Introduction

Animals tend to eclipse plants in our sightings of nonhuman others in Michel de Montaigne's Essays (Les Essais, 1580–1593). In her magisterial book on libertine botany, Quand l’esprit vient aux plantes, Dominique Brancher explains the centrality of the animal in Montaigne by showing that Montaigne’s sceptical turn granted animals different but equally valid perceptions, putting into question the conventional ontological and religious hierarchy that privileges the human. Libertine botany, the subject of Brancher’s book, subsequently takes this enquiry into the garden, where we find this destabilizing and multiplying of perspective in Cyrano de Bergerac's rational cabbage or Guy de la Brosse's affectionate herbs. But what about the plants that crop up in The Essays? Did Montaigne's thought remain zoocentric, as Brancher claims, or does an attentive reading reveal that plants teach us something vital about Montaigne's relation to the natural world, to the self, or to the practice of writing? Our first clue is both resounding and enigmatic: in the essay ‘De la cruauté’ (II. 11), Montaigne asserts ‘Quand tout cela en seroit à dire, si y a-il un certain respect qui nous attache, et un general devoir d’humanité, non aux bestes seulement qui ont vie et sentiment, mais aux arbres mesmes et aux plantes’ (‘Even if all of that remained unsaid, there is a kind of respect and a duty in a man as a genius which link us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feelings, but even to trees and plants’). What concerns me in this article is the possible significance of such a claim about our ethical obligations to plants, given Montaigne's unwillingness to return to it in any clear or explicit way elsewhere in his work.