A Montaigne for now

The international reception of Michel de Montaigne's Essays: Forms, interpretations, trends. Edited by Olav Krämer, Andrea Grewe and Susanne Schlünder. spectrum Literaturwissenschaft 86. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2026, 388 pp.

Montaigne's textual mobility

Tiphaine Samoyault understands in her project All sorts of miserable things (2026) variation as the defining characteristic of a classic and as the very condition of its memorability. She argues against the notion that works must remain static over time; rather, constant change through reception, translation, and rewriting is necessary to keep a work alive. In this context, she uses Montaigne as a prime example of an author who was already aware of the instability and mutability of his language while writing. Since Montaigne assumed that his texts could be incomprehensible after just fifty years due to linguistic change, Samoyault sees today's modernizations not as destruction, but as a form of "restoration" authorized by Montaigne himself, which makes the text audible to new readers. Audible is one thing; interpretable in the sense of being integrated into a contemporary context is another.

Antoine Compagnon classifies Montaigne (in The antimoderns) as a founding father of the “anti-modern” tradition, who, through his skepticism towards radical change, actually laid the foundations for modernity. “D’ailleurs Montaigne n’employait-il pas déjà le même raisonnement contre la Réforme ? Il justifiait par là son conservatisme pratique, son loyalisme politique et son légitimisme religieux.” Montaigne serves here as a model for a realism that emphasizes the “malice” of change (as in the Reformation) and defends the existing order not out of blind tradition, but through a skeptical assessment of the risks of the new. Compagnon shows how later thinkers like Albert Thibaudet received Montaigne as a master of liberal pluralism and “voluptuous critique.” For Roland Barthes, too, Montaigne became a refuge at the end of his life and the epitome of the "true book," one that possesses a timeless validity beyond the modern belief in progress. In Compagnon's system, Montaigne is the one who, in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, demonstrates that the "ancients" are often the more authentic moderns.

Michel Foucault understands Montaigne in History of the film in the classic era as a key figure for understanding madness before the dawn of the classical age. For Foucault, Montaigne represents a mode of thought in which reason and unreason are still engaged in an inner dialogue and are not radically separated. Montaigne recognizes "presumption" as the natural affliction of humankind and leaves open the possibility that all thought can be afflicted by unreason. Foucault contrasts this skeptical approach, which discovers madness as a figure immanent to reason, with the later Cartesian doubt, which consistently banishes madness from the realm of the thinking subject. Montaigne's visit to the mad Tasso is interpreted here as a moment of profound connection and, at the same time, unsettling similarity.

In Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Céline interprets human existence as an unstoppable descent into an "existential night" in which all civilizational values ​​and cultural mechanisms of consolation are exposed as hollow masks; the narrator Bardamu acquires an old copy of Michel de Montaigne for one franc on the quays of the Seine and, while reading it, comes across Montaigne's letter to his wife on the death of their son, whose comforting assurance that "everything will work out in life" is mocked by Bardamu, especially since Montaigne instead sends her a letter of consolation from Plutarch that he found by chance – a form of literary condolence that Bardamu perceives as a heartless and absurd "beautiful piece of work". Montaigne thus becomes a contrasting figure between bourgeois wisdom and the existential anguish of the lower classes, through which Céline demonstrates the impotence of classical philosophy in the face of raw human misery: even the highest wisdom fails in the face of the brutal reality of death, as seen, for example, in the dying of young Bébert, and appears only as a worthless distraction. Through this intertextual inclusion, Céline shows that at the end of the journey, where the night of nihilism begins, philosophy must fall silent, since it possesses no effective remedy against the depravity of the world and the inevitability of the "biological ignorances." While Montaigne appears in other interpretations, such as those of Antoine Compagnon or Simone de Beauvoir, as a master of skepticism or a witness to human passion, Céline reduces him to a "know-it-all" who covers up the horror of existence with empty phrases. At the same time, however, Montaigne remains a central intertextual figure of reference, through whom the crisis of the humanistic worldview in the 20th century becomes visible: Bardamu adopts Montaigne's radical doubt and his interest in physical existence, but these motifs are transformed into a bleak anthropology in which humanity appears primarily as a suffering, decaying body; the introspective exploration of the self, which in Montaigne leads to serenity, here turns into isolation, mistrust, and nihilism, so that Montaigne appears as the last witness of a vanished humanistic order—as the intellectual origin of doubt, whose emancipatory potential in modern experience turns into radical disillusionment. Thus, even ex negativo, the modern reception of Montaigne is a sign of the author's continuing relevance. Trials til today.

