Michel de Montaigne studied philosophy, yet was also a philosopher, and the various receptions and adaptations of his work for the last four centuries have prepared the way for the Essais to be used as an instructional guide, on a more widespread level, at the beginning of a new millennium.  Montaigne's relationship to philosophy, based on his readings of the ancients, and on his engagement of various contemporary issues during his lifetime will provide the background for an overview of: (a) the official suppression of the Essais as a dangerous book during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, (b) his acceptance by philosophes such as Diderot and Rousseau and his subsequent role in liberal and revolutionary ideology, his important influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche during the nineteenth century as a pre-modernist catalyst, (d) the academic codification of his life and work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, (e) how he became a modernist and postmodernist exemplar for such writers as Virginia Woolf and Phillipe Sollers. 1

    This background will set the framework for a discussion of what is to be learned from such receptions of Montaigne's work and how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have so much to learn from Montaigne's experience at the end of the sixteenth.  ‘Philosophy,' of course, has fallen out of fashion among the general reading public, especially in the U.S.  I will propose that Montaigne's ‘philosophy,' understood as an informed guide for living, pragmatic yet daring, individual yet collective, is increasingly relevant today to the general public.  At a time when people are struggling with the politics of identity, the relationship between the public and private, and the relationship between the individual and the collective in a democratic society, they are especially searching for ethical models to follow in their personal as well as public lives, as so provocatively discussed in James Rachels's recent Can Ethics Provide Answers?  Moreover, the world seems to be in a constant struggle with political and religious conflict, the two seemingly inextricably linked, a conflict in which Montaigne was involved all of his life.

    Beyond the Stoic, Skeptical, and Epicurean philosophies so often attached to various dimensions of the Essais, Montaigne needs to be presented in a context which shows the vital relevance of his work today.  I will propose that, on more popular fronts people should begin to read Montaigne in accessible forms, discuss his thought in classrooms on the high-school and introductory college levels, bookstore readings, reading groups, libraries, the Internet, and elsewhere, instead of limiting his pedagogical impact to either the small graduate seminar at a major research university, or to an anthologized version of "Des Cannibales" in a masterpieces of Western literature course, read in a class session or two by earnest, yet often bewildered undergraduates.

    I will thus propose a Montaigne for the twenty-first century – one that is accessible and essential in order to promote Montaigne's legacy to a more inclusive public.  He was a man of his time, who understood different languages and cultures, a person with experience in war, politics, religion, family matters, business, and agriculture, involved with all levels of society, from peasantry to royalty, a citizen who communicated and interacted with people from all walks of life.  He would not have wanted his insights and guidance to be limited to a relatively small group.  I will attempt (L. attempt re, "to try – to tempt") to demonstrate that Montaigne's work embodies a philosophy that can help a citizenry, ever anxious at the coming millennium, to cope with many of the difficult realities we face today.

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    Yet Montaigne was an eclectic spirit and he often responded to his ancient models with self-portraiture, paradoxical formulations, discursive freedom, and digressive mannerism in order to insist on his belief that life cannot be reduced to a syllogism.  His essayistic activity is quintessentially modern in that it manifests a liberated and creative use of historical materials toward the development of an idiosyncratic sense of selfhood.  Opposition to Montaigne began to appear after the publication of the 1588 edition: reservations about Montaigne's stylistic idiosyncracies and intellectual incoherence gave rise to less favorable judgments of the Essais.  The first major critique of his work was religious; Montaigne's fideism, skepticism, and hedonism clashed with the consolidation of power of the Ligue and of the Counter Reformation.  The second was stylistic: the lack of rigorous method (the critique of Malherbe), obscurity and obscenity (that of Scaliger), and his use of Latinisms, Gasconisms, and neologisms (that of Pasquier).  Montaigne's refutation of scholastic education in "De l'institution des enfans," in which he calls for a more personally meaningful manner of expression, one which depends less on arbitrary rules of procedure and more on an individuals use of personal judgement, have in fact rattled many of his critics over the centuries.  For his detractors, the Essais transgressed accepted modes of literary and philosophical discourse and, as seductive as their charms may be, as seen in Pascal's antipathetic relationship to them, needed to be suppressed.

    The publication of the Logique de Port-Royal in 1662 by the Jansenists Arnauld and Nicole mark the beginning of the end of Montaigne as an officially recognized author in France for nearly a hundred years.  For them, the Essais are the work of an irreligious libertine; in their commitment to an austere moral and theological Christianity, and as arbiters of neoclassical discourse, they called for Montaigne's censorship which was supported by Bossuet and Malebranche.   Official proscription finally occurred in 1676: the Essais were placed on the Papal Index as a work dangerous to religious conformity and political order.  Only expurgated editions were allowed to be published in France, such as Charles de Sercy's Esprit des "Essais" de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne in 1677.  For nearly a hundred years the Essais were published in such sanitized editions: linguistic and stylistic idiosyncrasies were removed, digressions cut, paradoxes smoothed over, titles rewritten, and chapters rearranged until the Essais took on the form of a collection of maxims for the leisured aristocracy who appreciated Montaigne as an honnête homme plein de bon sens, and not much more. 4

