As a multi-disciplinary and multilingual community, Essais is inspired by the legacy of Montaigne —thus the ability to distance oneself from one’s culture and one’s education. By confronting different approaches with one another, the journal aspires to provide genuine research led by academics from French and international universities.

Giving priority to the essay writing form, the journal also aims to facilitate communication between all generations of researchers and to train the younger generation to academic writing and to editorial processes. Going against the flow, essays aim to restore the right to experimentation in our societies, the possibility for Humanities to formulate complex and paradoxical truths. Investigations, dialogues, original translations, the texts the journal gathers challenge the concepts and methods of different disciplinary fields —the hypothesis being that only complementarity, or the combining of knowledge(s) foster a new look on commonplace objects or the emergence of new, urgent, objects of research.

Essais publishes monographic issues whose calls for papers are launched on websites such as Calenda, Fabula and other platforms. Three issues are published each year by Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux on paper format and electronic format and the journal is available online via Bordeaux Montaigne university’s website and OpenEdition’s plateform.