CHAPTER 3

La Boétie and Montaigne: Discourse on Servitude and Essay of Allegiance

La Boétie’s name is forever linked to that of Montaigne. The famous and chaste definition of their friendship, “because it was he, because it was I,”1 made the two men inseparable in posterity’s eyes. It is the image of perfect friendship that Montaigne proposes. However, this ineffable friendship also reflected professional and publishing ambitions. Political intentions sometimes merged with the literary expression of a friendship erected into a model. La Boétie played an important role in shaping Montaigne’s politics and literary development. Two years and four months older than Montaigne, La Boétie had begun a rapidly advancing and promising career in the parlement, and his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is now considered one of the fundamental texts of modern political philosophy. This political treatise was originally supposed to constitute the core of Montaigne’s book, but at the last minute it was omitted from the first edition of the Essais in 1580. In fact, the place of La Boétie’s writings in Montaigne’s work has always been problematic, and the friendship idealized by the author of the Essais is not free from personal calculations.

Estienne de La Boétie was born in 1530 in Sarlat, in the province of Périgord. Descended from a family of magistrates, he studied law at the University of Orléans, whose faculty included Anne du Bourg, one of the Reformation’s first martyrs who, after being condemned as a heretic, was tortured and put to death in 1559. La Boétie obtained his diploma in law on September 23, 1553, with a royal dispensation because he was not yet twenty-five years old. He began his career as a magistrate in the présidial court of Sarlat and the following year succeeded Guillaume de Lur Longa in the office of councillor in the parlement of Bordeaux. He married Marguerite de Carle, the niece of Pierre de Carle, president of the Bordeaux parlement. With her first husband, Jehan d’Arsac, who had died in 1552, she had had two children: Gaston, who in 1563 married Louise de La Chassaigne, the daughter of the president Geoffroy de La Chassaigne and aunt of Montaigne’s future wife, and Jacquette, who in 1566 married Michel de Montaigne’s brother Thomas de Montaigne, lord of Beauregard. La Boétie’s mother’s brother was Jean de Calvimont, a former ambassador extraordinary to Spain and Portugal who had become president of the parlement of Bordeaux and judge of a special chamber where Protestants were tried. The La Boétie, Calvimont, Montaigne, and La Chassaigne families were closely tied by these intermarriages; as we have seen, this was common in the milieu of the Bordeaux parlement. These arranged marriages allowed members of the families to attain the most desired offices in both the jurade and the parlement. The friendship between La Boétie and Montaigne thus included significant family ramifications and was situated in a network of relationships that was foreseeable for robins sharing the same social ambitions.

In his edition of La Boétie’s literary works, published in Paris in 1571, Montaigne reveals that his “acquaintance [with La Boétie] began only about six years before his death,”2 that is, in 1557. In the chapter “Of friendship,” (I: 28) Montaigne initially wrote that he had known La Boétie for “four or five years” before his death on August 18, 1563, but later corrected this to read “four years,” that is, since 1559. This “reduction” by two years of the length of his friendship with La Boétie allows Montaigne to avoid mentioning an earlier meeting while he was holding his first office at the Cour des Aides in Périgueux. It was thus in Bordeaux in 1559, during a municipal reception, that the friends found each other: “At our first meeting, which by chance came at a great feast and gathering in the city, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that time on nothing was so close to us as each other.”³ This first encounter was like love at first sight, even if there is no doubt that Montaigne already knew La Boétie by reputation, mainly through his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which was circulating in manuscript form.

During the first half of 1559, La Boétie was very active in the Bordeaux parlement, where he quickly made a place for himself. We know of ten rulings for which he was the reporter between March 29, 1559, and August 17, 1560,⁴ and with the help of his reputation, he did many more between May and August 1561.⁵ He was soon entrusted with administrative and political responsibilities. That same year he was assigned to a mission in the Agenais to help Burie, the lieutenant general in Guyenne, punish agitators who were trying to foment a popular uprising against royal authority. La Boétie’s religious positions at this time were, like Montaigne’s, unambiguous, and he was categorically opposed to any negotiation with the Protestants. A ruling dated April 1562, bears, for the first time, Montaigne’s and La Boétie’s names side by side. On this document, Montaigne is presented as the relator, that is, the reporter, the president of the court being François de La Guyonnie and the councillors, Estienne de La Boétie, Antoine Beringuier, Jean de Massey, Henri de La Taste, Jean Rignac, Bertrand de Makanam, François Fayard, and Pierre de Saint-Angel. This document marks the beginning of a judicial cooperation that lasted for a little over three years.

The friendship between La Boétie and Montaigne was relatively short, and their professional exchanges took place primarily in the parlement. Four years is not a long time to establish an exemplary relationship, but Montaigne explains that their social interactions were intense between 1560 and 1563. We can easily imagine that their conversations at that time bore chiefly on religious questions. In a parlement that was politically divided and exposed to all sorts of machinations, the two companions’ political views were quite close. At the beginning of the civil wars, they openly defended the Catholic cause and proved little receptive to the idea of making religious concessions to the Protestants. They also shared the same vision of a parlement that was independent but respected royal authority.

The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, written by La Boétie at the age of eighteen, and the Memorandum on the edict of January 1562 were crucial for Montaigne’s political development. Through these works, which circulated sub rosa or in a semiprivate way, La Boétie had shown a rare aptitude for commenting on the political and religious decisions of his time. For that reason, the story of the bond of friendship and publication between the two men—before and after La Boétie’s death—had undeniable repercussions on the writing and publication of the Essais. From the outset, books and manuscripts were central to the relationship between the two men. For example, Montaigne’s first library was composed of books inherited from La Boétie, the “close brother and inviolable friend”6 who had bequeathed to him as a “token of friendship,” the Greek and Latin books he had in Bordeaux,⁷ with the exception of a few volumes on law that belonged to his cousin, the legitimate son and heir of the president Calvimont. La Boétie’s death in 1563 marked the beginning of a bookish relationship (relation livresque) that arose from their common profession and shared convictions.

In Montaigne’s account (written almost twenty years later), this friendship dated from 1559, when the future author of the Essais (in contrast, La Boétie never published anything during his lifetime) left his office as councillor at the Cour des Aides de Périgueux and joined the parlement of Bordeaux. Montaigne made the acquaintance of La Boétie during his first career as a magistrate, from 1559 to 1563. After 1588, that is, twenty-five years later, Montaigne relates in detail, in a late addition to the chapter “Of friendship,” his feeling of divine inspiration when they met: “We sought each other before we met because of the reports we heard of each other, which had more effect on our affection than such reports would reasonably have; I think it was by some ordinance from heaven. We embraced each other by our names.”⁸

This fortuitous encounter between La Boétie and Montaigne was thus, according to him, the result of Divine Providence. The text of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude had to be embodied in a physical form that could carry it through the Wars of Religion. Montaigne had heard about La Boétie through his political writings, but this “bookish” acquaintance was not reciprocal because Montaigne had not yet conceived the work that would one day make him famous. When the two men met, their respective careers and reputations had nothing in common. La Boétie was certainly more mature and career oriented than the young Montaigne, who seemed more interested in worldly pleasures. This substantial difference between the two men is made clear in a Latin poem left by La Boétie and addressed to Montaigne.9 In this neo-Latin satire, Montaigne is depicted as a young man of promise who, in spite of his qualities, seems mostly driven by pleasure and even debauchery. La Boétie retells Xenophon’s fable known as “Hercules’s Choice” between Virtue and Happiness. Each one attempts to persuade the young Hercules to enjoy different rewards such as honor and fame or idleness and sexual pleasure. In this poem La Boétie transforms Happiness into Voluptas and substitutes Hercules for Montaigne. This poem can be read as a warning against the dangerous charms of hedonism:

To you [Montaigne], who in your father’s footsteps are struggling

To climb the arduous paths to virtue,

Shall I, who am burning with youth and who would look

Ridiculous as a preceptor, give counsel and advice?

…

On the lewd whore. But, youth,

While you have the strength flee the treacherous

Favors with which she now enchants your ears, for soon

The poison will penetrate your mind.

…

What good is life to someone who is slothful

If, living, he differs little from the dead?

He who lazily sleeps away the year and moves

Silently through life is more dead than alive.¹⁰

The neo-Latin poems written by La Boétie offer a very different image of the young councillor to the parlement of Bordeaux. Montaigne is depicted as a lost soul who chases women in brothels. More interested in sexual prowess followed by long periods of laziness, the young Montaigne represents a very different kind of friendship for La Boétie. Some scholars have even alluded to a possible homosexual relationship between the two men.¹¹

In 1559, Montaigne certainly had more to hope from his friendship with La Boétie than La Boétie did from his friendship with Montaigne. Although we can understand why Montaigne would approach La Boétie, we can doubt whether La Boétie felt the same emotion when he first met a councillor who had just entered the parlement by the back door, from the Cour des Aides in Périgueux. What did he have to gain, on a strictly professional level, from this friendship? What was the exact nature of the “obligation” that Montaigne considers to be reciprocal? We know nothing about this, because Montaigne confuses the humanist topos of friendship with the social and professional reality of the parlementary milieu in Bordeaux at the beginning of the 1560s.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that Montaigne was about to embark upon a brilliant parlementary career, because his work as a councillor did not really allow him to distinguish himself from his colleagues. The closeness between Montaigne and La Boétie, which was, according to Montaigne, recognized by both of them, is more likely to have corresponded to a choice related to politics and clienteles about which he later kept silent. Although it was surprising, this sudden friendship is presented as inevitable, as if La Boétie had divined the role that Montaigne was to play for him after his death or had sensed in him the author that he would become twenty years later. Montaigne may have taken his desires for realities, because the a posteriori writing of this friendship deliberately compresses time in order to create the premises of an enhanced friendship that was to find its expression only much later, long after the friend had died, and mainly through the Essais.

The story of a friendship recounted by Montaigne calls for commentary. Without the manuscript of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, the friendship between the two men would never have existed. It was a paper friendship before it became a human friendship. We can note first that according to Montaigne La Boétie was, like the Ancients whom he claimed to be following, consubstantial with his work. But his work is known to us only through an “interpreter” (truchement), a “necessary intermediary”; Montaigne reinvents La Boétie just as Plato reinvents Socrates. Socrates and La Boétie share many common points; their words are known to us only thanks to go-betweens. Another similarity pointed out by Montaigne: Socrates and La Boétie both had ugly bodies but beautiful souls. Plato created a place for Socrates in the history of philosophy; Montaigne tried to find a place for La Boétie in the history of political philosophy, even if the political and religious events of the late Renaissance forced him to abandon this project. This renunciation was a liberation that made it easier for him to obliterate the “seam” that usually defines friendship between two human beings. It could not be quantified, either, because it consisted in a project that had hardly begun, a preliminary sketch for a friendship. In the Essais, Montaigne describes a friendship that remained at an initial stage. The famous “because it was he, because it was I”—a reformulation of the consubstantiality theorized by Montaigne—allowed the author of the Essais to get along without La Boétie. In speaking of himself, he was also speaking about his friend. Can we, after all, imagine Plato without Socrates or Montaigne without La Boétie? No, because their respective stories and writings are closely connected and merge with each other. Everything we know about La Boétie is given us by Montaigne.

The Letter about La Boétie’s Death

La Boétie died in 1563, at the age of thirty-three, from an illness—probably dysentery—that carried him off in less than ten days. Montaigne witnessed his last moments and reported his friend’s death in a letter written to his father. This famous letter is a key document for biographers of these two authors, not only because it is Montaigne’s first “literary” text, but also because this relatively short piece defines the terms of a friendship that is supposed to have led to the conception of the Essais. Perhaps not as original as initially thought, this letter has even been read as a paraphrase of a letter from Lancelot de Carle on the death of the duke of Guise in 1563.12 During his slow agony, La Boétie placed Montaigne before a series of responsibilities that were later to haunt him. Whether it was by bequeathing his library to him or by begging him to see in his friend a “brother” and to continue a work originally conceived to be written together, La Boétie assigned to Montaigne a political mission with far-reaching implications.