    During the eighteenth century, Montaigne's work was involved in many of the important debates of the time, yet most of the philosophes had little use for his quirky individualism.  Although he was admired as a free thinker, his discursive method was considered too irrational.   Passing comments by Vauvenargues and Voltaire, though full of rhetorical praise, were superficial and self-serving.  Montesquieu and especially Diderot went a bit further in their appreciation and occasional appropriation of Montaigne's life and work, but it is Rousseau who has the most demonstrable reception of the Essais during the eighteenth century.  Rousseau admired Montaigne as a natural, confessional writer, as a social critic respectful of pure virtue, as an opponent to scholastic philosophy, and most importantly, as an individualist.  Rousseau adopts many of Montaigne's pronouncements on inner freedom and social tolerance to construct his own notion of the model citizen: master and subject of the self, engaged in the collective effort toward the construction of a healthy republican society.  What Montaigne may have only implied, regarding the best relationship between the sovereignty of the individual and his or her relationship to society as a whole, Rousseau more fully developed into a program of romantic sensibility and egalitarian politics.  Among the general reading public in the late eighteenth century, Montaigne was considered a charming, free-thinking, skeptical sage, but in no way a writer worthy of serious consideration.  People made him into a libertin, a philosophe, or a revolutionary to suit their particular inclinations; he even appeared as one of the saints of the Convention in the "Almanach des Républicains pour servir à l'instruction publique" of 1793. 5

    It was only in the nineteenth century that Montaigne finally came to be accepted as a canonical writer.  Official recognition came with ten Eloges de Montaigne presented by the Académie Française in 1812 for its concours d'éloquence.  The romantic period's emphasis on individuality, its acceptance of autobiography as a literary genre, and its espousal of new literary values quickly generated increased enthusiasm for the Essais.  Montaigne was considered a master of interior freedom; the focus shifted away from reservations about his inconsistent thought patterns and disorderly writing and toward his profound moral philosophy and unique, nonchalant style.  Even Napoléon left for the Russian campaign with a copy of the Essais in his baggage. 6   Yet it was Sainte-Beuve in the nineteenth century who paid the most critical attention to Montaigne and thus helped to raise him into the pantheon of French culture.  The period's concern with personality, self-analysis, and independence of intellectual spirit, even provoked Sainte-Beuve to claim the universality of Montaigne: "Il y a du Montaigne en chacun de nous.  Tout goût, toute humeur et passion, toute diversion, amusement, fantaisie." 7

    Sainte-Beuve's historicist approach of considering the historical context to explain the significance of a literary work (l'homme et l'oeuvre), a notion which is inextricably linked to Taine's doctrine of determinism (la race, le milieu, et le moment), was founded upon Montaigne's insistence that we consider not just the writer, but the whole person, blemishes and all, in his or her personal, cultural, and historical circumstances.  Sainte-Beuve, although he expressed reservations about what he considered Montaigne's irreligious skepticism, developed his genre of creative criticism, very much in the spirit on Montaigne's hybrid genre of the essay: an interdisciplinary exploration of universal human problems and an analytically creative engagement of the self and of the world.  This is what always has, and continues, to attract readers to the Essais.  The "dangerous" elements of Montaigne's writing which were refuted in the seventeenth century now came to life in the nineteenth: the constant movement between the self, the world, and the text, the idiosyncratic use of literary, philosophical, and historical sources, and the ability to defer hermeneutic closure while still saying something substantial are what interested, and continue to interest, his most attentive readers.   Two of these are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche.

    During the nineteenth century, the most unique receptions of Montaigne and the Essais came from writers outside of France.  Emerson and Nietzsche often turned to Montaigne in their work as they developed their respective notions of how writers are to engage the cultural traditions of the past while developing their own unique positions in the present.  One of the most constant themes in the work of all three writers is the mission of self-cultivation which must endlessly struggle with the overwhelming influx of established literary and philosophical precedents which threaten at to overwhelm an individual's literary or philosophical productivity.  A dialog between the unique self and cultural tradition is a highlight of Montaigne's thought and writing, one which points to a spirit of modernity as embodied in his notion of the right of authors to freely use traditions to suit their own purposes: "La matiere de l'histoire, nue et informe; chacun peut faire son profit autant qu'il a d'entendement."8  Montaigne developed arguments for what he considered the most beneficial way of using one's historical and cultural traditions in "Du pedantisme" and in "De l'institution des enfans."   Likewise, in "Quotation and Originality," Emerson discusses the most fruitful ways in which writers can assimilate their readings into their own original work.  Nietzsche's ""Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben" berates an overly insistent historical approach to education which insists on  accumulating more information regarding the past than a writer can healthily digest.

    Emerson dedicated a section of his Representative Men to Montaigne in "Montaigne; Or, the Skeptic."  Emerson uses Montaigne's pronouncement "que scay-je" as a reference point to develop his own notion of skepticism: the temporary suspension of judgement which makes possible an expanded nature of truth that will ultimately lead to higher understanding.  What Emerson admired most in such a skeptical attitude is that it periodically interrogates the existing order by availing itself of  "the checks and balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots and blockheads."9  Emerson uses Montaigne freely, the notion that writers must make previous materials their own, in a new way, is promoted in "Quotation and Originality": "It is inevitable that you are indebted to the past.  You are fed and formed by it.  The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest.  So it is in thought.  Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerous minds ("Quotation and Originality," VIII, 200).  Emerson used Montaigne in his work, as he did many "innumerous minds."  A good deal of his writing shares a quality with Montaigne's: both are vast mosaics of the thoughts of other writers.  Yet despite this patchwork quality, Montaigne's "fagotage de tant de diverses pieces (II, xxxvii, 758), both writers bind together the intertextual cornucopia of their work with coherence of their unique personalities and recreate the past in themselves and in their writing.

