There has been learned controversy1 over the authorship of the Discours sur la Servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), but its audacious message, its intensity, and its limited use of quotations lead me to conclude that Étienne de la Boétie, not Michel de Montaigne, was the author. Although at one time there may have been places where that quite small text could be integrated into the Essays, that integration did not happen. Very little is known for certain about La Boétie.
Born in Sarlat, a picturesque small town in Périgord, on November 1, 1530, La Boétie was raised by an uncle who sent him at quite an early age to study law at Orléans. In October 1553, Étienne received letters patent permitting him to be a conseiller in a court of law. He would be mobilized as a member of the elite to head a militia force to defend Bergerac from Huguenot attack.
Learned in ancient Greek, La Boétie, like so many other young and learned men of that generation, translated some of Xenophon’s and Plutarch’s works. He met Montaigne in 1557, and they quickly became intimate friends. Sustained by his friend, La Boétie died in 1563.
A small book with a minimum of scholarly references and stylistic conventions, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is just that, a discourse written forcefully, to convince an audience or readership. Montaigne had read it prior to meeting La Boétie; he would publish it in 1576, along with some of La Boétie’s other works, including his poems.
The intensity of the work immediately makes readers want to know more about the author. One certitude is that despite their familiarity with Protestants and, no doubt, despite the Huguenots’ flourishing theological and political-protest literature, La Boétie remained a Catholic, and so did Montaigne. There were, of course, lawyers and jurists who converted to Jean Calvin’s doctrines; but in the main, men who were members of a corps such as a parlement or a local court would remain Catholic.
The mysteries surrounding the author of the Discourse in no way diminish the clarity and audacity of its meaning, its intellectual brilliance, and the persuasive power that it achieves by its almost intimate authorial presence. With a mere six transhistorical concepts—servitude, master, lord, monarchy, tyranny, and liberty—La Boétie opens up a virtually unknown field of political inquiry by asking one question: How does it come to pass that all but a handful of men live in servitude? They have lost, or never possessed, the liberty in which they were born. In effect, La Boétie argues that everyone but the king who lives in France is in some degree a slave to the monarch.
How could this happen? La Boétie takes a cue from that great anti-monarchist, Cicero, who in his Offices, addressed to his son, argues that individual liberty and monarchy are completely incompatible.2 Taking the same cue in the Prince, Machiavelli argues that in fact the prince or king and the tyrant-despot are one and the same.3
A person can have many lords over him. La Boétie identifies domestic subjection, seigneurial subjection, and feudal subjection. All Europeans—save the Venetians and the Swiss!—lack the liberty that citizens enjoy. A prince of the blood is a subject who must kneel before the king, and so are the cobbler and the peasant. There is no public space in towns, because only subjects, not citizens, reside there.
La Boétie offers few extensive or lurid accounts of life under a tyrant. He says that the floors in the dwelling of the ancient Roman tyrant were as bloody as the floor in a butcher’s shop. He prefers to emphasize those who killed tyrants in order to recover their liberty, rather than list those who enjoy “sales et vilains plaisirs” (dirty, nasty pleasures).4 He finds three types of tyrants. The first group includes those who obtain kingdoms by popular election; the second, by force of arms; and the third by succession of their lineage.5 Differences are noted, but the results are fundamentally the same: the tyrant-king rules for his own benefit, not for the common weal.
La Boétie gives numerous examples of tyrannies, notably that of Pisistratus who, although a tyrant, ruled with consideration for the Athenians (Aristotle), and Dionysius I of Syracuse who, although elected to defend the city, set himself up as a tyrant-king.6 La Boétie comments: “It is incredible how suddenly the people, as soon as they are subjected, fall into such a deep forgetfulness of freedom that it is impossible for them to wake up.”7
After exploring whether liberty is, or is not, natural to the genus “man,” La Boétie begins a lengthy discussion about popular political action. Unlike Hotman, he seems not to believe that “corporations,” that is, estates and councils, can curb monarchical-tyrannical power:
Poor and miserable, senseless peoples, nations obstinately given to your own ill and blind to your good. You allow the finest and brightest share of your revenue to be taken before your eyes, your fields to be pillaged, your houses to be robbed and stripped of ancient and paternal furnishings. You live in such a way that you cannot boast that anything belongs to you, and it seems as if you would be very fortunate to be able to pay rent for the enjoyment of your belongings, your family, and your lives. And all this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin comes to you not from enemies, but yes indeed from the enemy, and from the one that you make as great as he is, for whom you go so courageously to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your persons to death.