This extends to a legal-political reinterpretation of Montaigne today: Eric Zemmour's references in his book French destiny These arguments can be categorized as attempts to co-opt Montaigne for his extreme political agenda, based on several key instrumentalizations. First, Zemmour uses Montaigne's quote about loving Paris "down to its warts and blemishes" to justify an "integral" view of history that understands French history as an indivisible whole. In this sense, Zemmour demands that even highly problematic periods and figures, such as the collaborator Marshal Pétain, must be accepted without question as part of the national identity. Another aspect of his far-right interpretation lies in the transformation of the skeptic Montaigne into a guarantor of authoritarian state power. Zemmour claims that Montaigne drew "absolutist lessons" from the civil wars of his time. He quotes Montaigne as saying that laws derive their validity not from their justice, but solely from the fact that they are laws, which Zemmour describes as the "mystical foundation of their authority." This view rejects liberal principles of the rule of law and instead legitimizes an unquestionable state sovereignty.

Zemmour's claim that even the moderate Montaigne accepted the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre as a political necessity is particularly radical. Through this historically highly controversial attribution, Zemmour places Montaigne close to an ideology that justifies massive state violence against religious or political minorities to maintain national unity. Finally, Zemmour functionalizes Montaigne's criticism of Protestant biblical first names to support his own modern campaign against Muslim names in France: “Même Montaigne s'agace du refus obstiné des protestants de donner à leurs enfants « ces anciens noms de nos baptêmes, Charles, Louis, François, pour peupler le monde de Mathusalem, Ézéchiel, Malachie, beaucoup mieux sentant de la foi ». Après la Saint-Barthélemy, ce politique, pourtant fort modéré, confiera à ses amis: « Il le fallait faire ».” Zemmour draws a direct parallel between the Protestant refusal of that time to give traditional baptismal names and current Muslim identity claims, which he interprets as a sign of a lack of assimilation and as a "subversion of the state." In his overall interpretation, Zemmour thus uses Montaigne as a historical authority for an authoritarian societal model based on strict cultural homogeneity and the subordination of individual rights to the state interest.

The theoretical concept of “textual mobility” (Samoyault) corresponds directly to the content of this collection of essays on the international reception of Montaigne, which explores the actual diversity and transformation of Trials documented across centuries and national borders. While Samoyault emphasizes that a classic must constantly adapt to new eras, the Montaigne collection provides historical evidence of how differently Montaigne was translated, interpreted, and instrumentalized in Italy, England, and Germany. Both sources underscore that the authority of the Essays does not lie in an unalterable original version, but in their ability to exist in ever-new variations and thereby solidify their status as world literature.

Comparative Reception History of the Essays

Michel de Montaigne enjoys a remarkably vibrant interest in the early 21st century – not only in the academic world, but also among a broad reading public, and not only in France, but far beyond, allowing us to read him within the context of contemporary French literature. Antoine Compagnon (A summer with Montaigne) and Sarah Bakewell (How to Live) became international bestsellers; the Festschrift for Philippe Desan, published in 2021, bears the telling title Global MontaigneAgainst this background, it is all the more remarkable that a systematic, internationally comparative study on the reception history of the essays has been lacking until now. This research gap is addressed by the present volume, which originated from a conference held in Osnabrück in December 2022.

Editors Olav Krämer, Andrea Grewe, and Susanne Schlünder have presented a panorama of the international reception of Montaigne, uniting translation history, intermediary figures, interpretive traditions, and philosophical appropriations in three major sections. They consider countries and eras that have received little systematic attention to date. A total of thirteen contributions span from the late 16th century to the present day, encompassing the spheres of reception in Italy, Spain, Latin America, the German-speaking world, France, and—in a certain sense—post-structuralist philosophy.

The editors' twelve-page introduction offers a precise and instructive mapping of the current state of research as well as a programmatic justification of their own research questions. The starting point is the observation that, by 2009, Paul J. Smith had recorded 224 translations of the Essays into 35 languages ​​(2), but that the majority of these translations have been analyzed only superficially or, at best, in the form of brief overview articles. Comprehensive monographs on the international reception are scarce; Warren Boutcher's two-volume study is one such example. The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe (2017) is the most prominent exception, but focuses on the early modern period and on questions relating to the history of books (3).

