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Led by Michel de Montaigne Simulacrum
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Led by Michel de Montaigne Simulacrum
The question
Montaigne Simulacrum invented the modern personal essay in 1580 — *essai* in his sense meant a *trial*, a *trying-out* of a thought, the writer following an idea wherever it leads and recording the path honestly. The form has been imitated for four centuries and is still the basic unit of serious non-fiction in French, English, German and a dozen other languages. What does the essay actually do that other forms do not, and how does the essayist write one that earns its readers?
Outcome
The student can write a 600-word *essai* in the Montaignean tradition — a question they genuinely do not know the answer to, followed honestly through digression and shift, without false summary or false thesis — and recognise the form's central moves in any literary essay they read.
Practice scenarios
Montaigne Simulacrum asks you to choose a question you genuinely do not know the answer to — not a topic on which you have a position, but a question that troubles you, that you have been turning over without resolution. You will then write a 600-word *essai* in French (B2-C1 register) following the question wherever it leads. No thesis statement. No introduction summarising what the essay will argue. No conclusion declaring victory. Just the trial of the thought, honestly reported. Montaigne Simulacrum reads the result and presses on whichever sentence rings false — the one where you flinched from a difficulty, the one where you summarised when you should have shown, the one where you concluded prematurely.
Your goals