It has often been suggested that the letter about La Boétie’s death was written with great care, and that this text anticipates the Essais. But it is important to take this document for what it is and nothing more. At the time when he wrote this letter, or at least when he revised it for publication, Montaigne had just resigned his position as a councillor at the Bordeaux parlement—if we accept the possibility that this text (despite the fact that it is addressed to Montaigne’s father) was written not in 1563 but long after the death of Pierre Eyquem in 1568, and on the occasion of the publication of La Boétie’s works in 1571. The precise date of the composition of this text is still in doubt. The extract from the privilège for the collection published by Federic Morel is dated October 18, 1570, that is, less than six months after Montaigne ceded his office as councillor to Florimond de Raemond and more than seven years after La Boétie’s death. Internal contradictions in this text—notably the date of La Boétie’s testament as reported by Montaigne—force us to question the actual proximity of the events Montaigne recounts. Whatever date we assign to the composition of this letter, Montaigne was not yet an essayist. He was then only a translator who had just published, one year before, a French version of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis.

Montaigne’s letter on La Boétie’s death is supposed to put the seal on an inimitable friendship that presents itself as ouï-dire (hearsay), that is, as a testimony of which Montaigne is only the objective and disinterested relator. We note that the beginning of this “extract from a letter” is lacking, as if the document had been found incomplete or had been censored by Montaigne himself before its publication in Paris in 1571. This lack makes even more ambiguous his attitude with regard to the death of a man who had been considered one of the best orators at the parlement of Bordeaux. This letter without a beginning reminds us of Montaigne’s “travel journal,” which also begins “underway.” As texts without introductions that would make it easier to understand the exact terms of the writing, these “Montaignian fragments” do not claim to be finished objects; they are presented as unstable, incomplete testimonies. On that point, let us note that the title page of the edition printed by Morel announces a “Discourse on the death of the aforesaid Seigneur de la Boëtie by M. de Montaigne,” whereas Montaigne’s “letter,” which appears at the end of the volume, is titled “Extract from a letter that Monsieur the Councillor de Montaigne wrote to Monseigneur de Montaigne his father, concerning certain particularities that he observed in the illness and death of the late Monsieur de la Boétie.” We may note in particular the use of the word “discourse” (discours), insofar as this extract from the letter is constituted above all by a series of discourses, not by Montaigne, but by La Boétie—Montaigne playing the role that he learned with La Boétie, that of reporter.

A rapid first reading of the letter on La Boétie’s death reveals that Montaigne ultimately had very little to say about his friend. The clerk that he was simply records what he saw and heard of the councillor La Boétie during the last hours of his life. This was in no way a new role for him, but he was less used to playing it than his friend was. Montaigne is trying his hand at a somewhat different kind of “discourse.” He sets himself the task of describing the “particularities” of this death that he wants to be exceptional but which in the end appears rather ordinary. What then are these particularities that moved Montaigne? From the outset, the reader has to concentrate his attention on La Boétie’s last words. We cannot yet speak of friendship; that tie is not even mentioned. The first words of the letter allow us to suppose that other points have already been explained in the introduction that has disappeared or been eliminated. The reader discovers this letter when it is already “underway,” and the end of a narrative that omits La Boétie’s upbringing and career. Everything is not presented to us. For example, the history of his illness, and the history of the friendship that is revealed only in the Essais in 1580, are lacking. La Boétie is described only on his deathbed: “As for his last words” is an unusual first sentence to find at the beginning of an exemplary narrative. This locution puts the accent on the discourse, that is, on an oratorical performance presented as essential. But in this letter, Montaigne is interested solely in a dying man’s speech. The author of the “Discourse” gives way to the litigant in the parlement. Rather than inquiring into his friend’s attitude as he faces death, Montaigne concentrates entirely on the flow of words La Boétie expresses.

Montaigne tells us that La Boétie was exceptionally voluble in his last moments and that “throughout his illness he spoke more willingly to me than to anyone else.”13 Among those who attended to La Boétie during his illness, Montaigne considers himself privileged. It was to him that La Boétie mainly addressed himself. His family occupied only the second rank and faded into the background in the presence of his friend. Montaigne informs his father that in view of La Boétie’s very elevated and virtuous life, one could only hope for words of the same kind. This anticipation, and the fact that Montaigne was in a way preparing his reader for the remarks to follow, offers a striking contrast with the slow deterioration of La Boétie’s rhetorical aptitudes during the nine days of his death agony. From the very beginning of his letter, Montaigne asserts unhesitatingly that his friend had an art of discourse unequaled at the time and that he was a better orator than an author: “though when in former years he spoke on serious and important matters, he did so in such a way that it was hard to express them as well in writing, yet at the last his ideas and his words seemed to be competing with each other to render him their final service.”¹⁴ The oratorical performance is opposed to writing: two kinds of competence that Montaigne distinguishes at the outset. In other words, while Montaigne lacks La Boétie’s loquacity, he has pretensions as a writer that he succeeds in realizing.

Then begins the account of the vicissitudes of La Boétie’s interminable death. When Montaigne returned from the Palais on Monday, October 9, 1563, he sent one of his servants to invite La Boétie to dine with him. At that time, Montaigne was one of the busiest people in Bordeaux. He was working on two appeal cases. Not being able to get about because he was slightly ill, La Boétie asked Montaigne to come visit him that afternoon to spend some time with him before he left for Médoc. Soon after dinner (that is, in the middle of the afternoon), Montaigne went to the Rue Rostaing, where La Boétie had leased a house from Dominique Du Rochier’s heirs. Fearing the plague, since the building was “very close to houses infected with plague, which he was rather afraid of,”¹⁵ Montaigne advised La Boétie to leave Bordeaux as soon as possible, but only to go to Germignan, where Richard de Lestonnac, Montaigne’s brother-in-law, owned a country house. This house was two leagues, or about eleven kilometers, from Bordeaux.

Following Montaigne’s recommendation, La Boétie left Bordeaux with his wife and his uncle, Monsieur de Bouillhonas. He had hardly arrived in Germignan when his condition rapidly deteriorated. That is the point at which Montaigne begins the chronicle of his friend’s slow death. Early on the morning of August 10, a valet sent by La Boétie’s wife urged him to go to Germignan as soon as possible because La Boétie was very ill. Montaigne went to see La Boétie, who was “delighted to see [him],” but he had planned to return to Bordeaux that same evening and prepared to take leave of his friend. La Boétie begged Montaigne, “with more affection and insistence than he had ever done anything else, to be with him as much as I could.” Not knowing how much his friend was suffering, Montaigne nonetheless decided to go back to Bordeaux. He returned to Germignan on Thursday. La Boétie was dying, and “his flow of blood and his abdominal cramps, which weakened him still further, were growing from hour to hour.” This time, Montaigne spent the night at Germignan but left for Bordeaux the next morning. He returned to Germignan on Saturday. La Boétie then told Montaigne that his illness was probably contagious and suggested that he “be with him only now and then, but as often as I could.” Ignoring this recommendation, Montaigne decided to stay by him, and the two friends spent Sunday talking about one thing and another: “and we spoke only about particular occurrences connected with his illness, and what the physicians of antiquity had said about it. [We spoke] very little about public affairs; for I found him completely uninterested [in them] from the first day.” No public affairs, no political discourse were ever mentioned by Montaigne. La Boétie was reduced to talking about his health. There were actually two La Boéties: the one reported by Montaigne, who talked about things that were ultimately trivial, and the one who in his writings commented on the political affairs of his time or theorized about freedom and servitude. This second La Boétie, all on paper, existed only through Montaigne. In this letter, Montaigne chose to show only the La Boétie who spoke of relatively ordinary things.

La Boétie’s condition worsened on Sunday, and Montaigne tells us that he fell “into a state in which everything was confused.”16 A “dense mist and dark fog” overcame his reason. La Boétie ceased to be himself and lost forever the eloquence that differentiated him from his colleagues. “Everything was pell-mell and without order,” Montaigne writes. Incoherent in his remarks, he feared he would surprise those around him: “And then he asked me if the weaknesses he had suffered had not somewhat astonished us.”¹⁷ Montaigne reassured him. Then La Boétie began his first “great” discourses to his uncle, his wife, and Montaigne. In contrast to Montaigne’s silence, La Boétie’s exuberant loquacity sheds light on the friendly relationship between the two men. We witness a scene in which the roles have been reversed. La Boétie spoke, Montaigne transcribed and edited. The division of labor Montaigne wanted thus already finds its logic in the first text written by the author of the Essais.

On Sunday evening, according to the chronology reported by Montaigne, the notary finally showed up. Montaigne helped La Boétie put in writing his last wishes and urged his friend to sign his will. La Boétie hesitated; was it because a testament had already been drawn up the day before, in Montaigne’s absence? In any case, La Boétie asked for more time: “My brother, I would like to be given a little leisure; for I find myself extremely tired and so weak that I can hardly go on.”18 Montaigne called in the notary again, and that Sunday evening, August 15 according to Montaigne, La Boétie dictated his will so quickly that it was very difficult to follow him. Montaigne gives the impression that he was present when La Boétie prepared his will with his notary, Jean Raymont. La Boétie is said to have asked Montaigne to read the text to make sure that it was in conformity with his last wishes. This will is, however, dated Saturday, August 14, and was signed by La Boétie; Thomas de Montaigne, lord of Beauregard; Nicolas Brodeau, his doctor; Charles Bastier, a pharmacist from Bordeaux; François Gailhand; Sardon Viault; Raymond Dumas; and Pothon Chayret. Montaigne is not even mentioned as a witness. Is that because he was not present when the will was written and signed? In fact, he spent most of Saturday in Bordeaux, arriving in Germignan only late in the evening.

Montaigne’s letter on his friend’s death nears its end. There were many people in La Boétie’s bedchamber. His uncle Estienne; his wife; his daughter-in-law; his niece, Mademoiselle de Saint-Quentin; Thomas, lord of Beauregard; and Montaigne were at his bedside. Accustomed to declaiming in a court of justice, La Boétie thought he was before the chamber of the parlement—rather than in a sickroom. We are rather far from a Stoic death and are witnessing instead a relatively noisy and confused melodrama. La Boétie constantly groaned and Montaigne seemed submerged by such a flow of words. The passage from one chamber (parlement) to the other (bedchamber) changed nothing; to his last breath, La Boétie remained a gifted speaker. That may be the idea Montaigne is suggesting. The discourses followed one another, on and on. La Boétie made a speech to Mademoiselle de Saint-Quentin, then to Jacquette d’Arsac, his daughter-in-law. Impassive, Montaigne remained a silent witness. La Boétie was such a good orator that he bowled his listeners over: “The whole chamber was filled with cries and tears, which did not, however, interrupt in the slightest the series of his speeches, which were rather long.”¹⁹ One by one, more than a dozen friends and relatives crowded into the bedchamber of the dying councillor, in a procession that resembled those at a fair.

Montaigne remained in the background, continuing to be the master pleader’s clerk and keeping his distance. His brother Thomas was then called in by La Boétie, who made a speech to him that quickly turned into a sermon. La Boétie reproached him for his Protestant positions and urged him not to associate himself with the Protestant party—and not to divide his family. Thomas, who had recently converted to Protestantism, was the widower of Serène Estève de Langon, from whom he had had no child, and he was getting ready to marry Jacquette d’Arsac. Still another marriage between the Montaignes and the La Boéties, but one that risked throwing the family into the Protestant camp. Montaigne reports this conversation which, at the time it was published, might have been dangerous—or at least compromising—for his brother Thomas. Confronted by La Boétie’s outpourings, in the end Montaigne found very little to say. Detached from the scenes he was describing, he seems ill at ease at La Boétie’s bedside and amid the mixed feelings that are supposed to have secretly gnawed at him as he walked through the halls of the parlement with his friend: “the jealousy I always felt regarding his glory and his honor.”20 In the language of the sixteenth century, the word “jealousy” (jalousie) refers to a form of extreme attachment that can go as far as covetousness and envy.

The state of La Boétie’s health further deteriorated on Monday, August 16. He found it harder and harder to express himself. As death approached, he fainted, and everyone thought for a moment that he was no longer of this world, but he regained consciousness and began another speech. First he addressed a reproach to Montaigne: “And you, too, my brother, so you don’t want me to be at peace? O, what repose you cause me to lose!”²¹ Faced with this strange remark, Montaigne did not know what to reply. He was on the hot seat before this friend who was admonishing him. The reporter listened but remained silent, once again.

On Tuesday, La Boétie asked to see a priest. After throwing a bit of Cicero in Montaigne’s face, he fell asleep and awoke with a start: “Well, well, let it come when it wishes, I am waiting for it, with fortitude and calm.”²² Montaigne tells us that La Boétie repeated these words several times during his illness. Seeing that his friend was delirious, he asked him what were the visions he was talking about as if it was important for him to understand these hallucinations provoked by the fever. La Boétie became a medical case; ordinarily so eloquent, he could no longer explain himself clearly. Shortly before he died, his voice became more strident. At this point in Montaigne’s account comes the famous passage in which La Boétie asks Montaigne for a “place.” Montaigne is concerned by such remarks because “these words were not those of a man in his right mind,” that is, in complete possession of his reason. A remark that amplifies the importance of the word: “To the point that he forced me to convince him by reason, and to tell him that since he breathed and spoke, and had a body, he consequently had his place.”²³ So long as La Boétie spoke, he incontestably occupied the “place” he asked Montaigne for. La Boétie could exist only through the mediation of the word, the mediation that Montaigne gave him in the printed text of the letter on his friend’s death. On August 18, La Boétie finally fell silent.

Three days later, the parlement’s Registres secrets reported a speech by Montaigne during a session that paid homage to La Boétie: “The aforesaid day Me Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, royal councillor at the Court, stated, being in the assembled chamber, that Bouilhonnas de Fartas, the uncle of the late Maître Etienne de la Boetie, during his lifetime royal councillor in the Court, very humbly begs the Court to be allowed to honor by his presence the body of the said De La Boetie tomorrow morning, which was approved to be done.”24 After this last public farewell, La Boétie was rapidly forgotten. The members of the parlement had other concerns, and La Boétie, though he had been a councillor with a promising future, had ultimately left nothing in writing that could justify the admiration of his peers. Only Montaigne brought him out of this silence to which he seemed forever relegated. Paradoxically, it was on Huguenot terrain that La Boétie recovered his voice, thanks to Geneva’s appropriation of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, a short extract from which was published in Le Réveille-Matin des François et de leurs voisins in 1574.²⁵ The warning addressed to Thomas de Montaigne had been transformed into a prophecy. Montaigne was henceforth confronted by the subversive reception of a friend who was escaping him.

La Boétie’s Political Treatises: The Memorandum and the Discourse

The encounter between Montaigne and La Boétie took place at the beginning of the Wars of Religion. Both of them operated within the machinery of the parlement of Bordeaux.26 According to Montaigne, La Boétie wrote the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude “as a kind of trial [essai]” when he was very young. On the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne makes La Boétie two years younger: “eighteen” is struck out and replaced by “sixteen,” which makes the first composition of the Discourse date from around 1548. Montaigne takes care to de-historicize this treatise, and presents it as a “general” text “in honor of liberty against tyrants.”²⁷ At the outset, the use of the French word essai to define the Discourse allows Montaigne to establish a link with his own work, but it also makes more precise the political goal of his friend’s reflection. Thus we can ask whether the Discourse was not conceived specifically to respond to a precise historical event. Jacques-Auguste de Thou maintains that La Boétie wanted to react against the brutal repression that had followed the salt-tax revolt of 1548 in Bordeaux, thus overtly criticizing Constable de Monmorency’s ferocious repression.²⁸

Bordeaux had been particularly affected by the new tax levies, and in 1542 the city had been forced to lend the king 20,500 livres and in 1543 to contribute to the maintenance of 50,000 soldiers. The modification of the system of salt storage depots had served as a trigger for the popular uprising. The current mayor, Guy Chabot, was absent when the revolt broke out in 1548. Overwhelmed, the jurats did not react, and in a few hours more than twenty thousand armed men were in the streets. On August 21, the king’s lieutenant general, Tristan de Moneins, was killed by the rioters. Montaigne, who was then fifteen years old, might have witnessed this murder.²⁹ There is an allusion to this bloody episode in the Essais. As we have seen, the parlement and the jurats were held responsible for not having been able to prevent the outburst of “popular fury.”

Despite the political importance of this popular uprising, it is hard to see in this event the sole origin of La Boétie’s treatise. The Discourse was revised several times by its author—notably in 1554, during the battle over the edict of the Semesteri at the time of La Boétie’s nomination to the Bordeaux parlement and Lur Longa’s appointment to the Paris parlement—and we know that it circulated in manuscript form during La Boétie’s lifetime as well as after his death in 1563.ⁱⁱ The text was modified later, as is indicated by the eulogies of Ronsard, Baïf, and Du Bellay, which are posterior to 1550. In fact, the history of the reception of the Discourse far exceeds its author’s initial intention, whatever it may have been.³⁰

Montaigne decided not to include the Discourse when he had his friend’s works published in 1571. La Boétie’s diatribe against voluntary servitude was more appropriate in the Essais, which were intended—at least in the first version of 1580—as a personal reflection on political, diplomatic, military, and moral questions. On the other hand, the Memorandum on the January edict was too limited to its time and not in tune with the political situation after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Besides, Montaigne does not dwell on the Memorandum, which often contradicts the liberal and humanistic ideas of the Discourse. The two texts are so different in nature that most critics still refuse to consider La Boétie the author of the Memorandum and prefer to keep Montaigne at a distance from a much less open-minded La Boétie. However, several references in the text, and especially Montaigne’s mention of it, allow us to conclude that La Boétie is the author of the Memorandum on the edict of January 1562.³¹ From a purely stylistic and lexical point of view, the two texts present significant similarities.³²

The apparent impression of continuity between the Memorandum and the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is strengthened when the two texts are read one after the other. That is why it is important to situate them in their respective historical and political contexts. They are separated by fifteen years. If we believe Montaigne, the Discourse dates from 1546–48—that is, before he entered the Cour des Aides in Périgueux—whereas the Memorandum was written toward the end of 1561. La Boétie’s political career had developed between those two dates, and the role that he played within the parlement of Bordeaux had greatly changed him. The Protestant Reformation had also spread widely in Guyenne between the end of the 1540s and the beginning of the 1560s. In the course of 1561, seditious insurgents acted openly in Bordeaux and Guyenne, and recourse to violence quickly became the best way of expressing oneself, in the camp of the Catholics as well as in that of the Protestants. In this infernal logic of terror, La Boétie recommended an intransigent political position in response to an ordinance of October 1561 issued by the king of Navarre’s lieutenant governor in Guyenne, Charles de Coucy, lord of Burie. One of the propositions considered intolerable by Catholics involved reserving a church for Protestant worship in the main cities of Guyenne. This concession was judged unacceptable by Montaigne and La Boétie because in their view it opened the door to other concessions that would ultimately weaken the Catholic Church and, in the meantime, disturb the civil peace.

The Discourse and the Memorandum are distinct texts whose statements contradict each other. The divergences can be explained by the fact that the Memorandum anticipates and seeks to forestall a precise political and historical event, namely, the edict of tolerance promulgated at Saint-Germain (January 17, 1562), which granted Protestants public places of worship, whereas the Discourse is more theoretical and refers to an ideal conception of liberty, making servitude a natural inclination in humans that was already present in Antiquity. The audiences to which these two political texts are addressed are also very different. For example, the Discourse has a rhetorical dimension that corresponds quite well with the erudite practices of jurisconsults and magistrates with a keen interest in history and ancient models, without it being possible to reduce it to a pure exercise in declamatio.33 Far from being a diatribe against the Constable’s tyranny and barbarity—La Boétie never names any name or makes the slightest clear allusion to a contemporary—the Discourse was conceived rather as a professional practice, the habitus of a robin beginning his career as a young councillor. On this point, Montaigne is right to say that it constitutes a youthful exercise. Conversely, the Memorandum is a politically engaged text that was made moot by the beginning of the Wars of Religion in 1563. Montaigne’s position with regard to this text changed over the years between 1560 and 1570. By 1580, the Memorandum was completely out of date and out of phase with the political and religious reality of the time, whereas the Discourse remained relevant, precisely because it had been conceived as a theoretical exercise and was less anchored in history.

For November 26, 1561, the Bordeaux parlement’s registers mention a mission that involved Montaigne “going to the Court for other affairs.”³⁴ From this it has been inferred that he took the Memorandum to Paris. This is pure speculation; the object of his mission is not known. As we have seen, Montaigne often served as a courier for the parlement. He was a good horseman—he was still young—and he could make the 550-kilometer trip between Bordeaux and Paris in less than seven days. The parlement was concerned in particular about the political bipolarization in the southwest, and lost no opportunity to address a report to the king when Protestants seized churches, destroyed crosses and altars, or burned the ornaments of places of worship. Let us recall that at this time, faced with the rise in the Huguenots’ military power, the Constable de Montmorency had joined with François de Guise and the Marshal de Saint-André to form the triumvirate supported by the king of Spain. France was henceforth divided into two parties: that of the triumvirs with the Catholics and that of the “conspirators” (conjurateurs)iii with the Protestants. Burie tried in vain to reestablish order in Bordeaux and in Guyenne. That was the immediate context of La Boétie’s Memorandum.

In the hope of putting an end to the hostilities and pacifying seditious Huguenots, Burie had decreed that in cities that had several churches, one would be reserved for the use of the Protestants. This was a courageous decision, but it was controversial. The edict of July 1561 had forbidden Protestants to assemble in groups, but it had ultimately been counterproductive, because the number of their assemblies increased and they also seized the Catholic churches, which they used for their own services after driving out the priests. In November, a royal edict ordered the Protestants to return the churches on pain of death. As De Thou put it in his Histoire universelle, “the July edict, instead of calming, only embittered people.”³⁵ The colloquy at Poissy was of no use. An assembly was convoked at Saint-Germain in January 1562, where representatives from all the kingdom’s parlements gathered to write a more conciliatory edict. La Boétie’s Memorandum is conceived as a document preparatory to this edict. His goal was to present recommendations for this new text aimed at pacification. Other memoranda, both Protestant and Catholic, were also prepared for the Saint-Germain colloquy. After the publication of the edict, Michel de L’Hospital tried to reassure the extremist Catholics while at the same time implementing the concessions granted the Protestants. Catherine de Medici sought to be perceived as conciliating and ready to give the Huguenots even more rights. However, this policy of tolerance failed, because the Catholics saw it as a betrayal.

In his Memorandum, La Boétie envisaged only three possible ways of resolving the religious dilemma: retaining the old doctrine in matters of religion, introducing the new one, or else maintaining an equilibrium between the two religions “under the care and guidance of the magistrates.”36 This last solution was neither political nor religious, but judicial. It corresponded to the position of the parlements, which saw in it a political recognition of their function and attributed to them a central importance in the resolution of the conflict. Montaigne also supported the judicial solution. After 1570, his position was obviously quite different, and the propositions made in the Memorandum no longer corresponded to his conception of the parlement. According to La Boétie, it was incumbent upon the parlements to see to it that the negotiated solutions were respected by both sides. But there was no question of having two religions within the same kingdom. In fact, between two such contrary doctrines, “there can be only one true one,”³⁷ writes La Boétie. The concessions had limits.