    Montaigne was one of the first Western thinkers to challenge the precepts of a humanist education that promoted a normative view of the world.  Faced with the growing complexity of the social problems of his time (political instability, religious wars, famine, the implications of colonization) he reacted skeptically to the intellectual system in which he had been educated.  At the prestigious Collège de Guyenne, students were not encouraged to search for knowledge, but rather to effectively present a fixed canon of texts.  Montaigne reacted against this experience throughout the Essais as seen in his development of a natural and spontaneous style, free of affected eloquence.  He also sought to inspire his reader's pursuit of his or her own personal understanding of the world.  The innovative gesture embodied in Montaigne's free use of tradition, as well as his rejection of Ciceronian humanism and pedagogical scholasticism, thus made him a nemesis to the neoclassical hegemony in France, and later in England.  Yet it is this very characteristic of his work that made him so interesting to the modernists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and one that makes him relevant today.

    The reciprocal movement between reliance on the cultural past and self-realization, as developed by Emerson in "Quotation and Originality," following Montaigne's lead, is played out in a different context in Emerson's "The American Scholar" whereby self-realization acts as the foundation from which an effective social contract can be constructed.  The human experience for Emerson is always in a state of becoming and is, like nature itself, founded upon polarity and metamorphosis.  Emerson's notion of integrating the individual into the collective, of synthesizing differences into a composite sameness, of producing a diverse unity is the experiment (essay) of American democracy – it has never reached its potential and increasingly demonstrates how problematic this social ideal is.  Emerson's hope for individuated collectiveness exposes a much greater faith in human goodness than either Montaigne or most people today would accept.  Emerson promoted a social equality which emanated from the innate divinity of the human spirit: "A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men" ("The American Scholar," I, 115 – emphasis added).  Montaigne (Catholic and monarchic) did not promote a collectivist system of political governance and could never have imagined the notion of a citizenry empowered by knowledge, based on a direct apprehension of divinity.  Yet he did believe that the highest truths should not be mediated exclusively by ecclesiastics and academics and thus provided an opening for a humane and progressive education to flourish, extended by Emerson into political and cultural arenas, in terms that curiously foreshadow the latter: "qu'il faut colloquer les enfans non selon les facultez de leur pere, mais selon les facultez de leur ame" (I, xxvi, 163 – emphasis added).

    Montaigne was thus a precursor of what Emerson became, and of what was so feared in seventeenth-century France: a progressive Unitarian.  Walt Whitman became the epitome of Emerson's personal autonomy which simultaneously embraces the variegated whole of society, recalling Montaigne's sine qua non of focusing on the world through the lens of his own experience: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."10  Whitman's essayistic appropriation of the human and cultural landscape of the U.S., as prepared by Emerson, is a distant yet significant instance of Montaigne's philosophical legacy outside of France, and one which touches upon the very notion of a democratic education in the U.S. today.

    Although Nietzsche's work is sprinkled with references to Montaigne, the Essais do not maintain an explicit presence in it; nevertheless, Montaigne's impact on Nietzsche's thought and writing is
substantial. 11  In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche claims a spiritual affinity with Montaigne: "dass ich etwas von Montaigne's Muthwillen im Geiste, wer weiss? Vielleicht auch im Leibe habe." 12  Nietzsche's comparison is not gratuitous; Ecce Homo is in a sense his Montaignean self-portrait: his own version of the evolution and significance of his life and work.  In other places in his work Nietzsche identifies with Montaigne and what he praises as the essayist's triumphant self-discovery.  Nietzsche holds in high esteem Montaigne's self-cultivation, appreciation of the contemplative life, confessional sincerity, and informed skepticism.  He often used Montaigne's insights to loosen the straitjacket of abstract metaphysics and to explore his own individuality in its historical and cultural circumstances.

    Perhaps the most important link between Montaigne and Nietzsche, one relevant today, is how to use the conflictual tension between past and present in a productive and meaningful way.  Nietszche opens "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben," a text which demonstrates many affinities with the Essais, by quoting Goethe: "Übrigens ist mir alles verhasst, was mich bloss belehrt, ohne meine Tätigkeit zu vermehren oder unmittelbar zu beleben (I, 209).  This quote could equally characterize Montaigne's notion of education as explained in "De l'institution des enfans," in which he calls not for the mere accumulation of historical information by the student, but for the development of the student's mind by actively engaging the material: "Qu'il ne luy apprenne pas tant les histoires, qu'à en juger" (I, xxvi, 156).  Nietszche likewise goes on to say that history limited to knowledge must be rejected, and be used instead in the service of life and action: "Das heisst, wir brauchen sie zum Leben und zur Tat, nicht zur bequemen Abkehr vom Leben und von der Tat, oder gar zur Beschönigung des selbstüchtigen Lebens und der feigen und schlechten Tat.  Nur soweit die Historie Leben dient, wollen wir ihr dienen" (I, 209).  History must serve life in action, and not simply remain a "Garten des Wissens" (I, 209).  In order for a culture to flourish, there must be a vital interplay between memory of the past and engaged effort in the present.  Montaigne likewise calls for the active relationship of his student to historical precursors: "Il practiquera, par le moyen des histoires, ces grandes ames des meilleures siecles" (I, xxvi, 156).

    The fruitful dialog with cultural tradition should ultimately lead to self-enlightenment.  Montaigne's premise in "Du pedantisme," one redeveloped by Nietzsche in "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil," is that human understanding can be debilitated by too much historical knowledge.  As minds become saturated with too many other minds, they consequently cannot think for themselves: "Je dirois volntiers que, comme les plantes s'estouffent de trop d'humeur, et les lampes de trop d'huile: aussi l'action de l'esprit, par trop d'estude et de matiere, lequel, saisi et embarassé d'une grande diversité de choses, perde le moyen de se desmeler; et que cette charge le tienne courbe et croupi (I, xxv, 134).  For Nietzsche, history had become an overwhelming shadow that could no longer be sifted through adequately for one to achieve comprehensive understanding: ". . . es gibt einen Grad von Schlaflosigkeit, von Wiederkäuen, von historischem Sinne, bei dem das Lebendige zu Schaden kommt und zuletzt zugrunde geht, sei es nun ein Mensch oder ein Volk oder eine Kultur (I, 213).