The editors identify five dimensions as guiding concepts under which the volume systematizes the existing research gaps, each generating its own set of questions: first, editorial treatments and their paratexts; second, translations as cultural transfer acts; third, intermediary figures and their social and intellectual profiles; fourth, the genesis and development of Montaigne interpretations; and fifth, political and ideological instrumentalizations. This analytical approach is convincing because it prevents reception history studies from drifting into mere influence research or source hunting: the volume explicitly understands reception in a broad sense that encompasses editions and translations as well as commentaries and interpretations, intertextual references, and creative 'responses' (8).

The introduction is particularly insightful in its outline of a comparative perspective yet to be developed: For example, the extent to which receptions in different national cultures developed organically or influenced one another remains largely unexplored. The question of how international reception impacted French reception is also only addressed in a preliminary way (7). The fact that the volume ultimately juxtaposes rather than synthesizes these findings—which is hardly surprising for an edited volume—does not diminish its value: It provides the material that would be indispensable for such syntheses.

Methodologically, the volume is primarily oriented towards the concepts of cultural transfer research and recent literary translator studies (LTS), without overemphasizing this programmatically. Some contributions employ discourse-analytical tools, others a classical comparative motif history, and still others approaches from book history. This heterogeneity of methods reflects the diversity of the questions addressed and the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors, who come from Romance studies, comparative literature, philosophy, and translation studies. The volume is trilingual: contributions appear in German, English, and French, which corresponds to its international scope but occasionally requires attention for individual reading.

Translations as acts of interpretation: Hans Stilett and the question of the translator's visibility

The contribution by Vera Elisabeth Gerling and Hypolite Kembeu (217–241) is among the more methodologically and substantively sophisticated in the volume. It is dedicated to Hans Stilett (1922–2015), the author of the most recent complete German translation of the Essays, which appeared in 1998 in Hans Magnus Enzensberger's series "Die andere Bibliothek" (The Other Library). Stilett, who initially worked as a senior editor at the Federal Press Office and only later turned to the study of comparative literature, had worked on his translation for decades, taking an unusual approach: He began on his own initiative, without a publisher's commission, and only subsequently—with great and ultimately fruitless zeal—sought a publisher for his manuscript.

For their reconstruction, Gerling and Kembeu utilize not only the translation itself and its paratexts, but also previously untapped archival material from the Rhineland Literary Archive in Düsseldorf, which preserves Stilett's extensive correspondence with publishers. This combination of textual evidence and archival materials enables an exemplary case study that goes far beyond the description of a single translation: it vividly illustrates the nature of the publishing and book market contexts in the late 20th century in which an ambitious translation project had to assert itself (11), and it shows how translators could achieve textual and public visibility through prefaces and afterwords, media presence, and scholarly publications.

In terms of translation strategy, Stilett employs a pronounced tendency toward modernization: he translates into contemporary German, consistently renders Latin and Greek quotations into German—since knowledge of these languages ​​can no longer be assumed of today's readers (222)—and presents the numerous classical quotations interspersed untranslated in Montaigne's work as rhymed verses in the target language. Gerling and Kembeu analyze this using the example of a Horace quotation, which Stilett transforms into iambic trimeter, thereby taking considerable semantic liberties, rendering the quotation unrecognizable (223). Herein lies one of the most interesting tensions uncovered by the article: Stilett's stated goal of readability and modernization stands in productive contradiction to his claim to preserve Montaigne's distinctive features. Karin Westerwelle, who has critically reviewed Stilett's translation, is cited in the article as a key witness for the problematic nature of this strategy (268).

This essay is illuminating in several respects regarding the question of Montaigne's contemporary relevance. It demonstrates, for example, that the decision of whether and how Montaigne can be read today depends not only on philological factors, but also significantly on publishing and marketing strategies. Stilett's project stood or fell on whether Hans Magnus Enzensberger would include it in his series—and thus whether it would reach any audience at all. As this essay shows, the visibility of a classic in the contemporary literary scene is anything but a given.

Interpretations from the 19th and 20th centuries: Flaubert, Nietzsche, and the question of the art of living

The two essays dedicated to Flaubert and Nietzsche form the literary-historical core of the third section. Karin Westerwelle's study, "Fortunate Encounter: Flaubert as a Reader of Montaigne" (243–293), is the most extensive individual study in the volume. Westerwelle, one of the leading Montaigne scholars in the German-speaking world, traces Flaubert's lifelong and intensive reading of the Essays using letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and the handwritten underlinings in his copy of the essays. She shows that Flaubert discovered Montaigne as early as age seventeen or eighteen – with a gastronomic fervor that itself seems Montaigne-like: “In literature, in gastronomy there are certain fruits that one eats with one’s whole mouth, whose taste is so full and so succulent that the juice flows right to your heart” (252), the young Flaubert writes to his school friend Ernest Chevalier. For him, Montaigne is, in a nutshell, “my man” (“c’est là mon homme”) – a phrase that Westerwelle identifies as a pastiche-like echo of Montaigne’s own “c’est mon homme que Plutarque” (253).

