How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  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:

  (illustration credit i5.1)

  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.

  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?

  One radical theory has come and gone from circulation a few times in recent years. As remarked, On Voluntary Servitude has features so Montaignelike that it could almost be his own writing. It talks about habit, nature, perspective, and friendship—four themes that resound throughout the Essays. It emphasizes inner freedom as a path to political resistance: a Montaignean position. The work is filled with examples from classical history, just like the Essays. It feels like an Essay. It is persuasive, entertaining, and digression-prone. The author often goes off at some tangent—say, into a discussion of the Pléiade group of sixteenth-century poets—before coming to with a remark such as, “But to return to our purpose, which I had almost lost,” or “But to return from where, I don’t know how, I had lost the thread of my discussion.” This playful pretense at disorganization seems unusual in a young man’s literary exercise, but it fills the piece with life and spontaneity. The author talks to us as if we were sitting together over a glass of wine, or had bumped into each other on a Bordeaux street corner. The suspicion dawns: could Montaigne, rather than La Boétie, have been the author of On Voluntary Servitude?

  But it must have been by La Boétie, comes the reply; copies of the manuscript were being passed around Bordeaux. Yet none of today’s surviving copies is in La Boétie’s hand—all were made by others—and the only clear source we have for the “passed around” story is Montaigne himself. It is also Montaigne who identifies the author as La Boétie, and Montaigne who talks of it as a student piece. Perhaps the teenage Rimbaud here was the hothead given to rushing in and out of parlement chambers, not the prematurely judicious La Boétie. Or perhaps it was not the work of a young man at all: that would explain a few anachronistic references in the text. Perhaps, as some enthusiastic conspiracy theorists suggest, Montaigne wrote the piece much later and inserted the anachronisms to tip off smart readers to the deception.

  The first person to try attributing On Voluntary Servitude to Montaigne, in 1906, was the maverick Montaignist Arthur-Antoine Armaingaud, a man with a record of making outrageous suggestions and sitting back to watch the feathers fly. