essai

French essai comes from Latin exagium, meaning 'a weighing, a testing.' The word is related to 'assay' (to test a metal's purity) and carries the sense of a trial, an experiment, a first effort. When Michel de Montaigne published his Essais in 1580, he chose the title deliberately. These were not treatises. They were not arguments. They were attempts — personal, exploratory, unfinished. Montaigne was trying ideas the way a metallurgist tries ore.

Montaigne's invention was formal and philosophical. He wrote about cannibals, idleness, friendship, death, and the length of his own attention span. No previous literary form worked this way — moving through a subject by following the author's thought rather than a logical argument. The essay was personal without being confessional, intellectual without being systematic. Francis Bacon published his own Essays in English in 1597, and the form crossed the Channel.

The five-paragraph essay — thesis, three body paragraphs, conclusion — is a twentieth-century American invention that Montaigne would not recognize. It was developed for standardized testing and high school composition classes. The form is useful for teaching structure, but it bears almost no resemblance to the literary essay. A Montaigne essay wanders. A five-paragraph essay marches. The word covers both, but the spirit is in the wandering.

The essay is thriving online. Blog posts, newsletter editions, Substack articles — these are essays, even when their authors do not call them that. The form Montaigne invented for a sixteenth-century French aristocrat turns out to be perfectly suited to the internet: short enough to read in one sitting, personal enough to hold attention, flexible enough to contain any subject. The attempt has never been more widely attempted.