The Attempt
Montaigne published the Essais in 1580 and kept writing them until his death in 1592. The title is the argument. Essayer means to attempt, to try, to assay: as one assays a metal to find out what it is. An essai is not a demonstration of a conclusion already reached but a trial of a thought, conducted in public and permitted to fail.
The scale is worth having in mind: 107 essays across three books, averaging around thirty-six to a book, and ranging from a page to the two-hundred-page "Apology for Raymond Sebond".
The composition method is the genuinely radical part. Montaigne revised by adding, never deleting. Scholars label the layers:
| Layer | Edition | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| A | 1580 | The original text |
| B | 1588 | Additions, plus a whole third book |
| C | 1592/1595 | Final marginal additions, posthumous |
Because nothing was removed, a single page can carry a claim from 1580 and its own qualification from 1588 sitting side by side, unresolved. Montaigne is explicit: "I do not portray being, I portray passing." A reader is watching a mind revise itself over twelve years, with the earlier position still legible underneath.
The subject is announced with a directness that startled his contemporaries: "I am myself the matter of my book." This is not vanity. His wager is that examining one ordinary person closely enough reaches what is common, "each man bears the entire form of the human condition", so the particular becomes the route to the general, rather than an obstacle to it.
The style follows from the method. Digression is not a failure of organisation but the point: an essay on coaches begins with coaches and arrives at the conquest of the New World, because that is how a mind actually moves. "Que sais-je?", What do I know?, is the motto, and the scepticism is practical rather than despairing. It is a working assumption that lets him take a position without pretending to have settled it.
The form he made proved unreasonably durable. Bacon borrowed it immediately in English, and the essay is still the default shape of serious non-fiction four hundred years later.
Common pitfall: reading the digressions as padding, or the contradictions as sloppiness. Both are consequences of a deliberate method: nothing is deleted, so the record of thinking stays visible, and the wandering is a claim about how thought works.