Politics of Obedience

In the ferment of his law school days at Orleans, Étienne de
La Boétie composed his brief but scintillating, profound and
deeply radical Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Discours de la
Servitude Volontaire). 4 The Discourse was circulated in
manuscript form and never published by La Boétie. One can
speculate that its radical views were an important reason for the
author's with holding it from publication. It achieved a
considerable fame in local Perigordian intellectual circles,
however. This can be seen by the fact that Montaigne had read
the essay long before he first met La Boétie as a fellow member
of the Bordeaux Parlement in 1559.
The first striking thing about the Discourse is the form: La
Boétie's method was speculative, abstract, deductive. This
contrasts with the rather narrowly legal and historical argument
of the Huguenot monarchomach writers (those sectarian writers
who argued for the right of subjects to resist unjust rulers) of the
1570's and 1580's, whom La Boétie resembled in his opposition
to tyranny. While the Huguenot monarchomachs, best
exemplified by Francois Hotman's Franco-Gallia (1573),
concentrated on grounding their arguments on real or presumed
historical precedents in French laws and institutions, La Boétie's
4 Having remained long in manuscript, the actual date of writing the Discourse of
Voluntary Servitude remains a matter of dispute. It seems clear, however, and has been
so accepted by recent authorities, that Montaigne's published story that La Boetie wrote
the Discourse at the age of eighteen or even of sixteen was incorrect. Montaigne's
statement, as we shall see further below, was probably part of his later .:ampalgn to guard
his dead friend's reputation by dissociating him from the revolutionary Huguenots who
were claiming La Boetie's pamphlet for their own. Extreme youth tended to cast the
Discourse in the light of a work so youthful that the radical content was hardly to be
taken seriously as the views of the author. Internal evidence as well as the erudition
expressed in the work make it likely that the Discourse was written in 1552 or 1553, at
the age of twenty-two, while La Boetie was at the University. See Bonnefon, op. cit., pp.
xxxvi-xxxvii; Mesnard, op. cit., pp. 390-1; and Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography
(New York: Harcourt Brace, & World, 1965), p. 71. There is no biography of La Boetie.
Closest to it is Bonnefon's "Introduction" to his Oeuvres Completes, op. cit., pp. xi-Ixxxv,
later reprinted as part of Paul Bonnefon, Montaigne et ses Amis (Paris: Armand Colin et
Cie., 1898), I, pp. 103-224.
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