La Boétie defends the idea of a compromise during a determinate period: the two religions were to coexist until an ecumenical council ironed out the theological differences. Moderation and compromise could be conceived only as provisional. It was not a matter of changing religions, but of reforming questionable practices. La Boétie defended this transitional phase in the name of the only remedy that could be envisioned, a future peace. This was not a perfect solution, but for him it was the only one possible. Without this “tolerated interim,” nothing could be discussed. This notion of a temporary tolerance is strange coming from the author of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Montaigne distanced himself from such a practical definition of tolerance, and after 1572 he understood that the word “tolerance” could not be modified by any adjective indicating a restriction. Tolerance cannot be conceived for a definite time. The January edict went much further than the Memorandum in making Protestantism legitimate. Freedom of conscience and worship could not be conceived as limited to a specific period of time, and that is why the Memorandum was doomed to fail. La Boétie muddled things somewhat by arguing that “the dissimulation of private and secret assemblies is the starting point of the problem: the tolerance of public [assemblies] increased our calamities.”³⁸

Granting rights for a time and then taking them away makes no sense from a political point of view. The concessions the king accorded led the Protestants to believe that they had been right to disobey him. Some maintained, like La Boétie, that compromises made it possible to win one’s enemies’ indulgence and to appease them for a time, but in the long term any accommodation would inevitably be seen as an irrevocable privilege. La Boétie was categorical on this point: “People are deceiving themselves,”³⁹ he declared, because according to him France would then be filled with impiety and irreligion. Moreover, he seems really not to have believed that an ecumenical council could resolve the differences. After many hesitations, he recommended beginning with “the punishment of the insolent acts that have been committed because of religion.”⁴⁰ Those who love well chastise well. After the dogmatic and intransigent positions, the time for compromise seems to have come at the end of the Memorandum, whose key word is “reform”: “But let us reform the latter [the Church] in such a way that it seems wholly new, and let all others die, and in so doing, make use of such moderation that everything be granted the Protestants that Church doctrine can allow, in order to bring them all together in a flock.”41 Specific proposals regarding offerings and relics follow, as if the question could be settled by agreement on details. La Boétie imagines what might offend the Protestants and suggests “omitting everything that serves no purpose” in Catholic churches. By doing away with images, people would be prevented from falling into idolatry, and the Protestants would no longer have any reason to complain, since “they would no longer have any reason to find paintings in public places worse than those in private homes, and the matter would be restored to its first and natural state.”⁴²

The attenuation of visible signs of the Roman Catholic religion was supposed to substitute for a temporary solution. For La Boétie, it was all a matter of patience; he did not doubt that “with time people will recognize that it is a good and holy tradition of the universal church.”⁴³ When it is a question of grieving for the dead, La Boétie prefers to give each person the right to express his pain as he wishes. Wars are a storm that will necessarily pass. The goal of the Memorandum is to “divert this tempest”⁴⁴ that has fallen on France. His message is essentially to gain time. The laity had a duty to intervene when the theologians could not agree or find a compromise. This secularization of politics is no doubt the lesson Montaigne learned; he saw in the mediator that he aspired to become a man who respects both religions, even if, he says, the question of religion had never really come up for him. Protected from possible criticisms of Christian dogma, Montaigne could not be influenced on religion. Tradition was untouchable. No one could ever maintain that he leaned, at a certain point in his life, toward the Protestant cause, even if many of his ethical and moral positions were not incompatible with the idea of freedom that was at the heart of the Huguenots’ demands. La Boétie and the Memorandum probably taught Montaigne to avoid theological debates. In his Essais, Montaigne set himself above the storm La Boétie referred to. In this sense, he may not have been wrong to see in the Wars of Religion one episode among others in the long history of humanity. Paradoxically, the Essais based themselves on history the better to reject it.

Since the reformation of the Church could proceed only from a member of the clergy, to present the ideas defended in his Memorandum La Boétie turned, naturally enough, to the bishop of Orléans, Jean de Morvilliers, who was known for his moderation and equity.⁴⁵ Morvilliers, who was also praised by Montaigne, sought a reconciliation between the two religions. As a state minister, he attended the Council of Trent but did not succeed in imposing his views regarding the reformation of Roman institutions. The reform La Boétie desired led to nothing that made it possible to satisfy the Protestants. The foundations of his Memorandum no longer rested on anything more than good intentions, and did not make it possible to imagine a genuine political participation for the Protestants. The claim that the partisans of the reformed religion no longer had any reason to persist in their error and would naturally return to the bosom of the Roman faith once the Catholic Church’s practices had been reformed had no validity in practice. La Boétie’s wish “to reform the old Church quickly and promptly, to break the order and establishment of the new [church],”46 remained a pious and chimerical wish.

In the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, it was the humanistic robin who was addressing the intelligentsia of his time, whereas in the Memorandum it was the political agent of the king’s government who, asked to set forth arguments to refute the Protestants’ positions, contested any compromise and drew up a list of proposals to reform the only conceivable church. La Boétie’s role was to present the points that could be used by the representatives of the royal party (“your company”) during the parleys at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It is risky to read this Memorandum from a later perspective (for instance, in the light of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre), because in the very early 1560s the current relevance of La Boétie’s exhortations made his arguments still legitimate. At that precise stage in the conflict (before the massacre at Vassy), La Boétie’s repressive justifications (which were based on a practical line of argument that rejected any compromise with the Huguenots in the name of the maintenance of royal authority) proved to be a genuine political option for Charles IX. Seen in retrospect, this position was, of course, doomed to fail, but in late 1561 there was no reason to foresee the armed conflicts that were to come. In the Memorandum La Boétie presents arguments that were judged to be acceptable and recommendations that were perceived as necessary by many people, including Montaigne. The historical arguments set forth in the Memorandum are not found in the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Politics is also the art of adapting one’s discourse to reality, and at that time it was not as rare to find such contradictions between theory and practice as it is today. Naturally, we think of Montaigne, who also advocates freedom in the name of a conceptual humanism, but rejects any real political change in the name of custom.

At the end of the chapter “Of friendship”—and separated by means of three asterisks (usually not reproduced in modern editions) the better to isolate it—Montaigne offers an explanation of his decision not to publish the Discourse:

Because I have found that this work has since been brought to light, and with evil intent, by those who seek to disturb and change the state of our government without worrying whether they will improve it, and because they have mixed his work up with some of their own concoctions, I have changed my mind about putting it in here. And so that the memory of the author may not be damaged in the eyes of those who could not know his opinions and actions at close hand, I beg to advise them that this subject was treated by him in his boyhood, only by way of an exercise, as a common theme hashed over in a thousand places in books. I have no doubt that he believed what he wrote, for he was so conscientious as not to lie even in jest. And I know further that if he had had the choice, he would rather have been born in Venice than in Sarlat, and with reason. But he had another maxim sovereignly imprinted in his soul, to obey and submit most religiously to the laws under which he was born. There never was a better citizen, or one more devoted to the tranquility of his country, or more hostile to the commotions and innovations of his time. He would much rather have used his ability to suppress them than to give them material that would excite them further. His mind was molded in the pattern of other ages than this.47

In this passage, Montaigne provides several keys to the reading of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. First of all, he underlines the speculative and abstract aspect of this text, which, according to him, cannot be confused with other, more time-bound writings that refer to political events since 1572, even though they seem at first to be of the same kind. Montaigne hastens to add that this “subject” does not represent a simple exercise because the young La Boétie believed in the ideas he proposed. He explains that it was his friend’s principle always to obey and to submit “most religiously” to the laws of his country. In clear contradiction to the theses advanced by La Boétie, this maxim disqualifies any political usage of the Discourse and raises the question of allegiance in its relation to servitude. Can one compose an apology for freedom and at the same time submit to the “unjust” laws of the country—Montaigne prefers the word “fatherland” (patrie)—in which one was born? Is it possible to develop a discourse on freedom and the emancipation of man while at the same time accepting what Descartes called a “provisional morality” (une morale par provision), that is, a morality that is presented as a universal in a determinate cultural space and that cannot be challenged on the political, cultural, and social level? The regulative principle Montaigne advanced is that of a balance to be found between custom and freedom. According to the author of the Essais, religious practices do not depend on human understanding: “Our faith is not of our own acquiring, it is a pure present of another’s liberality. It is not by reasoning or by our understanding that we have received our religion; it is by external authority and command.”⁴⁸

La Boétie was a fervent defender of the parlement’s power and opposed the military and political power of the governors. For example, in December 1561 his name appeared on a list of twelve councillors assigned to take various police measures, notably disarming believers in the new religion. The Bordeaux parlement was encouraged by the military successes of the governor of Guyenne, Monluc, who had replaced the duke of Montpensier and who was rightly regarded as a redoubtable military man who was always ready to do battle with the seditious elements.49 The Memorandum was written at this time, and La Boétie still believed that the Protestants could be brought into line. At the end of this year, 1561, Montaigne was sojourning in the capital. In June 1562, on his own initiative, he affirmed his Catholic faith before the parlement of Paris. He fully shared the views of the members of the Bordeaux parlement who were supporting the Catholic repression of the Protestants. For instance, like La Boétie, he was opposed to any kind of religious tolerance, because he had a hard time understanding how two religions could coexist in the same country. This position reflected the point of view of most of the members of the Bordeaux parlement. Montaigne and La Boétie were defending an ideological position that was related to a form of robin corporatism. We find this rather uncompromising—even dogmatic—vision of the political and religious order in the chapter “It is folly to measure the true and false by our own capacity” (I: 27):

Now what seems to me to bring as much disorder into our consciences as anything, in these religious troubles that we are in, is this partial surrender of their beliefs by Catholics. It seems to them that they are being very moderate and understanding when they yield to their opponents some of the articles in dispute. But, besides the fact that they do not see what an advantage it is to a man charging you for you to begin to give ground and withdraw, and how much that encourages him to pursue his point, those articles which they select as the most trivial are sometimes very important. We must either submit completely to the authority of our ecclesiastical government or do without it completely. It is not for us to decide what portion of obedience we owe it.⁵⁰

For Montaigne, there was no intermediary position. La Boétie recommended moderation in 1561, but not concession. In chapter I: 27 of the Essais we see a clarification, and even a rectification intended to show Montaigne’s difference from La Boétie.⁵¹ Obviously, in 1580 the civil wars had taught Montaigne that the January edict—and any policy of moderation in general—had changed nothing at all in the troubles that were raging in France. Montaigne never had any intention of publishing this Memorandum, which he considered not only outmoded but also counterproductive when it was a question of leading such a divided country. History had shown that La Boétie was wrong, and it was better for Montaigne to distinguish himself from a friend whose past choices were now difficult to explain. Montaigne had the advantage of having experienced the civil wars, and in 1580 he was encouraged to transform into a law what had been only an idea in 1561. When Montaigne, sure of himself, declares that compromise merely invigorates adversaries who are encouraged by this show of weakness to redouble their demands in order to obtain even more concessions, he knows what he is talking about. In retrospect, it is easy for him to judge the errors committed by those who believed in appeasement. It is possible to be right on the level of ideas and wrong on the level of action.

At first, Montaigne declared that he wanted to publish this Memorandum someday. Thus in 1580 he writes that La Boétie’s “memoranda” “will find their place elsewhere.” However, after 1588 he adds a circumstantial “perhaps” that says a great deal about his disappointment. The more Montaigne progressed in his own political career, the more he doubted the interest of the Memorandum. La Boétie’s political thought slowly disappeared from the Essais, which became, from one edition to the next, much more personal. It is hard to see how the Discourse, and still less the Memorandum, could have found their place in the Essais. To include them would have been to expose himself to reproaches for a burdensome friendship with La Boétie, who had earlier advocated positions that were so contradictory with regard to tolerance and freedom that it had become complicated to explain them in view of recent political developments. The Protestant appropriation of the Discourse opened Montaigne’s eyes; he ended up worrying, rightly, about the interpretation that might be given to this text.

If he had doubts about the utility of publishing the Discourse, a rereading of the Memorandum almost twenty years later made Montaigne aware of the fragility of the arguments given. La Boétie’s proposals were, moreover, of very short duration because Catholic theologians refused to prejudge the decisions of the Council of Trent. The conciliatory policy of L’Hospital and the concessions proposed by La Boétie were all rejected by the Catholic Church. In the Memorandum, La Boétie sets himself up as a theologian, which might have shocked Montaigne, who was very careful not to fall into this trap himself. The decrees of the Council of Trent having rejected the compromises presented in the Memorandum, Montaigne had to leave himself a way out as he prepared for a journey to Rome that might make this text even more explosive. He therefore chose to clarify at least his position, while at the same time attributing the existence and paternity of the Memorandum to La Boétie. It was not a philosophical text like the Discourse, and he had reason to fear that the echo of this now politically outmoded memorandum might harm his own political ambitions. In politics, to deal with a problem it is often better to confront it directly. Praising these juvenilia was not the same thing as publishing them, and it was in deciding not to publish the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude that Montaigne showed his political aspirations and began to distance himself from a friendship that had become awkward. In 1580, he was no longer able to hush up a friendship regarding which he had left many written traces thanks to his publication of La Boétie’s works eight years earlier.

Voluntary Servitude and Allegiance

In the Discourse, La Boétie analyzes the paradox of voluntary servitude. In his view, servitude and allegiance illustrate the two sides of political obligation and obedience. Although servitude was widely used in the Renaissance, allégeance appeared in French only at the end of the seventeenth century (in 1669, to be precise) with the strengthening of monarchical power during the reign of Louis XIV. The French term comes from the English “allegiance,” which was popularized after the restoration of the monarchy in England at the time of the civil wars (1642–51). If allegiance is always voluntary, since it is based on an oath or vow, servitude, at least as La Boétie defines it, can be conceived only as an authoritarian imposition. The expression “voluntary servitude” is thus paradoxical in the context of the late sixteenth century. Montaigne frequently uses the word “obedience” (obéissance) to testify to this obligation of the lord or the public servant toward the monarch or toward the government in general. He refers to “obedience to the public reason”52 and reminds the reader on several occasions that royal authority demands fidelity and obedience. He was never to change his mind about this fundamental principle, making mistakes in his political itinerary without departing from this rule that he had imposed on himself during his parlementary period.

