and his death in 1592) from short illustrative exercises in the manner of antiquity to increasingly long, meditative, and self-examining chapters in which the self becomes both subject and object of inquiry. The famous formulation — 'Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l'humaine condition' (Every man carries within him the complete form of the human condition) — states the project: to study the universal through the particular, to know humanity through the study of the one person Montaigne has unimpeded access to, himself. The Essais are also a vast encounter with antiquity — Montaigne reads, annotates, and converses with Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace — but the ancient texts are always tested against lived experience rather than accepted as authorities. The influence of the Essais extends from Shakespeare (who read Florio's 1603 English translation) and Descartes through Pascal, Rousseau, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf.