Michel de Montaigne
Updated: Oct 24
A copy of the 1588 edition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais survives crowded with his handwriting. He corrected printed words, inserted passages, and carried additions into the margins. The volume, known as the Bordeaux Copy, records work that continued after publication.[1] Some changes repair the text; others add arguments and examples. Together they invite a question that runs through the essays themselves: how can a person judge responsibly while recognizing that further thought may alter the judgment?
Montaigne had reasons to distrust the ease with which people became certain. Born in 1533 into a prosperous family in southwestern France, he served as a magistrate before withdrawing from judicial office. His declaration of retirement in 1571 expressed a desire for leisure and freedom, but France’s religious wars and his subsequent public responsibilities gave that withdrawal limits.[2][3] The familiar image of a man alone in his tower becomes misleading if it separates his thinking from the world in which decisions had consequences.
The first two books of the Essais appeared in 1580. The edition of 1588 added a third book and extensive revisions to the earlier ones.[4] The title suggests attempts or trials, a way of putting judgment to work. Ancient writers supplied examples and arguments, but Montaigne also examined conversation, memory, friendship, and the habits through which a life acquires its particular shape. He could begin with a received opinion and discover, in pursuing it, that the terms of the question needed changing.
In “Of Repentance,” he describes the difficulty of portraying someone who remains in motion. “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage,” he writes in Charles Cotton’s translation.[5] The movement includes shifts of intention and perspective as well as the passage of time. An earlier statement may have described him faithfully, yet no longer exhaust what he has to say. To erase every inconsistency would sometimes falsify the subject by making it appear more settled than it was.
This gives the ordinary details of his life a philosophical purpose. A person’s way of remembering an argument or receiving advice can reveal how judgment operates more closely than a declaration of principle. Yet the person available for inspection is a particular French gentleman, with the privileges and assumptions of his position. His access to himself does not make him representative of everyone. The reader has to consider both the reach of an observation and the circumstances that made it possible.
Montaigne complicates any comfortable account of his openness. In the same essay, he says that he rarely repents. He defends past decisions by returning to what was known when he made them, distinguishing a poor result from a failure of deliberation. Circumstances contain surprises that foresight cannot command. A choice that ends badly may still have been reasonable on the information available at the time.[5] Reconsidering that choice requires reconstructing its circumstances, including what could reasonably have been anticipated.
The argument also offers a tempting refuge for someone reluctant to admit a mistake. Montaigne makes that difficulty harder to overlook when he acknowledges that other people’s reasons seldom dissuade him in matters of judgment.[5] His candor leaves the reader with work to do. We can recognize the fairness of assessing a decision in its original circumstances while still asking whether he has described those circumstances fairly. His self-examination includes a defense of himself, and the defense remains open to examination.
“Of the Art of Discussion” brings this problem into the room with another person. Montaigne values an interlocutor who presses him, gives resistance to his reasoning, and forces him to attend. He distinguishes the satisfaction of overcoming someone else’s weakness from the more difficult achievement of yielding to a stronger argument. Conversation can expose what solitary reflection has allowed to pass. It requires enough independence on both sides for disagreement to become something more useful than a display of rank or verbal agility.[6]
Then the essay unsettles its own appealing portrait. Montaigne admits that disorderly argument makes him angry and overbearing, and that he later feels ashamed of how he has behaved. His willingness to hear contradiction has conditions, some of which he finds difficult to meet.[6] These admissions give the writing much of its force. The reader encounters a person who can explain the value of correction and still resist the experience of being corrected. The gap between the two becomes part of the inquiry.
That gap extends beyond temperament. What feels immediately right may owe its authority to familiarity. Montaigne’s question, Que sais-je?, or “What do I know?”, bears on the confidence with which people promote inherited beliefs into universal truths. His skepticism draws on ancient philosophy, but it also takes shape through comparisons between ways of living.[2] A custom becomes easier to examine when another community manages without it. The comparison makes room for judgment by weakening the assumption that familiarity is sufficient evidence.
“Of Cannibals” puts that comparison under severe pressure. Drawing on reports about Indigenous peoples of Brazil, Montaigne turns European disgust back toward European conduct. People who condemn the consumption of the dead have tortured living neighbors under the pretext of religion. He finds greater barbarity in the deliberate torment of a person who can still suffer.[7] The comparison retains a moral distinction. Examining the origins of a judgment does not oblige him to give every practice equal approval; it makes European claims of superiority answerable to European acts.
His account also requires scrutiny. He presents a distant society through testimony and through classical ideas about lives less distorted by artificial wants. The people he describes can become unusually convenient witnesses against European corruption. Near the essay’s end, he reports the astonishment of visitors to Rouen at the coexistence of wealth and desperate poverty. Their reported response makes an accepted arrangement look strange.[7]
Of three observations attributed to the visitors, he says he has forgotten one. In describing his own conversation with one visitor, he complains that an inadequate interpreter prevented him from learning much of value.[7] These admissions qualify the essay’s confident reversal of European judgment. The encounter supports a question about inequality while giving the reader reasons to be cautious about treating the account as direct access to another people’s thought.