The benefit of this reading history for understanding Flaubert is considerable: Westerwelle convincingly argues that Montaigne's non-judgmental, ironically detached writing style significantly contributed to Flaubert's development of a 'moralistic aesthetic' characterized by the categories of 'impersonality', 'impassibility', and 'impartiality' (244). The distinctive logical-syntactic use of the conjunction 'et' in Montaigne's prose, which can be enumerative, adversative, or ironic, is also found in Flaubert's work—a feature Albert Thibaudet has characterized as 'et de mouvement' (246). Furthermore, and this is a systematically important finding, Flaubert deepens Montaigne's skeptical worldview: Where Montaigne remains in a cheerful and playful skepticism, the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet drives doubt to the very edge of nothingness – to Pécuchet's desperate exclamation: “Oh! le doute! le doute! j'aimerais mieux le néant!” (245).

One strength of Westerwelle's study is its reception-historical contextualization framework: it precisely outlines how the reception of Montaigne in 19th-century France was organized institutionally and editorially—54 editions of the Essays appeared in this century alone (249)—and how the bourgeois interest in history during this period advanced Montaigne scholarship. This framework makes it possible to understand Flaubert not as an isolated genius, but as part of a vibrant and multifaceted culture of reception.

Robert Krause's contribution, "Exquisite Art of Living? Nietzsche's Annotations and Appropriations of Montaigne's Essays" (295–311), follows directly on from Westerwelle's work, both methodologically and thematically. Krause analyzes the reading traces in Nietzsche's library copy of the Tietz translation, a source that has received little attention in research to date (297). On 93 pages of this copy, dog-eared pages, underlining, and highlighting can be found—evidence of intensive reading that continued throughout all three phases of Nietzsche's work (300).

Krause's reading of these annotations focuses on two central essays: "Des livres" (II, 10) and "De l'expérience" (III, 13). Using the latter as an example, he demonstrates which passages particularly captivated Nietzsche: Montaigne's conviction that nature possesses its own 'wisdom' and offers guidance to humankind (305); his insight that "laws are held in esteem not because of their justice, but because they are laws" (305) – a passage that Nietzsche marked in the margin and which Derrida (in Force de loi) will again play a prominent role; finally, Montaigne's plea for an ethics of the mean: "The greatness of the soul does not consist so much in going upwards and forwards as in knowing how to moderate and compose oneself" (308) – Nietzsche additionally underlined the last sentence of this passage.

Krause's source research is philologically sound and fruitful: he demonstrates that Nietzsche recognized in Montaigne not only a predecessor in skepticism, but above all a master of the 'aesthetics of existence' – in the sense that Michel Foucault later coined for the concept of self-care. As Krause emphasizes, Nietzsche was dependent on the German Tietz translation because his French was initially insufficient for a productive reading of the original (301) – a point that beautifully illustrates the intertwining of translation history and reception history.

Political instrumentalizations and deconstructive readings: Conservatism, Liberalism, Derrida

The two concluding contributions of the third section block – Olav Krämer's analysis of political interpretive traditions and Simon Godart's study of the reception of Montaigne in deconstruction – address questions that are most directly relevant to the contemporary significance of the essays.

In his contribution, “Montaigne’s ‘Conservatism’ or ‘Liberalism’: Two 20th-Century Interpretive Traditions” (313–345), Krämer, one of the three editors of the volume, examines a peculiar practice in Montaigne scholarship: the use of political concepts of order originating in the 19th and 20th centuries to describe the attitudes of a 16th-century author. Krämer analyzes this practice not to reject it, but to uncover the functions that such anachronistic categories fulfill. I myself mentioned interpretations of Montaigne’s conservatism at the outset.

Krämer distinguishes four functions: first, an understanding-organizing function, since the terms unite heterogeneous aspects of the essays under a guiding principle; second, a historiographical function, since they situate Montaigne within diachronic developments; third, an actualizing function, since they establish a relationship between the essays and contemporary political conflicts; and fourth, an evaluative function, since the use of these terms is rarely neutral. He demonstrates the latter particularly sharply using the example of Hugo Friedrich: Friedrich's discourse on Montaigne's 'conservatism' contains subtle but unambiguous signals of value judgment—the distinction from the 'idealism of the revolutionary' and the 'nihilism of the despairing' as 'excesses,' for example (328)—and, against the backdrop of the early postwar years, appears as an implicit plea for a descriptive morality and a return to the individual.

