I will be taking a look at Etienne de La Boetie’s essay “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” in three parts, both because this is a very long piece and because he broke it into those parts himself, so it makes sense to follow his lead.
Let me begin with where I left off in my last essay: of course I do not claim that any words written by Etienne de La Boetie should be treated exactly the same as if they were written by Montaigne, who knew well that people are fickle and malleable, and therefore would never transfer ones fleeting thoughts to another. Montaigne qualifies “On Affectionate Relationships” in particular, noting how young his friend was when he wrote it and that he didn’t even know Etienne at the time.
However, I stand by my strong position that none of this matters. Montaigne wrote more passionately in the Affectionate Relationships essay than anywhere else in his project, and it wasn’t only because his feelings for his late friend were dying to get out. Montaigne proved over 106 other essays that he is fully capable of keeping his feelings to himself or cloaking them however suits his purpose.
Montaigne dropped his guard in “On Affectionate Relationships” for one, because he was applying Aristotle’s template of the perfect friendship, and I’ll have more to say on that in the third essay of this series. But his passion was also necessary because he was under attack for his friend’s thoughts. La Boetie’s essay became a sensation after his death and Montaigne, having resigned his public position, was an easy target.
He had two choices in wake of the uproar: disavow the essay as something that didn’t reflect his own thinking or lean into the friendship and explain why he would never disavow something written by someone so important to him. He chose the latter, not at all because it was insincere, but because both La Boetie and his words meant a great deal to him.
Given Montaigne’s decision to embrace this essay, I’m going to treat it like something he wrote himself. His defense of it was part of his personal patriotism.
This leads me to where the essay begins, with a quote from The Odyssey about “choosing language to meet the emergency rather than the truth.” What a wonderful phrase, I must remember to use it sometime. He goes on to raise a fundamental question: why do people put up with tyrants?
“For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they, but simply, it would seem, delighted and charmed by the name of one man alone whose power they need not fear, for he is evidently the one person whose qualities they cannot admire because of his inhumanity and brutality toward them. A weakness characteristic of human kind is that we often have to obey force; we have to make concessions; we ourselves cannot always be the stronger.”
Then La Boetie goes on to explain why people sometimes willingly give up their power to tyrants, but concludes that even then, it’s in error:
“It is reasonable to love virtue, to esteem good deeds, to be grateful for good from whatever source we may receive it, and, often, to give up some of our comfort in order to increase the honor and advantage of some man whom we love and who deserves it. Therefore, if the inhabitants of a country have found some great personage who has shown rare foresight in protecting them in an emergency, rare boldness in defending them, rare solicitude in governing them, and if, from that point on, they contract the habit of obeying him and depending on him to such an extent that they grant him certain prerogatives, I fear that such a procedure is not prudent, inasmuch as they remove him from a position in which he was doing good and advance him to a dignity in which he may do evil.”
This is a very interesting insight that could be applied to the U.S. at this moment. Even if you buy the MAGA argument that Trump has stood by and protected them in a time of trouble—even taking a bullet for them—granting him the extreme power to escape the rule of law and act like a dictator, as promised, is a very bad idea. But if the previous comparison with Trump wasn’t close enough for you, how about this:
“They (the citizens of a country suffering under despotism) suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man; not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands of the tournament; not only without energy to direct men by force, but with hardly enough virility to bed with a common woman! Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice?”
The next point La Boetie makes is perhaps his most famous, one of the earliest statements ever made about the power of civil disobedience:
“It is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.”
This might be a good time for me to drop in a note to myself about something I read earlier today. Data over the last century reveals that civil disobedience is more than twice as effective as violent acts (including terrorism) in achieving long-term social goals. That’s a good thing to keep in mind as the temperature is rising worldwide and some people are becoming frustrated at conventional means.
And then he writes:
“If in order to have liberty nothing more is needed than to long for it, if only a simple act of the will is necessary, is there any nation in the world that considers a single wish too high a price to pay in order to recover rights which it ought to be ready to redeem at the cost of its blood, rights such that their loss must bring all men of honor to the point of feeling life to be unendurable and death itself a deliverance?”
None of this is terribly startling today, but bear in mind that all of this was written more than 200 years before the French revolution. You could easily draw a straight line from La Boetie to modern day Paris, in fact. This attitude is what we now consider to be quintessentially French, more so than anything Montaigne wrote in his essays.
And this sounds like it could have been written by Montesquieu:
“A longing common to both the wise and the foolish, to brave men and to cowards, is this longing for all those things which, when acquired, would make them happy and contented. Yet one element appears to be lacking. I do not know how it happens that nature fails to place within the hearts of men a burning desire for liberty, a blessing so great and so desirable that when it is lost all evils follow thereafter, and even the blessings that remain lose taste and savor because of their corruption by servitude. Liberty is the only joy upon which men do not seem to insist; for surely if they really wanted it they would receive it. Apparently they refuse this wonderful privilege because it is so easily acquired.”
This is the core of La Boetie’s argument in part one. It’s a stunning piece of political writing for its time and, given Montaigne’s refusal to disavow it, something worth using as a prism for the true meaning of his work.
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