Montaigne’s public life gives the question of judgment another setting. He remained Catholic during the religious wars and served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux, from 1581 to 1585.[2][8] His commitments placed him within institutions he could neither remake at will nor simply ignore. A decision could require an answer before every uncertainty had been resolved. His skepticism has to be read alongside his practical decisions and the limits he drew.
A letter to Bordeaux’s municipal officials dated July 31, 1585, supplies a small, exact instance. In the course of transmitting practical instructions, Montaigne objects to the practice of taking women and children prisoner and says it should not be followed merely because others engage in it. The circumstances behind this passage remain unclear.[8] What the letter establishes is his expressed refusal to accept imitation as sufficient justification. It does not establish what happened afterward, but it preserves a judgment made amid the demands of office.
The letter gives a practical counterpart to the essays’ scrutiny of accepted examples. Montaigne considers what others have done and refuses to let their conduct authorize his own. Neither this letter nor his reflections on cruelty establish that he always acted well. They show that his uncertainties could coexist with firm judgments, whose grounds a reader can examine.
Even the text that carries these judgments has a complicated history. After Montaigne’s death in 1592, Marie de Gournay prepared the first posthumous edition, published in 1595. Its differences from the Bordeaux Copy still require choices from editors. The surviving copy has lost portions of its margins, and the relationship between manuscript revisions and posthumous publication cannot be reduced to an uncontested final version.[9][10] Reading Montaigne therefore depends, in part, on other people’s judgments about how his words should be presented.
The reader’s judgment begins again at the level of a sentence. Montaigne may persuade us, irritate us, or reveal an assumption he has examined less closely than he thinks. His willingness to expose that possibility does not settle whether a particular claim deserves assent. It makes a more demanding relation with the reader possible. We can stay with his reasoning long enough to discover where we cease to follow him, and give our reasons without pretending that the conversation is finished.
1. Alain Legros and the MONLOE project, University of Tours: Essais de 1588 et Exemplaire de Bordeaux. Scholarly description and digital edition of the printed 1588 copy with Montaigne’s handwritten alterations. The marks include textual corrections as well as additions; they do not all represent changes of conviction.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Sections on life, free judgment, skepticism, and relativism provide biographical and philosophical context. For the retirement declaration, see the University of Tours transcription linked in note 3.
3. Alain Legros, University of Tours: Tower Inscriptions and the Library Dedication. The retirement inscription is dated February 28, 1571. It expresses a desire for withdrawal and leisure; it is not evidence of permanent separation from public affairs.
4. Cambridge University Library: My Booke and My Selfe Exhibition Captions. Case 8 documents the editions of 1580 and 1588; case 7 discusses Plutarch as a model. The account of posthumous textual transmission here is supplemented by the more detailed University of Tours research in note 9.
5. Michel de Montaigne. Of Repentance. Essais, Book III, chapter 2. Charles Cotton’s translation (1685), revised by W. Carew Hazlitt (1877), reproduced by HyperEssays. The opening describes change; later passages defend past deliberation and acknowledge resistance to others’ advice. The quotation follows the linked text.
6. Michel de Montaigne: Of the Art of Discussion. Essais, Book III, chapter 8, also translated as Of the Art of Conference. Cotton translation, revised by Hazlitt, on HyperEssays. The discussion of correction includes Montaigne’s admissions of anger and domineering conduct.
7. Michel de Montaigne: Of Cannibals. Cotton translation, revised by Hazlitt, on HyperEssays. Book I, chapter 30 in the sequence used here, chapter 31 in many other editions. The essay contains the cruelty comparison, the account of visitors at Rouen, and the qualifications about memory and interpretation.
8. Michel de Montaigne; edited by Alain Legros: Letters of Montaigne in Modernized French. Letter 25, to the Bordeaux jurats, July 31, 1585, PDF pages 47 and 48. The letter rejects following the practice of taking women and children prisoner. Legros notes that its circumstances remain obscure. The introduction identifies the mayoral terms as 1581 to 1585. English discussion in the essay is a paraphrase.
9. Alain Legros, University of Tours: The Posthumous Essais of 1595 and 1598. Explains Gournay’s editorial work and the competing authority of the posthumous editions and the surviving Bordeaux Copy. For newer research on variants and editorial agents, see note 10.
10. Marie-Luce Demonet, University of Tours: The 1595 Edition and Its Variants. Updated December 2, 2025. Examines variation among copies and the difficulties of assigning changes to author, editor, or printing workshop. Supports the qualification about an uncontested final text.
Disclosure: AI tools assist with research, summaries, drafting, and editorial review. Their use varies by article and stage of the writing process. Ardan Michael Blum writes, revises, and updates the content, shapes its arguments and interpretations, and makes the final editorial decisions.