Essayism begins with Michel de Montaigne.
When the French writer published the first two volumes of Essais in 1580, he was not establishing a literary genre in the modern sense. He was attempting something more personal and, ultimately, more revolutionary. The title itself came from the French word essai, meaning an attempt or trial. Montaigne was not presenting completed arguments or settled conclusions. He was making attempts to understand.
The significance of this approach can easily be overlooked. Sixteenth-century Europe was a world shaped by religious conflict, political instability, and competing claims to authority. The certainties of medieval thought were being challenged by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the discovery of previously unknown cultures beyond Europe. Old assumptions no longer seemed secure, yet new foundations had not been firmly established. Montaigne lived through the French Wars of Religion and witnessed first-hand the consequences of certainty pursued without restraint.
In this context, Montaigne’s response was remarkable. Rather than constructing a system, he turned towards inquiry. Instead of asking how the world should be explained, he began by asking what could honestly be known. His famous question, Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”), became both a personal principle and a methodological foundation.
The result was a new form of writing.
Montaigne’s essays range across an extraordinary variety of subjects. He wrote about friendship, education, custom, death, experience, conversation, travel, horses, smells, and countless other topics. Yet the true subject of the essays was neither politics nor philosophy nor everyday life. Their real subject was the encounter between a thinking person and the world being observed.
Unlike the scholar, Montaigne did not seek mastery. Unlike the preacher, he did not seek agreement. Unlike the politician, he did not seek persuasion. The essays record an ongoing process of observation, reflection, reconsideration, and revision. They show thought in motion.
That movement remains one of Montaigne’s most important contributions.
The structure of many essays before Montaigne reflected the structure of an argument. A position would be presented, developed, defended, and concluded. Montaigne allowed writing to follow a different path. His essays wander. They digress. They return unexpectedly to earlier observations. New insights interrupt older ones. Contradictions are not always resolved. Rather than hiding uncertainty, Montaigne incorporated uncertainty into the work itself.
This was not carelessness. It was a recognition that understanding often develops through exploration rather than deduction. In doing so, Montaigne transformed writing into a method of inquiry. The essay became a place where thought could develop without needing to arrive at certainty. The value of the work lay not solely in its conclusions but in the honesty of its investigation. Readers were invited to accompany the writer through the process of understanding rather than simply receiving the results.
This invitation established a distinctive relationship between writer and reader.
Earlier forms of discourse frequently relied upon authority. The essay relied upon companionship. Montaigne did not stand above his readers. He stood alongside them. His observations encourage participation rather than submission. Readers are not asked merely to agree. They are invited to examine their own experience in relation to his. For this reason, essayism is not simply a literary form inherited from Montaigne. It is also an attitude inherited from him.
The essayist approaches the world with attention rather than certainty. The essayist begins with observation rather than doctrine. The essayist accepts that understanding may emerge gradually through inquiry. These principles continue to shape the practice of essaying more than four centuries after the publication of Essais.
Montaigne’s influence can be traced through later generations of essayists. Francis Bacon adapted the form for practical reflection. Addison and Steele brought essays into public conversation through newspapers and journals. Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and countless others developed the possibilities of the form in new directions. Yet despite their differences, all remain connected to Montaigne’s original insight: that writing can become a means of exploration rather than merely a vehicle for instruction. Perhaps this is why Montaigne remains so contemporary.
Modern culture often rewards certainty, immediacy, and declaration. Montaigne offers an alternative tradition. His essays proceed through questioning, examining, revising, and returning. They demonstrate that uncertainty need not be a weakness. Properly approached, uncertainty can become the starting point of understanding. The enduring contribution of Michel de Montaigne to essayism was therefore not merely the invention of a literary genre. It was the establishment of a practice.
He showed that writing could serve as an instrument of inquiry. He demonstrated that a person could think publicly without claiming final authority. He transformed reflection into a form of exploration. Most importantly, he revealed that the movement of thought itself could become meaningful.
Four centuries later, every essay that begins with a genuine question rather than a predetermined answer remains, in some measure, a continuation of the experiment Montaigne began.
Further Reading
Essais by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Encyclopaedia Britannica: Essays by Montaigne
Historical overview of Montaigne’s Essais [britannica.com] [en.wikipedia.org]