Now we reach the final part of Etienne de La Boetie’s treatise, and I’m going to begin it with a major plot twist—Montaigne and La Boetie actually weren’t that close. Ok, I shouldn’t say that so definitively, it’s the opinion of one biographer. Still, it’s a startling thought. How can that be? If you’ve read “On Affectionate Relationships,” you’d think that they had one of the greatest friendships in history, one that left Montaigne in deep mourning afterwards that inspired all his essays.
But according to a recent biography, “Montaigne: A Life” by Phillipe Desan, much of this was for show. That Aristotle description of friendship I mentioned previously? That was considered the template for friendships in the renaissance. It was a common literary trope of the time to exaggerate friendships to seem like they fit this Aristotelian ideal. That is how men displayed their valor and virtue. Desan wrote:
This poetic vision of the friendship between Montaigne and La Boétie has too often been presented as a model of fraternity and altruism. 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.
Montaigne and La Boetie only knew each other about four years and from all available evidence, Montaigne was never close to being an equal. La Boetie was a highly respected orator and held more sought after positions within Bordeaux’s parlement (which was less like a legislative body than a civil appeals courts.) Desan wrote:
Montaigne describes the exemplary nature of his friendship with La Boétie as “so entire and so perfect,” “fostered, as long as God willed.” 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.
So when Montaigne sat down to write his first volume of essays, he used La Boetie as a springboard. But after the literary acclaim he discovered after publication of his first volume of essays, Montaigne realized that he no longer needed him, and you’ll notice that La Boetie’s name never comes up in volumes 2 and 3. Even Montaigne’s ideas seem like fainter echoes of La Boetie as his project goes on. According to Desan, when his project began, Montaigne was the one in voluntary servitude:
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.
Keep these thoughts in mind now as we reach the final section of La Boetie’s treatise, concerning the people who make it possible for tyrants to thrive. La Boetie begins by saying that it is not the full king’s court that maintains power, it is the people closest to power, the six or seven completely devoted individuals, who keep everyone else in line.
And so he then describes a cabal that reads an awful lot like the modern Republican Party:
Whenever a ruler makes himself a dictator, all the wicked dregs of the nation — I do not mean the pack of petty thieves and earless ruffians who, in a republic, are unimportant in evil or good — but all those who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice, these gather round him and support him in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant.
In my experience, it isn’t just tyranny that plays out like this. Every form of power depends on people who gain their strength through proximity to people of influence. It happens in governments, corporations, even educational institutions and nonprofits. But it’s those who exercise power in the name of evil who truly lose their humanity:
Observing those men who painfully serve the tyrant in order to win some profit from his tyranny and from the subjection of the populace, I am often overcome with amazement at their wickedness and sometimes by pity for their folly. For, in all honesty, can it be in any way except in folly that you approach a tyrant, withdrawing further from your liberty and, so to speak, embracing with both hands your servitude? Let such men lay aside briefly their ambition, or let them forget for a moment their avarice, and look at themselves as they really are. Then they will realize clearly that the townspeople, the peasants whom they trample under foot and treat worse than convicts or slaves, they will realize, I say, that these people, mistreated as they may be, are nevertheless, in comparison with themselves, better off and fairly free.
Next, La Boetie notes that even men of valor are not immune to the evils of tyranny. And here, La Boetie does something Montaigne refuses to do in 107 essays—he holds Seneca accountable for Nero:
Even men of character — if it sometimes happens that a tyrant likes such a man well enough to hold him in his good graces, because in him shine forth the virtue and integrity that inspire a certain reverence even in the most depraved — even men of character, I say, could not long avoid succumbing to the common malady and would early experience the effects of tyranny at their own expense. A Seneca, a Burrus, a Thrasea, this triumvirate of splendid men, will provide a sufficient reminder of such misfortune. Two of them were close to the tyrant by the fatal responsibility of holding in their hands the management of his affairs, and both were esteemed and beloved by him. One of them, moreover, had a peculiar claim upon his friendship, having instructed his master as a child. Yet these three by their cruel death give sufficient evidence of how little faith one can place in the friendship of an evil ruler. Indeed what friendship may be expected from one whose heart is bitter enough to hate even his own people, who do naught else but obey him? It is because he does not know how to love that he ultimately impoverishes his own spirit and destroys his own empire.
Then we come to this explanation of why the wicked can never have true friends—which is a great critique of contemporary mob movies—but it’s also something that Desan hints might apply to Montaigne:
Although it might not be impossible, yet it would be difficult to find true friendship in a tyrant; elevated above others and having no companions, he finds himself already beyond the pale of friendship, which receives its real sustenance from an equality that, to proceed without a limp, must have its two limbs equal. That is why there is honor among thieves (or so it is reported) in the sharing of the booty; they are peers and comrades; if they are not fond of one another they at least respect one another and do not seek to lessen their strength by squabbling. But the favorites of a tyrant can never feel entirely secure, and the less so because he has learned from them that he is all powerful and unlimited by any law or obligation.
Here’s what Desan argues: Montaigne admits that he doesn’t have many friends. All he has is his idealized vision of La Boetie, a friendship that is easy to extol because it’s already over. But what sacrifices did he ever make for any friendship? La Boetie wanted Montaigne to publish this treatise. Montaigne found a reason not to. He took from the friendship everything he could and when it was no longer of use to him, he relegated it to discard pile. Why? Because in his later success, Montaigne became elevated above others and had no companions.
It’s a very harsh reading of Montaigne and one requiring quite a bit of psychology. I doubt that Montaigne ever made such a calculation about La Boetie. But is it possible that, unconsciously, he reminded himself that he surpassed him in fame and wisdom?
It’s too bad that La Boetie’s treatise never found its way into Montaigne’s first volume. It would have made an interesting contrast with Montaigne’s own thoughts on similar subjects. But perhaps its omission did something even more interesting—it makes us think about Montaigne’s relationship to power and the ways he tried to escape the shadow of his departed friend.
Somehow, Montaigne ended up achieving the best of both worlds, to be lauded as a wonderful generous friend, while keeping the spotlight entirely to himself.
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