It is useful to see how the idea of voluntary servitude is theorized with respect to allegiance on the basis of La Boétie’s text in the Essais.⁵³ It is through this comparison—which is far from being an idiosyncrasy peculiar to Montaigne—that the two notions are defined in a structural opposition. The theoretical articulation between allegiance (obedience) and voluntary servitude encourages us to make an essential distinction between the idea of liberty and “the practices of liberty” in the liberal ideology of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This liberal ideology, which separates the ideal of liberty from the acceptable practices of that liberty in the light of a political necessity, later found its best theoretician and spokesman in John Locke. In 1580, Montaigne, as a noble, conceived his political existence only in a relationship of allegiance, which he dissociates from the robin ideal by advocating individual freedom in a universal and atemporal way, an ideal that he had shared with La Boétie when he was a member of the parlement. After 1588, that is, after he had abandoned any political ambitions, he returned to this freedom of thought, which for posterity made him an archetype of modernity.

Allegiance constitutes the “other maxim sovereignly imprinted on his soul” that Montaigne mentions in connection with La Boétie. This deep structure does not need to be defined, because it is part of a natural form that is itself determined by custom and religion. According to La Boétie, servitude is of a different nature, because it results from a political accident: “What evil chance has so denatured man that he, the only creature really born to be free, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it?”54 The “evil chance” designates a social accident whose effects are steadily amplified, to the point that man has forgotten the founding event and the history of his submission. La Boétie proposes to recall what has been forgotten and reintegrate it into the collective political memory.⁵⁵ Here we could refer to Pierre Clastres’s analyses of silent peoples or societies without a history,⁵⁶ or establish a link between the institution of a false consciousness and the ideological development of voluntary servitude. As La Boétie emphasizes, the love of servitude was gradually substituted for the desire for liberty, and obedience was then transformed into custom. Law itself can be considered a reification and codification of customs over time.⁵⁷

As in La Boétie’s writings, the notion of people remains rather vague in Montaigne’s Essais. This word is often linked to custom and used to designate cultures as different as the Native Americans of the New World, the Athenian or Roman people, or the French society of the sixteenth century. On the whole, it can be said that Montaigne—like almost all his contemporaries—distrusted the common people, who were often associated with social disorder, and even with arbitrary power and tyranny.⁵⁸ The masses constituted an unpredictable, violent, irrational, and credulous force. Thus Montaigne speaks of “the common run of men today, ignorant, stupid and asleep, base, servile, full of fever and fear, unstable, and continually tossed about by the tempest of the diverse passions that drive them to and fro.”⁵⁹ Montaigne attenuated this description by eliminating on the Bordeaux Copy the adjectives “ignorant,” “asleep,” and “full of fever and fear.” He had a less negative conception of the people after 1588—when he had abandoned all pretense to participate in the public life of his time—but he did not really change his views. Whether he is referring to the danger of “the people, unable to bear such varied changes of fortune,”⁶⁰ “the hatred of the people,”⁶¹ the “license and sedition of the people,”⁶² or simply the naïveté of “the people, stunned and dazed,”⁶³ Montaigne’s idea of the people is usually negative, with the exception of the Roman people, who, in his view, always showed good sense when faced with the corruption and abuses of Rome’s emperors.

The salt-tax revolt in Bordeaux in 1548 did not help produce a positive image of these uncontrollable popular uprisings. Montaigne found it difficult to imagine a form of government that would give even limited power to the populace. According to him “Nations brought up to liberty and to ruling themselves consider any other form of government monstrous and contrary to nature.”64 By nature, “popular opinion is wrong”⁶⁵ most of the time, and we must be wary of those who try to seduce a populace that Montaigne considers childish and unreasonable. It is easy to manipulate the people, and Montaigne reports that in his time he has “seen wonder in the undiscerning and prodigious ease with which peoples let their belief and hope be led and manipulated in whatever way has pleased and served their leaders, passing over a hundred mistakes one on top of the other, passing over phantasms and dreams.”⁶⁶ The simple observation of the practices of power—Huguenot or Catholic—showed him that religious leaders made use of the populace to advance their personal political ambitions. Populism leads to anarchy; and Montaigne was always in favor of order. The turmoil and disorder of civil wars put in question the social bond between people; on this point, Montaigne remains intransigent.

The populace exists in order to obey those who command: “Happy the people who do what they are commanded better than those who command, without tormenting themselves about the reasons, who let themselves roll relaxedly with the rolling of the heavens. Obedience is not pure or tranquil in a man who reasons and argues.”⁶⁷ The Wars of Religion generated in Montaigne a genuine fear of popular excesses: “The murders in victories are usually done by the mob and the baggage officers. And what causes so many unheard-of cruelties is wars in which the people take part is that that beastly rabble tries to be warlike and brave by ripping up a body at their feet and bloodying themselves up to their elbows, having no sense of any other kind of valor.”⁶⁸ The civil wars allowed him to see on a daily basis the abuses committed by a populace left to its own devices, the same populace that La Boétie had already pointed to in his Memorandum on the January edict, because it “is becoming accustomed to irreverence toward the magistrate, and with time learns to willingly disobey and allow itself to be led to the bait of liberty, or rather license, which is the sweetest and most delicious poison in the world.”⁶⁹ The common people’s demands often lack good sense. In the same spirit, Montaigne observes that “peoples are apt to assume about kings, as we do about our servants, that they should take care to prepare for us in abundance all we need, but that they should not touch it all for their own part.⁷⁰ And yet, on several occasions in the Essais, he declares that he has “felt compassion for the poor people who were taken in by these follies.”⁷¹ In fact, in this case he speaks mainly of peasants, for whom he feels a profound respect that is essentially connected to the land and to tradition. Montaigne’s conception of the people hardly changed between 1560 and 1590. These multiple declarations that deny the common people any possibility of action have led some to tax Montaigne for being conservative, but it would be anachronistic to accuse him of being a reactionary when we know that the great majority of political theorists of the Renaissance shared this very negative view of a populace left to itself.iv

The discourse on custom replaces the discourse on liberty and transforms it into an ineluctable law. We note that in the 1580 edition of the Essais Montaigne comes back to this conception of custom in the service of a servitude to which we become accustomed: “She [custom] establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the foothold of her authority; but having by this mild and humble beginning settled and planted it with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the liberty of even raising our eyes.”⁷² Servitude is merely a logical consequence of the clientele system in which Montaigne is deeply involved. But after 1585, he no longer sees himself in this implacable social logic and declares that he is “mortally avoiding servitude and obligation.”⁷³ He wonders about his past state of dependency and describes his youth this way: “I was, I think, better fitted to live on another man’s fortune, if that could be done without obligation and servitude.”⁷⁴ He notes elsewhere that on the political and sociological level, “This was a very useful way of attracting men to obedience by honor and ambition.”⁷⁵ This reflection on voluntary servitude examined in the light of his own political experience led to his distancing himself from the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude and to the virtual disappearance of La Boétie in the posthumous edition of the Essais published in 1595.

Montaigne’s political dependence on the monarch and the influential lords of Guyenne and Gascony—particularly the Foix-Gurson family—dated from the early 1570s and lasted until 1588, that is, until after his second term as mayor of Bordeaux (1583–85) and his imprisonment in Paris in July 1588. Montaigne was not always “free” with regard to the established government. He does not deny the principle of allegiance to royal authority, but after 1588 he draws an important distinction between the king’s function and his person: “We owe subjection and obedience equally to all kings, for that concerns their office: but we do not owe esteem, any more than affection, except to their virtue.”76 Here a slight difference is discerned between social allegiance and political allegiance—which is in part founded on custom—and individual freedom. Montaigne understands servitude as a political necessity indispensable for the proper functioning of society, but at the same time he demands the right to freely exercise his judgment. He got out of this problematic distinction by separating the public from the private and by transferring to the monarch or to any other recognized authority his freedom of action for everything having to do with the public sphere while preserving his personal judgment in the private domain.^v After 1585, the Essais put the spotlight more and more on the private man and remained silent about the mayor and the governor of Bordeaux, or about the negotiator between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. Montaigne distanced himself from the royal government and separated in his own way the king’s two bodies. Having withdrawn from any political action, he adopted the analyses of Duplessis-Mornay and the “Monarchomachs”vi on the difference between a legitimate monarch and the tyrant he could become in the concrete exercise of power.

Influenced by the reflections of the Monarchomachs on royal absolutism, Montaigne also inquired into the bond between the king and his subjects. Likewise, La Boétie had tried to imagine the role of the emancipated people in this redistribution of power: the common people allows itself to be enslaved by the simple fact that it does not choose to be free. Wanting to be free would already represent a kind of freedom. This conception of liberty resembles more freedom of conscience (a term redefined by the religious practices of the time) than genuine freedom of action, and we can understand how the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude could logically be appropriated by the Huguenots, who needed first of all to establish this abstract form of freedom before they could move on to the following stage of individual resistance and political action. As people had been fond of pointing out since the 1570s, what was the use of freedom of thought without its expression and concrete application on the political level? In The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, La Boétie does not adopt the Monarchomachs’ argument that freedom of conscience cannot exist without freedom of worship. However, that is what allowed his treatise to come down to posterity. This precise question of religious practices was what had caused the political failure of the Memorandum.

We see looming in La Boétie—and consequently in Montaigne—the cornerstone of modern liberalism: individual freedom detached from any political or social action. La Boétie never recommends action (an uprising, for instance) against servitude, and on this essential point he agrees with Luther’s position in his famous text on Christian freedom and still more in his response to the peasants who were demanding that this “freedom in people’s heads” be given a concrete application in everyday life.⁷⁷ La Boétie is categorical on this issue: for the common people it is a question “not of freeing [itself] but only wanting to do it.”⁷⁸ Freedom amounts to a question of will. That is a rather extraordinary distinction, because it dissociates theory from practice. La Boétie explains what he means by liberty and defines the limits of any action against the master or the tyrant: “I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”⁷⁹ The apology for inaction raises a moral problem: should one keep silent or revolt—with words, but also with weapons—against tyranny? Does taking this position put in question the oath of allegiance advocated by Montaigne between 1570 and 1588? These are questions that complicated Montaigne’s reflections on servitude and kept him from publishing La Boétie’s text after 1572.

Montaigne reflects on the bond between patron and client, master and slave. He could have recalled the beginning of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, where La Boétie excludes any enduring social relationship between two beings: “it is a great misfortune to be at the beck and call of one master, for it is impossible to be sure that he is going to be kind, since it is always in his power to be cruel whenever he pleases.”80 Does allegiance have to be independent of the kindness of the master or the king when the prince’s magnanimity is essentially contractual (insofar as each party benefits from the allegiance and the servitude)? To tell the truth, such a remark on the consequences of servitude is of little use for understanding what leads people to give up part of their freedom to attain a stable material position within a social and political network where corruption and exploitation can never be excluded. Allegiance presupposes an expectation and an anticipated profit, but nothing is ever certain. On this point, the first part of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is imbued with a disconcerting idealism. However, the farther we advance in this text, the more La Boétie’s observations evince a political realism that greatly influenced Montaigne.

It was precisely the problematic relation between servitude (a term that is too abstract and idealized) and allegiance (a term that implies a structure of reciprocal obligations and mutual benefits) that led Montaigne to distinguish two forms of liberty: one theoretical (which he often expressed qua private individual—Michel de Montaigne—master of his judgment), and the other more practical, which corresponds to the public man (the mayor or the negotiator) in a larger framework defined by power relationships, obligations, and allegiances that allow the subject to exist socially. All people have their individual freedom in the private sphere; this remark proceeds from a qualitative approach. But political or public liberty depends on the quantitative nature of the exchange between two beings. These two notions of liberty seem incompatible in Montaigne.