    In the pedagogical notions of Montaigne and Nietzsche, a crisis of information is at hand: they are anxious, faced with the fact of the impossibility of coming to terms with all that there was to be known.  The immediate engagement of existential experience, as informed by a certain degree of book learning, is what Montaigne recommends over the school of pure historical knowledge: "Au nostre, un cabinet, un jardin, la table et le lit, la solitude, la compaignie, le matin et le vespre, toutes heures luy seront unes, toutes places luy seront estude" (I, xxvi, 164).  Montaigne's project revolved around his readings, but he established a reciprocal relationship between historical conformity and contemporary individualism.  Nietzsche picked up on this position and took it much further: into a dynamic modernist project of continually reshaping of the past into original formulations which challenge the very past upon which such reshaping was formulated.

    A paradoxical period arose during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding receptions of the Essais.  On the one hand, such modernist writers as Walter Pater and Virginia Woolf adapted Montaigne into their respective writing projects, in innovative ways, as did Emerson and Nietzsche.  On the other, there as an historicist, antiquarian approach to Montaigne which defended the Essais against any radical notions, by regularizing them in a very sophisticated and positivistic manner.  Montaigne's work was thus thoroughly codified by French academics, and made into a canonical classic.  Such an approach was headed by Ferdinand Brunetière who sought critical objectivity: he focused on verifiable information: the chronology of the work's composition, facts on the authors life, the sources of the work, its critical editions, the intellectual climate contemporary with the work's composition.  A generation of critics followed in the path of Brunetière's scientific objectivity: Pierre Villey, Gustave Lanson, and Fortunat Strowski all strove to establish a definitive biography, regularize the disorderly Essais, and thus make them more palatable to the general reading public in France.  The common purpose of these universitaire critics in the early twentieth century, of using biography, sources, chronology, and thematic evolution (Strowski's tripartite scheme of the stoical, skeptical, and epicurean Montaigne) helped to bring the Essais to a wider audience, both in the secondary school system and among the general reading public in France.  Yet, at the same time, such systematic evaluations distorted the Essais – the attempt to methodize their irregularities, idiosyncracies, and inconsistencies, the positivist impulse to ascertain unequivocal facts, consistent themes, and stylistic contours turned the Essais into a neatly packaged classic for official consumption.

    At about the same time, Pater and Woolf in England were pushing the Essais in the opposite direction: underscoring their uniqueness, celebrating their nonconformity, and heralding Montaigne as one of the most significant precursors to literary modernism.  Pater often referred to the Montaignean essay as the most effective form for communicating what he considered quintessential modernist activities: the suspension of dogmatic judgment and subjective understanding.  Pater's attraction to Montaigne's method of self-portraiture and analysis of the constant flux of human experience is the key to the Essais importance for the modern age in Pater's eyes, as delineated in Appreciations: "The desire of self-portraiture is, below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at all – a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature."13  Pater's interest in Montaigne motivated him to write the novella, one never finished, Gaston de Latour: the story of a young man in quest of knowledge who journeys through Périgord to Montaigne's estate and into the imagined life and thought of the essayist.  Gaston seeks to understand himself through his myriad reflections on the Essais.  It is difficult not too notice Pater's pun: Gaston de Latour as Montaigne: the Gascon de la tour – the protagonist, like his literary idol Michel de Montaigne, is always groping toward understanding yet never intellectually and emotionally satisfied: "The diversity, the undulancy of human nature! – so deep a sense of it went with Montaigne always that himself too seemed to be ever changing color sympathetically therewith" (Gaston, VI, 91).  Gaston thus realizes that he must create his own truths, and not rely on external authorities such as the family, the church, or the state: "Whatever truth there might be, it must come from each one from within, not from without" (Gaston, VI, 136).  The purpose of life then is self-fulfillment, the communication of one's inner-being, directly and honestly in a mode of Socratic self-understanding.

    Woolf's interest in the Essais can be seen in the very manner of her writing, one which is often carried out in the Montaignesque manner: her aims and means are often produced in a skeptical mode: the weighing of probabilities, the suspension of dogmatic judgment, and the exploration of the many sides of a question are experiments (essais), not closed systems of understanding.  Woolf in fact awarded Montaigne the first single-author essay of The Common Reader, "Montaigne."  In it, Woolf praises Montaigne's success in self-portraiture, the uncanny ability he has to be able to "write himself down."14  She values his suspension of reified conclusions, as opposed to the "rash assumptions of human judgement," and his "perpetual experiment" in personalized communication ("Montaigne," 67).  Woolf's conviction of the intimate portrayal of the variegated self in her work emulates Montaigne's proto-modernist manifesto: "Je regarde dedans moi, je me considere sans cesse, je me contrerolle, je me gouste (II, xvii, 657).  In "Montaigne," Woolf shows how Montaigne played a key role in her intellectual temperament: "After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen?  Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau perhaps.  But this talking of onself, following one's own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, it's variety, its imperfection – this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne." ("Montaigne," 58).

