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  • Le Dos de ses livres: Descartes a-t-il lu Montaigne? by Hervé Baudry
  • Tom Conley
Le Dos de ses livres: Descartes a-t-il lu Montaigne? Par Hervé Baudry. (Bibliothèque littéraire de la Renaissance, 90; La Librairie de Montaigne, 2.) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015. 393 pp., ill.

It has long been asked if and how Descartes read Montaigne. Contemporary readers find in the temper of the Essais what shapes the Discours, the Méditations, Les Passions de l'âme, and Les Règles. Are the connections coincidental? Do they belong to enduring discursive formations determining how and what can be thought and said? Is the pairing a projection of our age? Or do they belong to an inner imperative, what Proust called 'le moi œuvrant', in which an existential address with the world is built on creative doubt? Ending on a question mark, Hervé Baudry believes that because Descartes's agenda and aims were far from those of the Essais it is pointless to wonder if the author of the Méditations and other works had read Montaigne. Yet Baudry's massive erudition suggests that the contrary may be true. Hindsight shows — paradoxically — that Montaigne could have read Descartes with greater care and complexity than Descartes could have read Montaigne. In Chapter 1 Baudry asks if the Siamese coupling is our contrivance. In Chapter 2 Sainte-Beuve's affinity for the Essais is juxtaposed with Guizot and Villemain, in contrast to Victor Cousin's intuition that Cartesian philosophy spells the end of the analogical process that had marked the sixteenth century. Literary botanists (Brunetière and Lanson) find in the one the precursor of the other. Chapter 3 highlights how Laumonier, Thibaudet, Brunschwicg, Alain, and others were sensitive to philosophical and stylistic forces of attraction and, how too Anglo-Saxon criticism (from Alan Boase to Hassan Melehy) has read each author with and against the grain of the other, especially where common themes — animals, God, scepticism, subjectivity, morality, reason — are involved. Chapters 6 and 7 are set in dialogue, the former finding philosophical correlation and the latter using history to impugn the former. A copious dossier analyses: the Entretien avec Monsieur de Sacy; the Discours and the letter to Newcastle to engage the 'humanimal' question of Cartesian philosophy; Descartes's latently libertine character; and two possible sources of the Essais from Estienne and Plutarch. There follow tables of thematic and textual rapprochements; extracts from the Essais crying out for comparison with Descartes; a lexicon of parallelisms; and a chronological table of the printings of the Essais and Charron's De la sagesse and Traité de sagesse from 1600 to 1649. A copious bibliography rounds out the volume. Baudry deals only with works where comparison is either explicit or implicit. Without asking why the two authors are pertinent today, the question posed in the title remains in suspension and, after all is said and done, the matter of the book unresolved. [End Page 107]

Tom Conley
Harvard University
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