The solution recommended by La Boétie to emancipate people from their “voluntary servitude” is not to call for the organization or assembly of individuals within a group or a class; it does not lead to the formation of a rebellious collectivity. On the contrary, he gives priority to the development of a form of friendship between the master and the subordinate. This idea of a coalescent friendship was taken up again by Montaigne; it proceeds by the mutual absorption of one friend into the other, not by a union or a regrouping of one with the other. The distinction is subtle, but because this liberty “has revealed in every possible manner her intention, not so much to associate us as to make us one organic whole,” La Boétie writes, “there can be no further doubt that we are all naturally free, inasmuch as we are all comrades. Accordingly it should not enter the mind of anyone that nature has placed some of us in slavery, since she has actually created us all in one likeness.”81

La Boétie rapidly perceived that he had ventured onto the abstract terrain of philosophical discourse and sophisms. From that point on, his Discourse takes on a historical dimension and is more anchored in the political reality of his time: “Therefore it is fruitless to argue whether or not liberty is natural, since none can be held in slavery without being wronged.”⁸² Then he takes an interest in the problem of false consciousness of oneself and of the world, that is, ideology. Montaigne accepts this major contribution of the Discourse and the essential difference between the desire for freedom and the necessity of political allegiance thanks to respect for laws that are always conceived, as Montaigne often reminds us, by those who exercise power. Being conscious of abuses of the judicial system does not, however, authorize one to take up arms. This logical contradiction between political theory and political practice—an opposition inherent in Montaigne’s text—has often troubled the reception of the Essais and caused many commentators to say that Montaigne’s political ideas were too conformist.

The empire of custom is opposed to the growing role given to reason. This foundation of Montaigne’s thought is already clearly expressed by La Boétie, who claims that “form defines content and that the human being retains the form given him by his upbringing.”⁸³ In a profoundly Montaigne-like passage, La Boétie even goes so far as to assert that custom alone is responsible for political organization (and thus for the voluntary servitude he has just described) in human societies: “All those things to which he is trained and accustomed seem natural to man…. Thus custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude.”⁸⁴ Montaigne appropriated this argument by asserting that one cannot rid oneself of custom in order to conceive new political or religious systems, and that it is impossible to live outside the culture we have inherited. Given that custom is the main cause of servitude, La Boétie’s “misfortune” is logically transformed into a necessity, because custom, far from being a simple accident of history, is on the contrary a sign of continuity.

Should we infer from this that servitude, like ideology, is inevitable? Because humans are social animals, the solution Montaigne proposes consists in being aware—and only aware, without wishing for all that to change society or the world—of his human condition. It is not yet a question of proposing a social contract, in Rousseau’s sense of the term, but simply of recognizing the material and historical situation of humans through the obligatory acceptance of a morality, for lack of something better. One is born Catholic and French, as Montaigne reminds his reader; that is a form of voluntary servitude that is obligatory and inevitable, insofar as religion and politics result from custom. Custom is necessarily voluntary because it is imposed on everyone in the same way. We can only embrace it. We might as well dissociate freedom of thought from submission to the rules and laws that make us social beings. Thus it is logical that freedom is a form of voluntary servitude for La Boétie and Montaigne. It does not result from a metaphysics, but from a sociology, since its basis is political and goes beyond personal choices. That is why allegiance to rules established by others is not incompatible with freedom in principle. To be free is to retain the possibility of emancipation, while at the same time conforming to the laws that force us into servitude. For La Boétie, this “possible freedom” takes the place of freedom, as it does for Montaigne, and it anticipates in many ways John Locke’s theses on individual freedom.

For La Boétie, the consequence of voluntary servitude is not so much the giving up of each individual’s free choice as it is the possible manifestation of tyranny. After all, voluntary servitude does not prevent society from functioning; tyranny, on the contrary, represents the unacceptable degree of a necessary evil. For La Boétie, it is the limit that must not be passed in the practice of power. Once this threshold has been crossed, the contract that binds the prince to the people is necessarily broken. Tyranny transforms the power of a single person over all others insofar as the individual can no longer draw any benefit from his subjection; it challenges the very idea of voluntary servitude (or, more precisely, of allegiance). This observation raises the question of armed uprising in the Protestant texts of the 1570s, notably in Duplessis-Mornay’s Vindiciae contra tyrannos. In 1548, the probable date of the composition of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude—at least in its first version—La Boétie could not imagine the bloody events of the first civil wars. But twenty years later, when he was thinking about publishing La Boétie’s text, Montaigne was no longer able to ignore the different reading that could be given the text in the light of the recent history of the religious conflict in France.

Those who had recuperated La Boétie’s Discourse in the 1570s emphasized a theory of political representation based on magistrates—limited in number—whose function was supposed to have been to serve as a counterpower to the sovereign. These elect of God are in a way the guarantors of human freedom, and their role consists in opposing any form of submission. La Boétie remarks that “there are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection.”85 We understand how Simon Goulart, Duplessis-Mornay, and other thinkers close to the Huguenots were able to see in these “few,” the magistrates “possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit,” the elect of God who are not satisfied, “like the brutish mass,” to follow those who lead them into a state of voluntary servitude. These chosen individuals not only have (and we find here one of Montaigne’s favorite expressions) “a well-made head,” but one that is “also well-polished by study.”86 According to La Boétie, there are individuals who are born to lead others. Montaigne was strongly influenced by this analysis of the political elite, although he took care to separate the private from the public and to offer a theory of political power based on obligatory allegiance. This new political authority, which is associated with a form of conservatism, is no longer completely equivalent to voluntary servitude as defined by La Boétie, because servitude exists through a false consciousness of oneself, which is no longer the case in Montaigne—at least after 1588. Montaigne emphasizes the necessity of government and establishes a difference with allegiance, the particular form of servitude based on the principle of unconditional respect for authority and the laws—even if they run counter to one’s personal beliefs.

La Boétie had understood that political power is not founded solely on the prince or the tyrant, but also on a structural organization in the form of a pyramid composed of intermediaries who serve to implement the policies of those who are at the apex. As he writes, there are always four or five men who allow the tyrant to assert his authority, and then five or six hundred others who keep the four or five in place, and six thousand more who perpetuate the power of the six hundred, “upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances.”⁸⁷ This analysis of tyranny was not likely, of course, to be adopted by his Protestant readers, perhaps because it reminded them a little too much of the form of government that their leaders were advocating at that time. It could be claimed that the “magistrates” imagined by Duplessis-Mornay and other Huguenot theorists correspond exactly to this intermediate stratum of power whose function is to apply tyrannically the prince’s policy. For La Boétie, the structure of government greatly exceeds the question of tyranny; it applies to every form of government. If this fundamental organization of power is accepted, whether it is tyrannical or not, the distinction between servitude and allegiance no longer functions very well. Montaigne seems to have understood the difficulty involved in such a generalization of power and preferred to dissociate his judgment regarding the particular forms of government from his critical reflection on power in general.

In any event, servitude and obedience cannot be confused. On several occasions in the Discourse La Boétie draws a distinction between these two terms: “What an unfortunate vice it is to see an endless multitude of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility, not ruled, but tyrannized.”⁸⁸ Obeying is a matter of choice—one obeys the laws of his country—and results from an allegiance, whereas serving testifies to a false consciousness, a situation perceived as a matter of fact. It is this consciousness that Montaigne was later to explore in his Essais, in an introspection that allowed him to reinterpret La Boétie’s text in the light of his own political experiences, both positive and negative. In a fundamental passage in the Essais, he associates consciousness and education and even seems to suggest that (internal) study leads to a better evaluation of one’s own status in a political system: “what it is to know and not to know, and what must be the aim of study; what are valor, temperance, and justice; what the difference is between ambition and avarice, servitude and submission, license and liberty.”89 How should the distinction between servitude and subjection be understood? Is there a genuine difference on the practical level between serving and obeying? This consciousness may be only the product of a bourgeois mentality that locates liberty at the individual and not the collective level.

Montaigne never separates the aspiration to liberty from the obligation to obey, which must be, according to him, “simple and naive”: “We are so eager to get out from under command, under some pretext, and to usurp mastery; each man aspires so naturally to liberty and authority, that to a superior no useful quality in those who serve him should be so dear as their natural and simple obedience.”⁹⁰ This natural subjection is unavoidable for those who have made a vow of allegiance. But the question that remains is whether the duty of allegiance is applicable to all subjects. Toward the end of his life Montaigne pondered this fundamental point regarding submission to political authority: “On the other hand, however, one might also consider that such constrained obedience belongs only to precise and stated commands,”⁹¹ mentioning in this connection a servitude whose framework has been set in advance, through a contract, a promise that has to be respected by both parties. If the contract is broken, the individual can put an end to his subjection and thus reclaim a kind of liberty.

The Politics of a Friendship

The friendship between La Boétie and Montaigne expresses the humanist ideal and sublimates the bond that connected the author of the Essais to his late friend. This poetic vision of the friendship between Montaigne and La Boétie has too often been presented as a model of fraternity and altruism.92 This forgets that, in the Renaissance, friendship remained above all a topos. Therefore we have to avoid idealizing the feeling of affection and closeness that then had a precise literary function and well-defined rules of expression.⁹³ The point of departure for the discourse on friendship is the tripartite distinction presented in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, that is, friendship in relation to utility, pleasure, and virtue. For Aristotle, only friendship in relation to perfect virtue is a true friendship. Utility is relegated to a form of false friendship. On the basis of this Aristotelian distinction, there was a codified language of friendship in the sixteenth century. As a discourse, friendship does not need to be concretely embodied in reality; it is shaped and related in accord with the rules of rhetoric and on the basis of the ethical premises elaborated by Aristotle. It is an exercise for men of letters that leads to a rapprochement with Antiquity and its universal values. In the Renaissance, friendship was often more ideal than lived, at least in its literary representation.

Friendship fortifies the individual by the properties that are attributed to it: transcendence of history and reference to a common fund of humanity and universal harmony, as if friendship defined man’s essence. Humanism puts friendship on a pedestal, because it symbolizes the most human of feelings. That said, every rule has its exceptions that are so many counterexamples reminding us that man is above all a political animal. Friendship also refers to more futile and worldly concerns that are connected with career expectations or other, more material, benefits. Its utility rapidly spread to all domains of discourse in the Renaissance. This was the hidden side of friendship. Montaigne begins the third book of the Essais with the theme of denatured and corrupted values. In the chapter “Of the useful and the honorable,” (III: 1) he notes the decline of noble values marked by honorability and the rise of a bourgeois, mercantile ideology symbolized by utility. In short, friendship gradually leaves the domain of ethics and is transformed into sociability, which then confers political implications on it.

In Montaigne, the bond of friendship (here we put “bond” in the singular) corresponds to a particular, unique experience that structures the writing of the Essais by its presence or its absence. A man (La Boétie) and a text (the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude) define friendship. The two parts (the individual and the book) are inseparable. Friendship always has a face corresponding to a unique experience during a period of social and religious turmoil. That is why it has a political significance that cannot be reduced to a simple topos. The bond of friendship can be conceived only in its sociological and historical context. The break with the Aristotelian model of friendship as well as the transformation—certainly unconscious—of utility into a productive value make the discourse on friendship more functional in Montaigne’s work. In this sense the bond of friendship moves away from ethical discourse and approaches political discourse. Its temporality is irremediably modified.

In the Essais, Montaigne presents several judgments and commentaries on friendship. Let us begin with the essential distinction between friendship and friendships: “For the rest, what we ordinarily call friends and friendships are nothing but acquaintanceships and familiarities formed by some chance or convenience, by means of which our souls are bound to each other. In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.”94 The bond of friendship Montaigne is talking about is invisible; it unites and welds together two beings in order to fuse them and leaves no remaining joint that would be the trace of a division between them. The two beings, united in a single discourse, become indissociable; two particular existences are transformed into a universal category. The very name of the friend no longer needs to be mentioned, because it finds its continuation in the name of the author who makes it live or relive in him. That is how Estienne de La Boétie is revived in the Essais. The deceased friend recovers a social and political existence thanks to Montaigne, who declares on two occasions—after seven years (1570) and seventeen years (1580)—that he wants to restore and disseminate his forgotten or deformed political message.

Friendship is also the expression of a sociability. To make friends, one must be convivial, affable, and practiqueur, in the sense that this word was given in Montaigne’s time. Practique (“practice”) implies artifice, manipulation, intrigue, the deformation of discourse, and the betrayal of promises.95 In the name of political efficacy, practique brings Machiavellian considerations into personal decisions. These under-the-counter political schemes became the norm in the late Renaissance, and they force us to take them into account, even when we are talking about friendship. The particular circumstances of the meeting between Montaigne and La Boétie prove this. Montaigne was a public man used to deliberations with the crowd. Friendship sometimes results from a form of worldliness and, as he himself says, “public business” does not displease someone who, like him, readily allows himself to be “led by the general way of the world.”⁹⁶ Montaigne was clearly ill at ease in drawing rooms, but he nonetheless always found a way to the court and adjusted perfectly to the company of men who occupied powerful positions. However, we must not confuse the public roles he played with his private being. On this point, the Essais claim to be a book different from the others, because its author dreams of painting himself and stripping himself naked, showing himself to his readers in all transparency.