    Woolf's admiration even went beyond writing about him: she emulated, even exceeded the efforts of the fictional protagonist Gaston: over a period of two days in April 1931, Woolf mentioned five times in her letters a visit to Montaigne's estate, and was very moved by the experience: ". . . and drove to Montaigne's house which excited me immensely . . . the very door he opened is there: the steps, worn into deep waves, up to the tower  . . . everything was precisely as it was . . . and the very room, the stairs, and windows where Montaigne wrote his essays . . . [a]t the end, where I have, with trembling fingers after a whole bottle of Monbazillac, drawn an arrow, Montaigne wrote his essays . . . a divine country all round . . . O so drunk; and have eaten a whole pate de foie gras . . . visiting Montaigne's tower . . . dear me how I shd.  Like this life to go on forever."15  Woolf attempts to capture the spirit of Montaigne in her writing and her life: "Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says" ("Montaigne," 63).  Woolf's liberating of Montaigne's textual energies in the service of literary modernism is in sharp contrast to the French universitaire critics who were simultaneously regularizing the Essais into respectability.  She invites readers to essay their lives as Montaigne did his.

    As during the modernist period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contemporary receptions of the Essais are marked by both official academic criticism and by creative adaptations of literary writers.  In Essais sur les "Essais," Michel Butor proposes an interactive approach to the Essais; he sees the relationship of Montaigne's life and work as vital toward their understanding, and suggests that readers need to complete what Montaigne began by continuing the example of his life and writing in the present. 16   Likewise, Jean Yves Pouilloux in Lire les "Essais" de Montaigne, sees the Essais as a self-reflective text, one always needing to be supplemented by further critical adaptations and rearticulations: "[l]a vérité n'est pas donnée, elle est à construire." 17  Montaigne is for Pouilloux, some forty years after Woolf's "Montaigne," the incarnation of the modernist impulse of discontinuity, discursive freedom, and resistance to reductive understanding.  In Montaigne en mouvement, Jean Starobinksi affirms that the Essais are a work with the same words on the page for all readers, yet their elusiveness comes from the loose interconnectedness of the many intertexts woven into them.  For Starobinski, the unity of Montaigne's writing is to be found, paradoxically, in its diversity.  He authorizes readers, yet cautiously, to be participatory and produce their own meaning while interacting the Essais. 18  This interactive approach to the Essais echoes that of Emerson and Nietzsche.

    Such suggestions by contemporary French academics of an interactive, constructive approach to the Essais as the most effective way of understanding them personally have been developed by two creative writers in France: Michel Chaillou and particularly Philippe Sollers.  Chaillou's Domestique chez Montaigne is a narrative abundant in imaginative recreations of Montaigne's life as well as that of his family and especially his peasants and servants from 1530 to 1980. 19  The novel begins and ends in medias res and what occurs in between is a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey through four centuries of discontinuous narrative experience, one which takes place on a single day.  Chaillou's intention in Domestique was much like that of Montaigne,  to give new life to dead writers: "communiquer avec les morts, retrouver une oralité de ceux qui ont précédé."20  In Domestique, Montaigne and the Essais are given new life, regenerated in a contemporary work for consumption outside of the academy.

    The case of Philippe Sollers's reception of the Essais has greater implications than that of Chaillou, due to his literary as well as theoretical interest in Montaigne, along with his popularity in French literary and intellectual life of the last thirty years.  Sollers, a Bordelais, began to study Montaigne at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux, and made the obligatory visit to the tower library at the age of twelve: "L'étude de Montaigne, on n'étudiait que ça."21  In his essay, "Montaigne le mutant" from Théorie des exceptions,  Sollers discusses Montaigne's modernity and his importance to contemporary philosophical debates.  For Sollers, Montaigne's monumental contribution to literature is to have gathered history in the present in order to make it his own: "Montaigne, le premier qui signe vraiment son nom.  Et qui le sait.  Et qui l'affirme."22  Montaigne's liberated essaying of the past in the present, his activity of wryly preserving the past in himself, is an event of extreme importance for Sollers, since it demonstrates Montaigne's total commitment, yet one responsibly informed by the past, to himself: "C'est une absolue perfection et comme divine, de savoir jouir loyalement de son être" ("Mutant," 23).  Yet Montaigne's modernity is not purely a hedonistic subjectivity liberated from hegemonic constraints, one bringing us ever closer to refined self-understanding while the social contract continues to erode.  Montaigne, on the contrary, fully embraces tradition: the church, the king, and the western canon.  His engagement of custom however is impertinent in Sollers's eyes: it is a paradoxical response of total commitment, an act which then left the essayist totally free for himself: "C'est un geste très étrange et singulier qui consiste à l'idée que d'abord il faut s'occuper du soi, conforté par une reprise de tout le passé qui risque de disparaître" ("Sollers").  This is Montaigne's crucial significance for Sollers and perhaps for our time: the past is threatened with misinterpretation or even disappearance, Montaigne thus seized history and attempted to save it by inscribing it in the Essais.

    Montaigne's important for Sollers is that he incorporated the objective world into a subjective mode of writing, thereby dissolving the distinctions between mind and body, body and soul, subjective and objective, tradition and innovation.  Montaigne's uniqueness is the recapturing of the past, yet for himself and for his readers: "La modernité de Montaigne, c'est ni la sensualité, ni la force de la métaphore, ni la reconstruction du passé permanent . . . c'est le temps retrouvé ("Sollers" – Sollers's emphasis).  Montaigne's significance for the new millennium can be found in this interactive and constructive relationship between past and present, between tradition and innovation.  For Sollers, many left-wing intellectuals have misinterpreted Montaigne's "conservatism" since, Montaigne's retreat into language to preserve the past, is in fact a revolutionary act.  Montaigne's fragmentary, open form is the natural expression of his quest for absolute subjectivity that would eventually clash with the neoclassical doctrine of a common, purified language.  What Montaigne produced is what Julia Kristeva calls the "language of the semiotic" – a pleasurable, creative excess of fluid textuality that opposes the quest for transcendental significations, one which harasses the secure domain of language, Kristeva's "language of the symbolic," and thereby disrupts the hegemonic sign systems that enforce the fixed power systems of God, father, state, property, law,
etc. 23  Montaigne's essaysitic activity thus becomes an alternative to social revolution by virtue of its slow dismantling of reified consciousness.

