Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Although La Boétie speaks to Montaigne like a fondly disapproving uncle, he adorns his poem with less familial emotions: “You have been bound to me, Montaigne, both by the power of nature and by virtue, which is the sweet allurement of love.” Montaigne writes in the same way in the Essays , saying that the friendship seized his will and “led it to plunge and lose itself in his,” just as it seized the will of La Boétie and “led it to plunge and lose itself in mine.” Such talk was not unconventional. The Renaissance was a period in which, while any hint of real homosexuality was regarded with horror, men routinely wrote to each other like lovestruck teenagers. They were usually in love less with each other than with an elevated ideal of friendship, absorbed from Greek and Latin literature. Such a bond between two well-born young men was the pinnacle of philosophy: they studied together, lived under each other’s gaze, and helped each other to perfect the art of living. Both Montaigne and La Boétie were fascinated by this model, and were probably on the lookout for it when they met. The shortness of their time together spared them disillusionment. In his sonnet, La Boétie expressed the hope that his and Montaigne’s names would be paired for all eternity, like those of other “famous friends” throughout history; he got his wish.

They seemed to think of their relationship above all by analogy with one particular classical model: that of the philosopher Socrates and his good-looking young friend Alcibiades — to whom La Boétie overtly compared Montaigne in his sonnet. Montaigne, in return, alluded to Socratic elements in La Boétie: his wisdom, but also a more surprising quality, his ugliness. Socrates was famous for being physically unprepossessing, and Montaigne pointedly refers to La Boétie as having an “ugliness which clothed a very beautiful soul.” This echoes Alcibiades’ comparison, in Plato’s Symposium , of Socrates with the little “Silenus” figures popularly used as stash boxes for jewels and other precious items. Like Socrates, they sported grotesque faces and figures on the outside but held treasures within. Montaigne and La Boétie apparently enjoyed these roles, and played them up for their amusement. At least it amused Montaigne. La Boétie’s sense of his own philosophical dignity would have prevented him from showing any sign if he felt insulted.

The ugly Socrates rejected the beautiful Alcibiades’s advances, according to Plato, yet their relationship was unmistakably flirtatious and sensual. Was the same true of Montaigne and La Boétie? Few today think that they had an outright sexual relationship, though the idea has had its followers. But the intensity of their language is striking, not just in La Boétie’s sonnet, but in the passages where Montaigne describes their friendship as a transcendent mystery, or as a great surge of love that swept them both away. His attachment to moderation in all things fails him when it comes to La Boétie, and so does his love of independence. He writes, “Our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.” Words themselves refuse to do his bidding. As he wrote in a marginal addition:

If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.

Renaissance friendships, like classical ones, were supposed to be chosen in the clear, rational light of day. That was why they were of philosophical value. Montaigne’s description of the love that “cannot be expressed” does not fit this pattern. Indeed, he admits: “Our friendship has no other model than itself, and can be compared only with itself.” If it has a reference point at all, it again seems to be the Symposium , where Alcibiades finds himself equally confused by Socrates’s charisma, saying, “Many a time I should be glad for him to vanish from the face of the earth, but I know that, if that were to happen, my sorrow would far outweigh my relief. In fact, I simply do not know what to do about him.”

La Boétie, in his sonnet, does not go so far into perplexity as Montaigne; his emotion was not heightened by remembered grief as Montaigne’s was. Similar talk of unreason and personal magnetism can be found in La Boétie, but not in the sonnet, or even in any of the mediocre love poetry he addressed to women. It appears, of all places, in his early treatise on politics — the one which was being passed so eagerly around Bordeaux when Montaigne first heard of him.

La Boétie was apparently very young when he wrote this treatise, On Voluntary Servitude . According to Montaigne, he was only sixteen, and produced it as a student exercise: “a common theme hashed over in a thousand places in books.” Montaigne may have been deliberately underplaying the work’s seriousness, for it was controversial and he did not want either to damage La Boétie’s reputation or to get into trouble for mentioning it himself. Even if it was not quite so juvenile a piece as Montaigne made out, it did show early brilliance: one writer has called La Boétie the Rimbaud of political sociology.

The subject of Voluntary Servitude is the ease with which, throughout history, tyrants have dominated the masses, even though their power would evaporate instantly if those masses withdrew their support. There is no need for a revolution: the people need only stop cooperating, and supplying armies of slaves and sycophants to prop the tyrant up. Yet this almost never happens, even to those who maltreat their subjects monstrously. The more they starve and neglect their people, the more the people seem to love them. The Romans mourned Nero when he died, despite his abuses. The same happened on the death of Julius Caesar — whom, unusually, La Boétie does not admire. (Montaigne had similar reservations.) Here was an emperor “who abolished the laws and liberty, a personage in whom there was, it seems to me, nothing of value,” yet he was adored out of all measure. The mystery of tyrannical dominance is as profound as that of love itself.

La Boétie believes that tyrants somehow hypnotize their people — though this term had not yet been invented. To put it another way, they fall in love with him. They lose their will in his. It is a terrible spectacle to see “a million men serving miserably with their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater force, but somehow (it seems) enchanted and charmed by the mere mention of the name of one, whose power they should not fear, since he is alone, and whose qualities they should not love, since he is savage and inhuman towards them.” Yet they cannot wake from the dream. La Boétie makes it sound almost like a kind of witchcraft. If it occurred on a smaller scale, someone would probably be burned at the stake, but when bewitchment seizes a whole society, it goes unquestioned.

La Boétie’s analysis of political power comes very close to Montaigne’s sense of mystery about La Boétie himself: “Because it was he, because it was I.” That a tyrant’s charisma can work like a spell or a love potion has been made apparent by a series of autocrats in our own recent history. When one henchman of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was asked in an interview why he had loved his leader so loyally, he replied in a way that sounds just like Montaigne talking about La Boétie, or Alcibiades about Socrates:

You see, love, something called love: you will find a man loving a woman who’s one-eyed. If you ask that man, why do you love that ugly woman, do you think that person will tell you? The secret behind that thing is between two. What made me to love him and what also made him to love me.