In the Essais, Montaigne sketches a not very flattering picture of his aptitude for sociability and draws up an inventory of his faults: “Idle. Cool in the duties of friendship and kinship, and in public duties. Too self-centered.”⁹⁷ This distressing observation that makes him a bad friend, a bad father, a bad husband, and a bad mayor of Bordeaux is, of course, a late posture whose goal is to foreground an egoism and detachment—a sort of literary dilettantism or nonchalance—that are transformed into a virtue in the course of the editions of the Essais. His friendship with La Boétie is all the more remarkable because this feeling is almost foreign to him. It is a bond that goes against his nature. How can he have experienced such a perfect friendship when his character is so little inclined to social and familial obligations? It is not easy to count Montaigne among one’s friends; that, at least, is the message that the author of the Essais likes to convey after 1588. It is also the image of him that has come down to us: an individual retired to his château who, reaching the supreme stage of wisdom, is supposed to have isolated himself in his tower in order to distance himself the better to think about man, society, and the world. Without a friend, friendship could belong only to the past of a life of which only a book remained, consubstantial with its author. So what had La Boétie become? Was he still in Montaigne, without the seam being visible? What tangible traces of this friendship, ordinarily so absent in the Essais, are to be found in the Bordeaux Copy?

According to Montaigne, friendship—in the materiality of the book—is above all an empty space surrounded by “grotesques,” the fantastic decorations that frame a central theme. The association between painting and friendship is revealing because it symbolizes the other side of the self-portrait, that is, the depiction of the absent other who, thanks to the consubstantiality between author and book advocated by Montaigne, is systematically associated with the Essais. Friendship is also the writing (and the writings) of the other constructing the space of a self that remains at the stage of a project and is conceived only as in progress. This self in permanent construction on the basis of elements taken from something else (the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, for instance) also bears the indelible marks of a past that is visible in the earlier editions (1580, 1582, 1588) and establishes itself as the only material proof of the friendship. The friendship represents a past without memory at the moment of the rewriting, and whose “grotesques” (the book of the Essais) figure the only possible recollection. In Montaigne, friendship constitutes a frame, a series of rather vague contours that delimit the boundary of a writing that exists only as a preliminary sketch and, like every preliminary sketch, is destined to disappear. Imitating Montaigne’s book, friendship is being tried out. The form has become substance: it is the definition Montaigne gives of both the Essais and friendship.

Friendship constitutes a fabric that is constantly being woven, but also, inevitably, unraveled. The writing of friendship thus carries out an undermining work in the Essais. The beginning of the chapter “Of friendship” (I: 28) describes the technique used by painters that consists in first putting a composition in the center of a wall before filling the empty parts with “grotesques”:

As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the best spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space all around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental?98

Filling up the void takes the measure of the subject represented and defines it. In the case of the picture of La Boétie, one wonders, however, where the center is, because there remain only the “grotesques” of the painter Montaigne. The announced central composition is fragmented and relegated to the periphery of the book. The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude has been removed from its frame. The monstrous, deceased body Montaigne presented has been dismembered and scattered; there remain only vague allusions and obscure references to La Boétie and to the works of his youth. In the Essais we find very strange traces of a vanished friendship.

Similarly, the introduction to what was supposed to be the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude now gives way to lines directly and impudently addressed to a woman. The beginning of the chapter titled “Twenty-nine sonnets of Etienne de la Boétie” (I: 29) and dedicated “To Madame de Grammont, Comtesse de Guissen,” accords an important place to this woman, better known as “la Belle Corisande.” The chapter as a whole, reworked to approach this friend—political patroness—announces the new stake of a redefined friendship. Montaigne says he will one day whisper in her ear licentious verses by a La Boétie “in his greenest youth, when he was inflamed by a fine and noble ardor.”99 For La Boétie, marital coolness, for Montaigne, the warmth of lusty whispers in the ear and playful, irregular poetry: “The others were written later, for his wife, when he was suing for her hand, and they already smack of a certain marital coolness. And I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.”¹⁰⁰ La Boétie gives Montaigne the opportunity to rediscover his first relations with women,^vii which he had declared were over: the friend allows him not only to approach high state officials such as Lansac, Mesmes, and Foix, but also the women that are so present in the Essais.¹⁰¹

The history of the friendship between La Boétie and Montaigne is unverifiable, and we do not know the exact circumstances or the motives for the redaction of the Discourse, but that did not prevent Montaigne from disseminating La Boétie’s words without worrying about the interpretations that might hand him over to a different political camp. Montaigne wants to be his friend’s apostle. The term “apostle” corresponds quite well to the position he adopts, for he is La Boétie’s first and only messenger, the only one who disseminated his speech and his writings. We can imagine Montaigne’s surprise when he discovered that the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was serving the cause of Protestantism, that false religion with its false prophets. The presentation of the prophet La Boétie (the visionary of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude) is strengthened by an impressive number of Christian references in the “story of La Boétie” recounted in the chapter “Of friendship,” and in the famous letter on his death. Montaigne thus takes up in La Boétie’s writings, which he sees as veritable “relics,”102 a political question that is discussed in the Discourse as well.

When La Boétie asked Montaigne to “play the same role” and insisted on being given a “place,” Montaigne appeared rather reserved, even haughty. He did not seem to understand the importance of this place and remained almost indifferent to his friend’s injunctions. We recall that La Boétie begged Montaigne in vain: “My brother, my brother, are you refusing me a place, then?”¹⁰³ Montaigne took care not to reply to this awkward question that foreshadowed the difficulties he felt later on in granting a place in the Essais to La Boétie, whose political writings were ultimately never of any use to him. As we have seen, the problem of the place of friendship in the Essais is presented clearly in Montaigne’s first literary document, namely, the famous letter on La Boétie’s death. It is characteristic in this regard that what was supposed to constitute the heart of the first book of the Essais (chapter 29 presenting La Boétie’s Discourse or his Sonnets) does not exist as such in the first edition printed by Simon Millanges in 1580, since the chapter titled “Twenty-nine sonnets of Etienne de La Boétie, To Madame de Grammont comtesse de Guissen” is incorrectly numbered. This chapter is actually the twenty-eighth and not the twenty-ninth. We might think this is a printing error, but the disappearance of La Boétie at the heart of the first book of the Essais was systematically repeated in the editions of 1582 and 1588 as well as in the Bordeaux Copy, without Montaigne noticing it—or perhaps he knew it. On the material level of the book, it is thus impossible to say that La Boétie occupies the physical heart of the first book of the Essais.¹⁰⁴

Why was Montaigne so ill at ease with regard to this friend who wanted to become his brother? Friendship is chosen, whereas blood ties are transmitted. Can a brother be a friend? Montaigne’s family does not offer the best example of this. We know about the religious dissensions between Montaigne and his brother, Thomas de Beauregard, and his sister, Jeanne de Lestonnac, both of whom had adhered to Protestantism. We also recall Montaigne’s commentary on blood ties, which he distinguishes from perfect friendship. He carefully avoids answering the awkward question La Boétie asks and finds it difficult to grant a place to the friend (but not to friendship) in the Essais. He does not understand this vehement desire to find a place to give form to the friendship. As he sees it, the bond of friendship remains diffuse and scattered, because friendship always exists elsewhere, outside all space. A chimerical desire, it is transformed into a mental object that no longer claims a fixed place and does not occupy the center of Montaigne’s thought. Friendship henceforth escapes any kind of commerce (friendship is one of the three “commerces” defined by Montaigne); to refuse a place for the intercourse of friendship is in a way to give it the possibility of existing ideally. Desire is enjoyment, but the materialization of this desire—the need to carry out an exchange and to engage in this commerce—would be the beginning of the end of the friendship. A distance between oneself and the friend must always be maintained; that is the secret of perfect friendship, and on this point Montaigne often recommends that a physical distance be established between oneself and the object of desire. He himself practiced this art of separation and distancing in the domain of politics, both in the parlement and, later on, as the mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne definitely found it difficult to speak about friendship in his Essais—just as he did not succeed in finding a stable place for La Boétie. The explanation may have to do with the fact that a place devoted to the commerce of friendship does not really exist in the Essais. Even in the chapter titled “Of friendship,” Montaigne does not succeed in “establishing a firmer and more lasting pact,”105 and seems to accept the inevitable truth: “in friendship there are no dealings or business except with itself.”¹⁰⁶ The essayist seems to resign himself to the idea of a nonplace for friendship, or at least to accept the fact that friendship will always correspond to an impossible commerce, without a space of its own. In the chapter “Of three kinds of association” (“De trois commerces”), Montaigne admits that “the object of this association [commerce] is simply intimacy, fellowship, and conversation.”¹⁰⁷ To give is to please oneself, in accord with the logic of “the loser wins.” By borrowing La Boétie’s texts and sending them to the great figures of the kingdom, Montaigne sought to create his own space. Like an intermediary or interpreter, the messenger rises to the level of the message, the apostle of the loftiness of the Word. The role that Montaigne gives himself in the diffusion of La Boétie’s works in 1571 prepared him for his future Essais, because his friend’s works were supposed to occupy a central place in the first edition of the Essais in 1580. That is at least the idea that emerges from the publication of the Mesnagerie de Xenophon, to which we shall return. We find here again the method of “grotesques” that serves as a preamble to the chapter “Of friendship.” Montaigne had interfered in La Boétie’s work in the name of the principle of “because it was he, because it was I”; it was logical that La Boétie should enter into the Essais in the same way. The fusion of the two beings demanded similar writing strategies.

Montaigne describes the exemplary nature of his friendship with La Boétie as “so entire and so perfect,” “fostered, as long as God willed.”108 As we have said, this friendship lasted less than four years, which, it has to be admitted, is not long. The parlementary archives record only a few examples in which Montaigne and La Boétie worked together on the same cases in the parlement of Bordeaux—from February 1562 to June 1563—La Boétie always playing the primary role and Montaigne playing, during these years (1562–63), only a secondary or even tertiary role. At that time, Montaigne was far from having a remarkable career. In contrast, La Boétie was considered the parlement’s child prodigy and had won a reputation as an orator. In the world of the magistracy, intellectual recognition necessarily involved the publication of a treatise on law, history, or political theory. The opportunity had not yet presented itself, and despite the circulation of manuscript copies of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude and the Memorandum, the recognition on which La Boétie could pride himself was still rather limited. It was Montaigne who won for him a posthumous fame that he was far from enjoying during his lifetime. However, Montaigne’s friendship with La Boétie claimed to escape any political logic: “it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries,” he tells us. But the motives of this perfect communion between two souls are never explained.

The friendship between Montaigne and La Boétie was based on a common view of politics and religion in the early 1560s, when the civil wars had not yet begun. In the late 1550s, Montaigne still hoped to have a brilliant career as a member of the parlement and sought the company of colleagues capable of helping him in his projects and ambitions. Meeting an influential figure who had a well-established position in the parlement represented a non-negligible advantage in a system in which alliances and the patronage of influential persons were necessary to succeed.

For Montaigne, friendship is founded on an equality between persons who are socially unequal. This is an essential point for his friendship with La Boétie. The family did not allow such an equality:

From children toward fathers, it is rather respect. Friendship feeds on communication, which cannot exist between them because of their too great inequality, and might perhaps interfere with the duties of nature. For neither can all the secret thoughts of fathers be communicated to children, lest this beget an unbecoming intimacy, nor could the admonitions and corrections, which are one of the chief duties of friendship, be administered by children to fathers.¹⁰⁹

For Montaigne, the bond of friendship is the complete contrary of the bond of blood. The author of the Essais draws an important distinction between the friendship of children for their fathers or that of husbands for their wives, and “perfect” friendship, which is always chosen. Thus he contrasts “that common affection of fathers toward their children”110 with the singular and unique friendship he felt for La Boétie, a “single perfect friendship”:¹¹¹ “Common friendships can be divided up: one may love in one man his beauty, in another his easygoing ways, in another liberality, in one paternal love, in another brotherly love, and so forth; but this friendship that possesses the soul and rules it with absolute sovereignty cannot possibly be double.”¹¹² Far from this exemplary friendship are found the “numerous and imperfect friendships.”¹¹³

Friendship cannot be quantified, and it does not follow the rules of commerce; Montaigne conceives it solely as a gift, without the slightest hint of profit. Its singularity constitutes its quality. It is supposed to be the expression of a relationship that is atypical and does not respect familial and social rules. Rejecting authority and decorum, it establishes an equality between men by elevating the inferior one on the social scale to the level of the one who is socially—or professionally—superior to him. That is how the friendship with La Boétie authorizes Montaigne to converse directly with the great men of the kingdom. This careerist use of friendship also reminds us of the paternal filiation Marie de Gournay claimed after the death of her “adopted father” (père d’alliance); this established link made it easier for her to get Abel L’Angelier to publish her Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne. Friendship was also included in the social and political practiques that might promote a literary career. In this case, the tie of friendship served as a pretext—in the literal sense of the term—for social ambitions.