    Some of the more salient issues that arise in looking at how Montaigne has been used to promote philosophical viewpoints are: ambivalent resolution, a constructive relationship to one's of cultural models, and the impetus towards self-affirmation in a skeptical mode.  The Essais were written in a time of great political and cultural insecurity, a period marked by religious and political conflict, cultural insecurity, civil war, plague, famine, and economic instability – these are the historical circumstances that motivated Montaigne to question orthodox values and dogmatic principles.  It is thus Montaigne's skepticism, relativism, and textual idiosyncrasy which reflect the sense that reality, of the world and of the self, is a shifting and impermanent phenomenon, haphazard even.  Montaigne thus chose inconsistency to depict his world view, one which is perhaps the dominant epistemological trait of our time.  It is therefore possible to discuss the relevance of  Montaigne's project to our "postmodern condition," an age in which: "[i]t is no longer possible to maintain the economy of truth and representation in a world where reality is entirely constructed through forms of mass-media feedback, where values are determined by consumer demand . . . and where nothing could serve as a means of distinguishing true from merely
true-seeming . . . ."24

    Sixteenth-century France began with vigor and optimism: inspired by the advent of the printed book, the discovery of the Americas, and the humanist project; yet it ended in pessimism and despair, rife as it was with political chaos, bloody civil war, the evident treachery of colonialism, and the budding neoclassical suppression of renaissance exuberance.  Although Montaigne assumed an explicitly conservative pose in religion, politics, and culture, he implicitly critiqued the societal authorities and accepted discourses of his time.  Montaigne's outward faith in the dominant religious and political orders thus permitted him an existential security whereby he could revolt discursively against the normalizing proscriptions of erroneous dogmatism by demanding of himself and of his readers an and engaged effort toward authentic self-awareness, one which could potentially reform reified cultural practices and the illusions of common opinion.  This is what Emerson promoted, based on his reception of the Essais, and this is what is needed today in the U.S., more than ever.

    The twentieth century likewise began with great optimism and potential – witness the extraordinary technological advances in transportation, communication, medicine, science, and industry, the move toward national consolidation, the general improvement of human life in many parts of the world – all great achievements.  Yet this potential quickly dissipated as the century experienced the most atrocious wars of all time, mass genocide, atomic destruction, nuclear threat, and above all the loss of optimism, faced as we are with the widespread sense of the dissolution of social well-being, ethical principles, and political fairness.  There is an increasing general loss of faith that we will be able to remedy the situation, overwhelmed as we are by a technocracy that increasingly polarizes and dehumanizes the citizenry, and with the ever-growing world populations perpetually at odds with each other: this is our all too human condition at the beginning of a new millennium.

    Montaigne experienced a situation similar to ours: a postmodern "crisis of information," brought on by the advent of printing and the new availability of books, he was saturated with more information than he could ever hope to understand as a coherent whole.  His collection of over a thousand printed volumes would have been impossible for his grandfather's generation.  The opportunity to gather such a collection brought him to the realization that he would never be able to harmonize the superabundant contradictoriness of history and of life itself.  He could only use the copious information at hand, idiosyncratically,  in the perpetual experiment of his life and his writing, one which has no end: "Il n'y a point de fin en nos inquisitions; nostre fin est en l'autre monde" (III, xiii, 1068).  Montaigne would have understood Eliot's desperation in the "Waste Land" at our inability to develop a cohesive, symbiotic relationship between our cultural traditions and our contemporary situation.   Montaigne's circumstances seem very relevant to our own, and the Essais stand as a signpost of what was to come, in the words of Erich Auerbach: "His newly acquired freedom was much more exciting, much more of the historical moment, directly connected with the feeling of insecurity.  The disconcerting abundance of phenomena which now claimed the attention of men seemed overwhelming.  The world  – both outer and inner world – seemed immense, boundless, incomprehensible.  The need to orient oneself in it seemed hard to satisfy and yet urgent."25

    So what can we learn from the four-hundred year journey of the Essais and integrate into our experience at the start of a new millennium?  Like the Essais, our time is one of "mille visages" (III, xiii, 1112) as we struggle, like Montaigne, to order the multiplicity of experience into the "essays" or our lives.  We have seen the Essais read, rejected, suppressed, streamlined, and finally adapted for many different, often unique purposes.  Is Montaigne, the canonical sage in his tower surrounded by his thousand books, the darling of the academic erudite or the freewheeling creative writer, relevant today?   On the one hand, Montaigne's popularity seems healthy: witness the longevity of the Bulletin de la Societé des Amis de Montaigne, the more recent and very successful Montaigne Studies, the many world-wide conferences on Montaigne, the ten thousand visitors per year to the Château de Montaigne, such highly popular works as Montaigne: Une fête pour l'esprit of Yvonne Bellenger, the continued translation of his work into numerous languages, and his incorporation into course syllabi at thousands of universities world-wide.

    But today, especially in the U.S., most people have never heard of Michel de Montaigne.  This is unfortunate since one of the only hopes for world concord seems to rest in tolerance and compromise – two of Montaigne's outstanding attributes.  Montaigne himself tells us that the Essais are not a work to be passively read, as a mere consumer product for enjoyment, but they should be interacted with as a springboard toward enhanced self-understanding and consequently toward a better regulation of daily affairs and of collective cooperation.  Nannerl Keohane, in her inaugural address as President of Duke University, using Montaigne's very words, encouraged students, not just to read Montaigne, but to cultivate a Montaignean mode of intellectual sovereignty in order: "to embark on a lifelong odyssey in which you will keep learning, keep experimenting, remain mentally adventurous and continually update and redecorate the backroom of your mind."26  Montaigne's importance is more than just another passing literary experience that a reader can have: engaging the Essais on almost any level can be a crucial awakening for personal and intellectual growth.  They motivate readers to consider judiciously many aspects of a myriad of topics common to all, and then to make informed decisions, which may not always be distinctly black and white, but often many shades of gray.