That one who dominates you so much has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, and has nothing beyond what the merest human being has, among [the citizens of] the great and infinite number of your cities, except for the advantage that you give him so that he can destroy you. From where has he taken so many eyes with which he spies on you, unless you give them to him? How does he have so many hands with which to strike you, unless he takes them from you? The feet with which he tramples your cities, where does he get them from, if they are not yours? How does he have any power over you, except through you? How would he dare to come after you, unless he had information from you? What could he do to you, if you weren’t acting as fences of the thief who steals from you, accomplices of the murderer who kills you, and traitors to yourselves?
You sow your crops so that he may devastate them. You furnish and fill your houses [with belongings] in order to provide for his pillages. You rear your daughters so that he may have something with which to sate his lust. You rear your sons so that the best thing he can do to them is to take them into his wars, so as to lead them to be slaughtered, and turn them into the agents of his lusts and the executors of his revenges. You break your backs so that he can enjoy his delights and wallow in dirty and villainous pleasure. You weaken yourselves in order to make him stronger and more apt to keep you on a tight leash.8
It is not surprising to find classical-republican ideas about defense and war. Citizens are courageous fighters; subjects are always half-hearted, and mercenaries “effeminate.”9 La Boétie tallies the potential fighters against tyranny, but as Nannerl Keohane has concluded, there is really no program, no call for citizen armies to overthrow or assassinate tyrants,10 although he commends the killers of tyrants.
… you can deliver yourself if you try, not by acting so as to deliver yourselves from them, but simply by willing to do it. Be resolved, no longer to serve, and you will find yourselves free. I do not want you to push or to shake him, but only to no longer support him, and you will see him, like a great colossus of which the base has been removed, collapse of his own weight and break.11
Jacques Poujol suggests that what La Boétie is doing is transferring a familiar religious exhortation about casting off sin and sinful acts, in order to enjoy a new relation with God.12 When La Boétie comes to assess French kings, he first scoffs at beliefs about the divine powers of the oriflamme, the ampulla, toads, and fleurs-de-lis.13 He then asserts that “we have always had such good kings in peace and courageous in war—not made as others by nature, but chosen by all-powerful God.”14 Although the great deeds of Clovis and of the ancient French, sung about and praised by living poets, are eminently desirable,15 they obviously are mythical. Although patriotic like Montaigne, La Boétie lets this come to mind as an afterthought.
But at this point, La Boétie does not choose to end his discourse with a peroration centered on the divine and on Frenchness. Instead, he offers an interpretation of how tyranny extends across realms and the world. It is original, brilliant, and implausible.
Noting that while it is generally believed that sentry posts and guards with halberds protect the tyrant from assassination, that is not correct. Roman emperors were as often killed by their guards as protected by them.
Instead, there are always four or five men who have the tyrant’s ear. Through them, an entire people may be subjected. These men are the “accomplices of his cruelties, the companions of his pleasures, the pimps of his lust, and [they] share in the loot of his pillages.”16
Each of the six has a hundred who benefit from their relation; these six hundred have six thousand whose standing they have raised.17 For Roland Mousnier these fidèles were the fidèles des fidèles! The total number of royal officials in the early sixteenth century was about 400018 royal servants who, like everyone else, were in one or another degree of servitude.
Defining God as all good, rather than all-powerful, may indicate a step away from the conventional, but it does not bring to mind a person in despair, a person who fears for his soul. The lack of an appeal to action seems less important when it is brought to the fore and is viewed from an ontological perspective rather than from a political one. The shift back and forth from the collective human to the individual is particularly important if we seek to interpret La Boétie’s more general meaning and, of course, its relation to the thought of Montaigne, his friend.As for me, I indeed think, and I am not mistaken, since there is nothing so contrary to God, who is all-giving and all good, as tyranny, that He reserves a place down below to give some special place to tyrants and their accomplices.19
La Boétie stresses the will. What would happen if the people simply stopped doing what they, as subjects, were supposed to do?
La Boétie continues, alluding to the pervasive “will to serve.” After exploring human nature about human differences, and thanks to having speech, we can learn to think alike and “make a communion of our wills.”20 Reading La Boétie’s program for overcoming tyranny stirs many resonances that rise and become audible; but examining them would take us away from our theme.