The best proofs of friendship are rarely found among people of the same rank or social status, and Montaigne recounts singular friendships between a king and a slave or between a prince and his servant. Social inequality favors the expression of friendship by reaffirming the equality of men when the friend sets aside his power and authority in order to lower himself to the level of his friend. Thus friendship is supposed to be the expression of a voluntary servitude in which the master consents to put himself at the slave’s level. Then we understand why the chapter “Of friendship” could have served as an introduction to La Boétie’s treatise. It is also a practice that Montaigne uses again in the chapter that provides an apology for Raymond Sebond—which could be read as a prologue to a deconstruction of Sebond and of La Boétie—in order to explain his work as translator and editor of texts that had become compromising, each in its own way, in the political and religious context that prevailed between 1560 and 1570.

In practice, friendship is resolutely situated on the side of the middle of the road, the general, the moderate. In fact, for Montaigne, it expresses a balance that allows one person to rise and the other to lower himself to the latter’s level. This is also a political attitude that consists in putting oneself in the place of the other and seeking the golden mean. The manifestations of friendship reflect the moderation and leveling of the affects. Free of passion, this relationship, which is often unequal, requires a certain effort; it is not natural and at first sight there is nothing remarkable about it. It results from a calculated choice, from a new form of sociability: “In friendship, it is a general and universal warmth, moderate and even, besides, a constant and settled warmth, all gentleness and smoothness, with nothing bitter and stinging about it.”114 What more is there to say? Friendship dispenses with words because it offers nothing sensational, and that is exactly what happens in the Essais. The more Montaigne discovered his talents as a writer, that is, the more he asserted himself as an author, the more friendship was “settled” (rassize): “Father and son may be of entirely different dispositions, and brothers also. He is my son, he is my kinsman, but he is an unsociable man, a knave, or a fool. And then, the more they are friendships which law and natural obligation impose on us, the less of our choice and free will there is in them. And our free will has no product more properly its own than affection and friendship.”¹¹⁵

Montaigne twice puts the accent on voluntary freedom in this often-cited passage from the chapter “Of friendship.” This term is primordial for understanding friendship in his work. While La Boétie wrote a treatise on voluntary servitude, in “Of friendship” Montaigne composed a treatise of voluntary freedom. Moreover, there is a rather vague difference between these two terms. Insofar as the friend gives himself entirely to the other, the freedom of one of them is inevitably transformed into servitude for the other. Politics then functions in a power relationship established on the basis of a zero-point, as Montaigne reminds us in a short but important chapter, “One man’s profit is another man’s harm” (I: 22). How can we act so that only the profit is taken into account? Simply by doing without the other. That may be why the absence of the friend is presented to us salutary in Montaigne’s work, because it avoids the servitude inherent in friendship. The bond of friendship—in its phase of servitude—no longer exists in the Essais because it refers to a time that is over and done. Since it testifies to a singular and unique experience, this bond is presented to us as opposed to Montaigne’s two other kinds of commerce, namely, commerce with women and commerce with books, which are always the expression of experiences that are repeated and dependent on a quantitative logic.

It is customary to suggest that the chapter “Of friendship” symbolizes the space necessary for putting friendship “into commerce.” I would like to suggest just the reverse. The theme of friendship appears in the background in many chapters, but never really finds its own place. Although amorous commerce refers to the boudoir (“On some verses of Virgil”) and the tower forms the privileged space of reading and writing (“Of books”), the space of friendship is always lacking in the Essais. Germignan (the village where La Boétie died) was that space for a time, and we know how hard it was for La Boétie to keep Montaigne in his bedchamber. After 1571, this space has only a literary existence and shapes the quest of Montaigne’s writing. The writing of friendship is the search for the place of friendship, but it is also a project that is supposed to lead Montaigne to find his place in society. The fusion between La Boétie and Montaigne required a single space that could be shared, no matter who the author of the work was. Friendship retains an ideal form that Montaigne could not reproduce; that is perhaps why the form of friendship almost never corresponds to the content of the chapters whose main function is to talk about this bond. In the course of the writing, far from finding its definitive place in a single chapter, friendship traverses the Essais without being able to settle itself where we expect it to be.

We cannot ignore this bond of friendship that marks and influences Montaigne’s writing but that also denotes his desire to separate himself from his friend. The more Montaigne becomes an author, the weaker and more fragile this bond becomes. Friendship is not realizable in its practice—that is, as a series of encounters or continuous relationships over time. It is a pure ideal, like equality among men: “Friendship, on the contrary, is enjoyed according as it is desired.”116 The desire of friendship, like the quest for equality among men, merges with the idea of an idealized friendship that dispenses with any practice. For Montaigne, friendship refers to a primitive economy in which the very idea of commerce is absent; it frees itself from any materiality in order to exist solely as an unrealizable fantasy. Montaigne refers to friendship as a “noble commerce.”¹¹⁷ Even though at that time the word “commerce” (commerce) also had the sense of “intercourse” or “association,” Montaigne cannot have been unaware that it was also part of the discourse of economics. This expression is an oxymoron because in the Renaissance there could be no noble commerce. The noble ideal condemned work and advocated idleness. Commerce was an activity necessary for the proper functioning of society, but there was nothing elevated about it. Many treatises of the time are explicit on this question. The inherent contradiction between this particular quality of friendship gives rise to a noneconomic conception of what is ultimately becoming a literary relationship in Montaigne. Since it constitutes a gift, friendship no longer has a value. Montaigne explains that friendship “receives no increase.”¹¹⁸ Friendship is a dispossession of oneself: “For this perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible: each one gives himself so wholly to his friend that he has nothing left to distribute elsewhere.”¹¹⁹ The rules of this particular commerce run counter to any utilitarian logic: “If, in the friendship I speak of, one could give to the other, it would be the one who received the benefit who would oblige his friend.”120 The primitive economy of friendship escapes the usual commercial rules; it is situated in an ideal relationship that reminds us of potlatches and other ritual exchanges practiced by the Indians of the New World.

After 1588, the rejection of politics in the Essais led inevitably to the disgrace and disappearance of La Boétie. Perfect friendship became an absence:

In true friendship, in which I am expert, I give myself to my friend more than I draw him to me. I not only like doing him good better than having him do me good, but also would rather have him do good to himself than to me; he does me most good when he does himself good. And if absence is pleasant or useful to him, it is much sweeter to me than his presence; and it is not really absence when we have means of communication. In other days I made use and advantage of our separation.¹²¹

A friend in difficult times, La Boétie had to disappear from the Essais, more than twenty years after his death. His presence was then transformed into an absence and his retreat was the best proof of the perfection of a friendship about which Montaigne no longer could or wanted to speak.

It could be said that La Boétie represented a “salutary friendship” for the author that Montaigne was becoming. The more absence is noted, the more the bond is idealized. The representation of friendship cancels all future practice of friendship. This voluntary servitude has no obligation, it is freedom. The other to whom we had wholly given ourselves lives in us without our feeling the need to talk about him. The wheel had turned full circle and Montaigne finally rediscovered the state of voluntary freedom in which the subject is self-sufficient. From that moment on, friendship became a past that Montaigne no longer really needed, and on which it was preferable not to dwell. A generic reader without name or history replaced the friend, and a new consubstantiality between Montaigne and his book was substituted for the one originally produced by friendship. La Boétie henceforth incarnated the past of the Essais, and the generic reader, their future.

ⁱ An edict issued in Fontainebleau in 1554 (or 1555) establishing an Inquisition, which two successive semestres of the Parlement refused to register. [Trans.]

ⁱⁱ The Discourse had circulated in several European countries. A copy (of English provenance) was recently discovered in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, another in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, and a third one in London. Other manuscript copies of the Discourse are held by French libraries (notably Chambéry and Bordeaux), including one at the BNF in the Dupuy collection.

ⁱⁱⁱ The term refers to the “Amboise conspiracy” (conjuration d’Amboise), a failed attempt in 1560 by the Protestants to gain power in France by abducting the young king Francis II and arresting the duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine.

^iv Hobbes removed the ambiguities present in La Boétie, Montaigne, Bodin, and Duplessis-Mornay as to the possibility of the people becoming a political actor. For Hobbes, “when a man receiveth any thing from the authority of the people, he receiveth it not from the people his subjects, but from the people his sovereign.” Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1640; first printed edition London, 1650), chap. 21, sect. 9. In a famous distinction, Hobbes explains the twofold meaning of the word “people”: an aggregate of persons in a defined space, a simple “multitude of particular persons,” but also a “person civil” (chap. 21, sect. 11), what the theorists of the late sixteenth century were beginning to call a “citizen.” Those who do not distinguish between these two meanings attribute to “a dissolved multitude” rights that “belong only to the people virtually contained in the body of the commonwealth or sovereignty” (chap. 21, sect. 7). It is on the basis of this argument that Hobbes explains the role of the people in public action: “though any one man may be said to demand or have right to something, yet the heap, or multitude, cannot he said to demand or have right to any thing. For where every man hath his right distinct, there is nothing left for the multitude to have right unto; and when the particulars say: this is mine, this is thine, and this is his, and have shared all amongst them, there can be nothing whereof the multitude can say: this is mine” (chap. 21, sect. 11). Thus for Hobbes the people has no existence other than civil, once it has been subjected to the authority of the body politic; this form of voluntary servitude theoretically restores to it the right to act on the basis of the body politic that it constitutes. To be sure, La Boétie and Montaigne did not yet conceive the individual as a simple part of an aggregate constituted as a body politic, but we already find in their writings numerous references to what the author of the Essais calls “the crowd” (la foule).

^v We find the same idea in Hobbes’s The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (op. cit.), written in the late 1630s, circulated in manuscript in 1640, but printed only in 1650. Hobbes writes that, “When a man divesteth and putteth from himself his right, he either simply relinquisheth it, or transferreth the same to another man” (chap. 15, sect. 3). This form of voluntary servitude, a relinquishment of one’s rights, is for Hobbes a “transfer”: “To TRANSFER right to another, is by sufficient signs to declare to that other accepting thereof, that it is his will not to resist, or hinder him, according to that right he had thereto before he transferred it” (ibid.). For Hobbes, this transfer is a “FREE GIFT” (chap. 15, sect. 7). We already find in Montaigne this form of political gift, which he also sees in his relationship to La Boétie, the source of his own political positions in the early 1560s. This gift is understood solely outside any contractual consideration; instead, it is a natural inclination. Moreover, this gift of freedom creates an obligation for the person who receives it: “For where liberty ceaseth, there beginneth obligation,” Hobbes writes (chap. 15, sect. 9), adding that such conventions are always “de voluntaris.” According to Hobbes, “particular men enter into subjection, by transferring their rights” (chap. 21, sect. 12). Voluntary servitude constitutes them as a body politic that allows them to act through an intermediary authority, that of the sovereign.

^vi The Monarchomachs (“those who fight against monarchs”) were Huguenot political theorists who were notorious for having justified tyrannicide. [Trans.]

^vii Women have a much more important part in Montaigne’s work than has been thought. Several chapters of the Essais are dedicated to them, and the positive reception of the Essais by women readers of the time has been demonstrated. We can even say that Montaigne accords a special place to women in his book. Thus the chapter “Of the affection of fathers for their children” (II: 8) is dedicated to Louise d’Estissac; “Of the education of children” (I: 26) is dedicated to Diane de Foix, who was expecting her first child; the “Twenty-nine sonnets of Etienne de La Boétie” (I: 29) evicts the friend to make room for another woman, Madame de Gramont; and finally, the chapter “Of the resemblance of children to fathers” (II: 37) is dedicated to Madame de Duras. But it is especially in the chapter “On some verses of Virgil” (III: 5) that Montaigne speaks at greatest length regarding his relations with women. Behind this deceptive title—this essay could just as well have been entitled “Of love” or “Of sexuality”—Montaigne offers a long reflection on the relations between men and women.