    In a world with more problems and questions than solutions and answers, one in which technological consumerism, the media, and the Internet have eroded literature's educational and social role, can reading any literary or philosophical work make a difference in the lives of a new generation?  If Alvin Kernan's claim is true that "[t]elevision and other forms of electronic communication have increasingly replaced the printed book, especially in its idealized form, literature, as a more attractive and authoritative source of knowledge,"27 then perhaps it is time for the film to be made of Montaigne's life and times, an interactive CD-Rom of the same, well-constructed Internet sites, bookstore readings, reading clubs, and library discussion groups.  In electronic format, there are wonderful possibilities to present the Essais: quotes could be linked to their authors with the original language, famous people and places could also be linked, Villey's A, B, and C layers of the text could be separated so that readers could access the various editions of the work and then combine them as they wished, and on-line discussion forums established.  A translation of the Essais for middle and high school students, along with a teacher's guide would be most welcome.  Patrick Henry's edited collection Approaches to Teaching Montaigne's "Essays" is a step in the right direction; now what is needed is a such a work for middle- and high-school teachers.28

    Instead of the next wave of dissertations and monographs of the Essais for academic consumption, as important as they are, Montaigne scholars and aficionados need to make the Essais more accessible, in formats consonant with today's youth.  Now that we've come to terms with Montaigne's life and writing, as seen in the four-hundred year evolution of Montaigne's receptions, and in our refined understanding of Montaigne's relevance to our own time, we need to share the unique experience that reading the Essais provides with a more inclusive spectrum of readers.  This is not to promote a "dumbing- down" of Montaigne's life and work, but one of Montaigne's key pedagogical points in "De l'institution des enfans" and "Du pedantisme," as filtered through Rousseau and down to John Dewey and beyond, is that students should be involved in the process of learning, and it is through experience and necessity rather than by rote and dogmatic instruction that they will learn best.  So if the choice is to either popularize the Essais, by making them more accessible and interactive, or to see Montaigne increasingly confined to a small group of specialists, I would like to suggest the former.  Doing so can bring back to life Montaigne's joyful conception of reading and learning, described as a game of tennis, making us allies in the production of meaning: "La parole est moitié à celuy qui parle, moitié à celuy qui l'escoute.  Cette-cy se doibt préparer à la recevoir selon le branle qu'elle prend.  Comme entre ceux qui jouent à la paume, celuy qui soustient se desmarche et s'apreste selon qu'il voit remuer celuy qui luy jette le coup et selon la forme du coup" (III, xiii, 1088).

    As so well demonstrated in Pierre Leschemelle's Montaigne et la révolution du XVIè siècle, Montaigne was a person who fully participated in a wide range of social activities in his lifetime. 29  Woolf even underscored this quality of his biography in response to academics who promoted the image of the isolated sage cloistered away in his tower ruminating and writing in solitude: "Here is someone who succeeded in the hazardous enterprise of living; who served his country and lived retired; was landlord, husband, father, entertained kings, loved women . . ." ("Montaigne," 67).  More recently, George Hoffman in Montaigne's Career points out that the Montaigne's library office was not the prototype of the ivory tower it has been purported to be. 30  Located as it is, above the entrance to the château, it was as much of an administrative center as it was a retreat.  From it he supervised his estate which consisted of nine-hundred  acres, over a hundred peasants, and numerous servants.  Some windows of the tower open onto the countryside, but others open onto the courtyard from where Montaigne could oversee the daily activities of his workers: "Montaigne's library office suggests less a purely interior space than a post of observation linking the inside to the outside" (Hoffman, 15).  During Montaigne's "retirement," we know how active he was: mayor of Bordeaux, a manager of his estate, a diplomat, a traveler through Europe, an official visitor to Paris – there was a seamless continuity between his personal and his political lives – he lived his "philosophy"– he was a writer "engagé," one far ahead of his time, and his writing project "entailed not a retreat from society but a distillation of it" (Hoffman, 37).  Presenting Montaigne in the full context of the cultural richness of his life and time has great potential of bringing the Essais to many new suffisants lecteurs.

    But what about the question of Montaigne's philosophy, not the erudite and arcane version, but a philosophy of the quotidian?  As Richard Watson reminds us: "[a]bove all, Montaigne is a moralist; and he exists, perhaps most vividly, on the moral plane, for he appears most clearly in the practical realm of usual moral and ethical problems." 31  The consideration of Montaigne's role in the American educational arena raises the question of the efficacy of the Essais' message in a mass-media society in which the study of moral philosophy has all but disappeared.  Many graduates from American universities are technically sophisticated and materially motivated, yet culturally illiterate and, more importantly, devoid of any authentic concern for ethical values, for individual responsibility, for collective cooperation, for tolerance and mutual respect for difference, and for self-fulfillment within the framework of common values.  Is Montaigne's message, then, a dangerous one, preaching selfish egoism, hedonistic gratification, and withdrawal from social action, a poor example for the intellectual formation of students?  Or is it a vital one toward the reformulation of a multi-cultural humanism in which we may better understand our limits as well as our potential and consequently be empowered to work towards a more moderate and rational basis for a shared sense of values, a will for ethical action, and a more tolerant notion of human communication and interaction?

