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

Tyranny creates a drama of submission and domination, rather like the tense battle confrontation scenes often described by Montaigne. The populace willingly gives itself up, and this only encourages the tyrant to take away everything they have — even their lives, if he sends them to war to fight for him. Something in human beings drives them to a “deep forgetfulness of freedom.” Everyone, from top to bottom of the system, is mesmerized by their voluntary servitude and by the power of habit, since often they have known nothing else. Yet all they need to do is to wake up and withdraw their cooperation.

Whenever a few individuals do break free, adds La Boétie, it is often because their eyes have been opened by the study of history. Learning of similar past tyrannies, they recognize the pattern in their own society. Instead of accepting what they are born into, they acquire the art of slipping out of it and seeing everything from a different angle — a trick Montaigne, in the Essays , would make his characteristic mode of thinking and writing. Alas, there are usually too few of these free spirits to do any good. They do not work together, but live “alone in their imaginings.”

One can see why Montaigne, after reading On Voluntary Servitude , was so keen to meet its author. It is a bold work; whether Montaigne agreed with it all or not, it must have astounded him. Its reflections on the power of habit, a key theme of his own in the Essays , and its idea that freedom could come from reading historians and biographers, would have resonated with him. So would its sheer intellectual audacity and its ability to think, as it were, around corners.

La Boétie probably did not mean his treatise as a call to revolution. He circulated it in a few discreet copies, and may never have intended to publish it at all. If he did, his aim would have been to exhort the governing elite to more responsible behavior, not to make the underclass rise up and seize control. He would have been horrified, therefore, had he lived to see what was done with his work. Just over a decade after he died, On Voluntary Servitude reappeared as a radical Protestant tract, renamed Contr’un (Against One) for greater effect, and set in the context of a call to rebellion against the French monarch. A series of Protestant publications printed it, first the anonymous Reveille-matin des François et de leurs voisins (1574) and then various editions of Simon Goulart’s Mémoires de l’estat de France sous Charles IX (1577). It was incendiary, and it met with an incendiary response. The Bordeaux parlement burned Goulart’s second edition in public on May 7, 1579, just two days before Montaigne obtained his official privilege for the first edition of the Essays . No wonder he wanted to stress the fact that La Boétie’s work was a youthful exercise, presenting no threat to anyone.

This was the beginning of a long and colorful afterlife for On Voluntary Servitude . Even now, it is still sometimes published as a call to arms, or at least to principled resistance. During the Second World War it appeared in America under the title Anti-Dictator , with marginal notes drawing attention to such themes as “Appeasement is useless” and “Why Führers make speeches.” Later, anarchist and libertarian groups took it up and put out editions with radical prefaces and commentaries. La Boétie’s posthumous story as a hero of anarchism is the one great exception to the rule that he is remembered only for being Montaigne’s friend.

What anarchists and libertarians admire most is his Gandhi-like idea that all a society needs, in order to free itself of tyranny, is to quietly withdraw cooperation. One modern preface holds up La Boétie as the inspiration for an “anonymous, low-visibility, one-man revolution”—certainly the purest kind of revolution imaginable. “Voluntaryism” adopts La Boétie in support of its view that all political activity should be shunned, including even democratic voting, since it gives the state a false air of legitimacy. Some early Voluntaryists opposed female suffrage on the grounds that, if men should not vote, then women should not either.

The “quiet refusal” aspect of On Voluntary Servitude ’s politics had an obvious appeal for Montaigne. He agreed that the most important thing in confronting political abuse was to maintain one’s mental freedom — and that could mean opting out of public life rather than engaging with it. With its insistence on avoiding collaboration and on guarding one’s integrity, the Voluntary Servitude could almost be one of Montaigne’s own Essays , perhaps one written at an early stage when he was still polemical and had not yet perfected the art of sitting on every part of the fence at once. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson reading the Essays centuries later, Montaigne might well have exclaimed of the Voluntary Servitude , “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.”

Before its appropriation by Huguenot propagandists, he had actually intended to make it part of his own Essays , though duly credited to La Boétie. He was going to insert it following the chapter on friendship — the one where he writes most passionately about his feelings. The idea seems to have been to host the work as a sort of guest star or centerpiece, set off by surrounding chapters like a picture by its frame.

But by the time he delivered the book to the publisher, the situation had changed. On Voluntary Servitude was now thought of as a revolutionary tract: instead of standing as a tribute to his friend’s brilliance, as Montaigne intended, it would look like a provocation. So he withdrew it, but left his own brief introduction as a stump marking the site of amputation. He wrote, “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.” It was probably now that he added his own remark about the work’s junior and tentative nature.

Having done this, he had another change of mind. He did not want to make La Boétie sound insincere. So he added a note, saying that, of course, La Boétie must have believed in what he was writing; he was not the type to speak without conviction. Montaigne even said that his friend would have preferred to be born in Venice — a republic — than in the local town of Sarlat, that is, in the French state. But wait — that made La Boétie sound like a rebel again! Another reversal was needed: “But he had another maxim sovereignly imprinted in his soul, to obey and submit most religiously to the laws under which he was born.” All in all, Montaigne seems to have got into quite a jumble over La Boétie’s tract. One imagines him scribbling all this at the last moment in a corner of the printer’s office, the removed manuscript still tucked under one arm.

Considering that On Voluntary Servitude was currently being burned in Bordeaux, it was daring for Montaigne to mention the work at all, let alone to make excuses for it. Contradictory as ever, he acted with prudence in withdrawing the publication, but with courage in defending it. Moreover, in discussing how La Boétie came to write the piece, Montaigne actually revealed who the author was. That was probably well known anyway, but none of the Protestant publications had gone so far.

Having decided to get rid of it, Montaigne wrote: “In exchange for this serious work, I shall substitute another, produced in that same season of his life, gayer and more lusty.” This was a selection of La Boétie’s verses: not the ones written to himself, but a set of twenty-nine sonnets addressed to an unidentified young woman. Some years later, however, Montaigne changed his mind again and removed these too. What was left, in the end, was only his own introduction and dedication, plus a brief note: “These verses may be seen elsewhere.” One entire chapter, number 29 in Book I, became a double deletion: a ragged stub or hole which Montaigne deliberately refused to disguise. He even drew attention to its frayed edges. It is odd behavior, and has inspired a lot of speculation. Was Montaigne simply adding and subtracting material in a fluster, without bothering to tidy up the results, or was he trying to alert us to something?