In 1564 a book was published calculating that there were 7,409,127 demons at work in the world, under the administrative control of 79 demon-princes. Eight years later, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne began to write his Essays, a book which still seems to speak to us directly with all the force of rational understanding and an identifiable human personality. If Montaigne marks the beginning of modernity, it is because he tells us exactly what he is like; how he sees the world, fallibly and yet honestly; and because there was no book in the world like it before, and we are still writing books rather like it today.

Montaigne, in common with all great authors, has continued to be infinitely applicable. Centuries of academic readers have found a 17th-century sceptical writer, a rambling Romantic, a Victorian moralist, a modernist experimenting with perception and free association, and, alas, a post-modernist, playing with the random associations and hidden structures of words. Nietzsche was fascinated by Montaigne. Proust is steeped in him; the final image of A La Recherche, of lives extending far into the past and into the future, of men suspended above long tracts of time and memory as if on giant stilts, is taken as if in homage from the Essays.

Political leaders and thinkers of all sorts have gone on drawing solace from Montaigne’s unassuming belief that he isn’t sure of anything. Other people and, indeed, animals are probably just as important as the person who happens to be doing the talking at that moment. Montaigne asked, in the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ how he could be sure, when playing with his cat, whether it was more of a plaything for him, or he for the cat. That insight gave him a horror, unusual for his day, of irresponsible power, and particularly of torture, which he regarded as ineffectual as well as humanly repugnant. In the first half of the 20th century, Montaigne was important to such quiet resisters of fascist oppression as Stefan Zweig, as Sarah Bakewell describes. Nowadays, he is still explaining to us why it was wrong and futile to introduce torture in the attempts at Abu Ghraib to discover the truth. In ‘Of conscience’, he says:

Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth ... For why shall pain rather make me confess what is, than force me to say what is not?

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