    In the evolution of how the Essais have been received for over four-hundred years, we have seen how easy he lends himself to widely varying adaptations.  Their chameleon-like quality allows them to adapt to a broad spectrum of interests and temperaments.  This special quality is an invaluable one toward the more widespread role the Essais should play today.  Moreover, Montaigne is not afraid to be honest and show us his weaknesses along with his strengths; he is frank, and he is not afraid to say, like Socrates, that he does not have all the answers, that wisdom is, after all, only refined ignorance.  Leschemelle aptly remarks in Montaigne: The Fool of the Farce: "Here, we are not dealing with thought that is fixed, rigid, dogmatic, and never changing.  On the contrary, the work is iridescent, shaded, and sunny, highly colored, exuberant and passionately oriented toward honesty and authenticity; men appear there as they are in reality – ‘for real,' as children say – great and miserable, twisting and changing."32

    Philosophy should thus not be a mode of intellectual inquiry that is insulated from everyday experiences.  Montaigne's life and writing are so vitally integrated: he was a less aggressive, but no less provocative Socratic gadfly. 33  He does not merely teach, but questions, recounts, and leads by example.  James Rachels, in Can Ethics Provide Answers?, discusses Pyrrho's attitude toward the uses and abuses of philosophy – he took it seriously, but not in a way that is done today in classroom abstractions: "For him, philosophical ideas were not merely notions to be entertained during a theoretical discussion and then forgotten.  They were guides to life."34  Whether aesthetic, political, historical, or philosophical, Montaigne's life and writing provides numerous lessons and examples from which to learn as the new millennium begins with excitement and anxiety.

    Montaigne's practical philosophy is to help us to find, not the first principles of things and ultimate answers to our questions, but to find some principles and answers that may work for a time, faced as we are with the ever growing complexity of the world and perplexity of the human experience.  And Montaigne can help us cultivate new readers and move them toward a pluralistic literacy – a means of dealing appropriately and successfully with cultural sameness and difference.  If we accept, like Montaigne the absoluteness as well as the relativity of human conditions and adopt a viewpoint which stresses effective communication based on shared cultural heritages and their dilemmas, as variegated as they may be, and abandon the notion that compromise is weak, then we can begin to balance the scales of Montaigne's essaying of his life and times in our own.

                                                                                           North Carolina State University

 1  This overview of Montaigne's receptions will be cursory; it will raises issues that will not be fully resolved in this article.  Please refer to my Montaigne among the Moderns: Receptions of the "Essais" (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1994) for the full discussion of the many points touched upon here, as well as extensive bibliographical information.

 2 See Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1968) and André Tournon  La glose et l'essai (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983).

3 Daniel Ménager, "Jugements sur Montaigne et sur les Essais" in Montaigne: "Essais."  (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1973), p. 121.

 4 Pierre Villey, Montaigne devant la postérité(Paris: Boivin Editeurs, 1935).

 5  Mathurin Dréano, La Renommée de Montaigne en France au XVIIIe Siècle: 1677-1802 (Angers: Editions de l‘Oeust, 1952), pp. 539-540.

6  Pierre Michel, Montaigne (Bordeaux: Librairie Ducros, 1969), p. 83.

7  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis (Paris: M. Lévy, 1883), vol. I, p. 838.

8  Michel de Montaigne,  Essais, eds. V.-L. Saulnier and P. Villey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), book II, chapter x, p. 417.  All further references to the Essais indicate book, chapter, and page.

9  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Complete Works, 11 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1903) vol. IV, p. 171.  All further references include title, volume, and page.

10  Walt Whitman,  Leaves of Grass, eds. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1965), p. 28.

11  Brendan Donellan, "Nietzsche and Montaigne," Colloquia Germanica 19 (1986), pp. 1-20.

12  Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlecta (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1956), vol. I, p. 1088.  All further references indicate volume and page.

13  Walter Pater, Complete Works, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan and Company, 1910-12), vol. V, pp.116-117.  All further references indicate title, volume, and page.

14  Virginia Woolf, "Montaigne," The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1925), p. 59.  All further references appear in text.

15  Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 317-321.

16  Michel Butor, Essais sur les "Essais" (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1968).

17  Jean-Yves Pouilloux, Lire les "Essais" de Montaigne" (Paris: F. Maspero, 1969), p. 36.

18  Jean Starobinski, Montaigne en mouvement (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1982).

19  Michel Chaillou, Domestique chez Montaigne (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1982).

20  Michel Chaillou, Personal interview with the author (Paris, France: 25 May 1992).

21  Philippe Sollers, Personal interview with the author (Paris, France: 22 May 1992).  All further references appear in text indicated by "Sollers."

22  Philippe Sollers, "Montaigne le Mutant," Théorie des exceptions (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 19.  All further references appear in text.

23  See Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974).

24  Christopher Norris, What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 168.

25  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 310.

26  Nannerl O. Keohane, "The Backroom of Your Mind," Viewpoints (27 August 1993), p. 7.

27  Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 3.

28  Approaches to Teaching Montaigne's "Essais," ed. Patrick Henry (New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995).

29  Pierre Leschemelle, Montaigne et la révolution philosophique du XVIe siècle (Brussels: Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1992).

30  George Hoffman, Montaigne's Career (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).  All further references appear in text.

31  Richard A. Watson,  Language and Human Action: Conceptions of Language in the "Essais" of Montaigne (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 1996), p. 47.

32  Pierre Leschemelle, Montaigne: The Fool of the Farce (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995), p. 195.

33  Roger Stéphane, Autour de Montaigne (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 1990), p. 221.

34  James Rachels, Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
 Publishers, 1997), p. 3.