Que sais-je?

I know it will seem tedious that I must continue to disagree with (or express strong reservations over) Professor Bloom's critical judgements, but why Montaigne?  Why not Rabelais, or, perhaps more persuasively, Voltaire, as the signal genius of French national culture and personality?  Neither of these Gallic titans is suffered to appear, nor are such names as Racine, Corneille, Dumas, or Zola.  Granted, the French tragedians may have only a national appeal (despite the fact that I have seen Corneille on stage in Dallas within the past five years), and Zola is largely forgotten, but compared to some of the Iberian ciphers in Bloom's centiad (just as Professor Bloom has no compunction in emulating his deity in the practice of coining neologisms, nor do I), Dumas is a towering genius whose characters live in the minds of modern Western men and women at least as much as Sancho Panza and Dulcinea del Toboso.

I can only assume that it is Bloom's predilection for characters, and Montaigne's uncanny ability to make himself one of the most interesting characters in Western letters, that earns the erstwhile mayor of Bordeaux this pride of place among French luminaries.  I am not aware that his brand of French language became the national standard, as Dante's Tuscan became Italian and Chaucer's God-awful dreck became English, but I defer to Bloom's superior proximity to the Yale Department of French on this point.  Having dipped my neocortex into the ocean of Montaigne's wit only very sparingly over the decades, I am indisputably less qualified to rule on his merits vis-a-vis most of the other Frenchmen on Bloom's list; nevertheless, this unwonted preeminence seems idiosyncratic to me, particularly given the large number of the essays that concern themselves with issues particular to a religiously divided seventeenth-century France.

Is Montaigne genuinely above his age?