The Essays of Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was a French Renaissance thinker who invented the personal essay and changed how humans think about themselves. Born to a wealthy family near Bordeaux, he received an unusual education: his father hired Latin-speaking servants so Michel would learn the language naturally as a child, and awakened him each morning with music to avoid harsh starts to the day.

After studying law and serving as a magistrate, Montaigne witnessed the brutal French Wars of Religion that pitted Catholics against Protestants. Those horrors convinced him that certainty, especially religious and political certainty, was humanity's most dangerous delusion. When his closest friend Étienne de La Boétie died in 1563, Montaigne was devastated; much of the Essays reads as an extended conversation with this lost companion.

At 38, Montaigne retired to his family château, struck a medal declaring his retreat from public life, and climbed to the tower library where he spent the next decade thinking and writing. Surrounded by a thousand books and beams inscribed with favorite quotations, he asked himself one revolutionary question: What do I know?

The answer became the Essays, 107 explorations of everything from thumbs to cannibals to the proper way to die. He wrote not to instruct but to explore, not to preach but to wonder. He revised constantly, adding new thoughts in the margins until his death. The result was unprecedented: a single human mind in all its contradictions, doubts, and everyday concerns.

Montaigne also served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux during plague and civil war, negotiating between warring factions with the same skeptical moderation that marks his writing. He died at 59 during Mass at his château, having created a literary form and a new way of being honest about what it means to be human.