Le champ des Essais

Agricultural metaphors are certainly not lacking in the Essais ; they proliferate in well-known pages in which the mind is compared to those “lazy lands” that one must “subjugate [...] for our use”. This register is linked to the agricultural treatises of the era. This article analyses the distance between Montaigne’s discourse, which opposes “nature” to its “artialisation”, and the championing of agricultural techniques which equate with an “institution” of nature, a problematic idea in the light of the Essais.