Étienne de La Boétie

Étienne de La Boétie: Why Tyranny Needs Your Consent

A young law student in sixteenth-century France asked a question that had apparently not occurred to anyone before him in quite that form: not why tyrants oppress, but why the oppressed comply. His answer — that a tyrant holds power only because his subjects hand it to him, and that they can therefore take it back simply by stopping — was too dangerous to publish. It circulated in manuscript, appeared in print only thirteen years after his death, and is still being cited by revolutionaries four and a half centuries later.

Sarlat, 1530

Étienne de La Boétie was born on 1 November 1530 in Sarlat-la-Canéda, in the Périgord region of south-western France, into the provincial aristocracy. His father was a royal official in the Périgord; his mother was the sister of the president of the Bordeaux parlement — a connection that would matter. He was orphaned early and brought up by his uncle, the curate of Bouilbonnas.

He was educated at the College of Guienne and then at the University of Orléans, where he took his law degree in 1553. His abilities were conspicuous enough that in 1554 he received a royal appointment to the parlement of Bordeaux even though he was below the minimum age for the office — an exception granted for talent, and a signal of how fast he was expected to rise.

The Magistrate

He did rise. La Boétie distinguished himself both as a judge and as a diplomatic negotiator, and remained in the parlement's service until his early death. This is worth holding on to when reading his famous essay: the man who wrote the most radical case against obedience ever produced in Renaissance France spent his working life as a royal magistrate, upholding the king's law in a divided kingdom.

That kingdom was tearing itself apart over religion. La Boétie's own position was conciliatory and, in the circumstances, unpopular with the committed on both sides: he favoured the reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism through reform of the church, rather than accepting the permanent coexistence of two competing religions. It was the position of a lawyer who believed a settlement was still negotiable.

Montaigne

In the Bordeaux parlement he served alongside Michel de Montaigne, and the friendship between the two men became one of the most celebrated in European letters — largely because Montaigne memorialised it in his essay on friendship, one of the founding texts of the form he invented. Historians have argued at length over whether the attachment was romantic; what is not in dispute is that each played an influential role in the other's life, and that Montaigne's account of what a friendship can be was drawn from this one.

The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

La Boétie's claim on posterity rests on a short text: the *Discours de la servitude volontaire*, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Tradition long held that he wrote it at eighteen, in 1549; modern scholarship places it more probably in 1552 or 1553, while he was still at university.

The argument is disarmingly simple and very hard to escape. A tyrant is one man. He cannot compel millions by his own strength. He rules because the ruled cooperate — they obey his orders, collect his taxes, staff his armies, applaud his person. His power is not something he possesses but something continually supplied to him from below. La Boétie's diagnosis of why people supply it is bleak: once a people has surrendered its liberty, it becomes corrupted, and comes in time to prefer servitude to freedom, forgetting what the alternative even felt like.

The conclusion follows without violence. If domination depends on obedience, then withdrawing obedience destroys it. No uprising is required, no tyrannicide, no army — only mass refusal. In making that argument La Boétie became one of the earliest advocates of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance, and one of the first thinkers to treat obedience and domination as two faces of a single relationship rather than as separate phenomena.

It was not the kind of text a serving magistrate could publish. The Discourse circulated privately during his lifetime and appeared in print only in 1576, thirteen years after his death.

Poet and Humanist

La Boétie was, in his own estimation and that of his contemporaries, a man of letters as much as a jurist. He was an accomplished poet, moved in the orbit of the Pléiade — the circle of Pierre de Ronsard, Jean Daurat and Jean-Antoine de Baïfs that was then remaking French verse on classical models — and worked as a translator, producing French versions of Xenophon and Plutarch. The humanist reading is visible in the Discourse itself, which is the work of someone who had spent a great deal of time with the ancients' accounts of liberty and its loss.

Germignan, 1563

He died of illness on 18 August 1563 at Germignan, near Bordeaux. He was thirty-two. Montaigne, who was with him, spent the rest of his life writing around the absence.

The afterlife of the Discourse has been extraordinary and largely posthumous. Twentieth-century anarchist thinkers — Gustav Landauer, Bart de Ligt, Simone Weil — claimed La Boétie as a forerunner. Gene Sharp, the most influential modern theorist of nonviolent resistance and a source for civil-resistance movements around the world, returned to him repeatedly. Every campaign built on strikes, boycotts and mass non-cooperation rests on the proposition a French law student set down before he was twenty-five: that the powerful are powerful only for as long as everyone else keeps agreeing to it.