Particularly instructive is Krämer's comparison of Friedrich and the American philosopher Judith N. Shklar, whose book Ordinary Vices (1984) Montaigne was declared a ‘hero’ because he considered cruelty the worst vice (330 f.). Shklar reads Montaigne as a pioneer of a ‘liberalism of fear’: anyone who places cruelty at the top of the scale of evil must politically advocate for tolerance, limitations on state power, and protection against arbitrariness. Krämer’s analysis shows that Shklar not only interprets Montaigne but also rewrites the history of liberalism—and simultaneously establishes a liberal position for the present, without explicitly stating so. Marc Fumaroli, who appears in the article as the third case study, proceeds similarly, profiling Montaigne’s liberalism as a response to the political pathologies of the 20th century.

Simon Godart's contribution (347–388), which concludes the volume, is the most philosophically sophisticated and at the same time the most stylistically independent. Godart analyzes the reception of Montaigne in the later texts of Jacques Derrida – Force de loi (1990) Friendship Policies (1994) The animal that I am (1999/2002) – which emerged after Derrida's so-called 'ethical turn'. His finding is paradoxical: Montaigne is omnipresent and yet absent in these texts. He appears on title pages, as an epigraph, at key points in the introductions, but he never becomes the subject of an independent, 'deconstructive' reading – as Derrida subjected Rousseau, Heidegger, or Husserl to such a reading.

Godart's analysis is the most revealing. Force de loi, in which Derrida adopts the phrase about the ‘mystical ground of authority’ from Montaigne’s essay “De l’expérience” (III, 13) as a key category that gives the essay its title: “Les lois se maintiennent en credit, non par ce qu’elles sont justes, mais par ce qu’elles sont loix. C’est le fondement mystique de leur autorité” (354). Derrida uses this passage as a starting point for his reflections on the relationship between law and justice, without, however, appreciating the overall context and the irony of Montaigne’s argument. Godart thus shows that Derrida's reading of the sentence falls short of Montaigne's own paradox: For Montaigne, positive and natural law are not in irreconcilable opposition because 'coustume' and 'crédit' are part of human nature as second nature (359) – a nuance that Derrida omits.

Godart's title – 'Montaigne undeconstructible' – is thus meant literally: Montaigne eludes deconstructive reading not despite, but because of, his qualities. He is too important for Derrida to be questioned in his fundamental structures through a detailed reading, and yet apparently not important enough to avoid being reduced to the status of an intertextual prompter whose fragments offer points for reflection without themselves being the object of analysis (352). This finding is illuminating for the question of Montaigne's relevance today: it shows how one of the most influential philosophical movements of the late 20th century uses Montaigne as a resource without truly reading him – and what opportunities for a genuine reading of Montaigne are thereby missed.

Montaigne reception today

The edited volume fulfills its program with remarkable consistency. It opens up previously neglected spheres of reception – especially the Italian and Latin American ones – it deepens the understanding of individual key stages in the German-language and French reception history, and it poses the fundamental question about the forms and functions of political interpretations of Montaigne.

With regard to the question of Montaigne's significance for contemporary French literature and culture, two findings deserve particular emphasis. First, the essays on Flaubert, Nietzsche, and Derrida demonstrate that in the 19th and 20th centuries, Montaigne was received less as a historical monument than as a living interlocutor whose texts—be it the skepticism of the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, the practical relevance of the Essays on Experience, or the paradox of the mystical basis of authority—were productively adapted for various aesthetic and philosophical projects. This productive appropriation is not merely a topic of literary history, but also a model for the present: the Essays are not a canonical document to be reverently admired, but rather a text to be read, annotated, refuted, and further developed.

Secondly, the volume demonstrates that the form of this appropriation is always mediated through translations and editions. The fact that Nietzsche read and annotated Montaigne in the Tietz translation, the fact that Stilett's 1998 German translation made Montaigne newly accessible to contemporary readers, the fact that Derrida read Montaigne in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and not in a critical edition—all of this has left traces that the volume makes visible. As this collection convincingly demonstrates, the history of reception is always also the history of the material and institutional conditions of reading.

The editors themselves identify the gaps left open in the volume: a systematic comparative study of national trends and their interactions is lacking, as is a comprehensive investigation of the creative reception in contemporary literature—that is, the question of which contemporary novelists and essayists explicitly refer to Montaigne and what they make of his work. These are tasks for future research, which this volume provides an excellent foundation for.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.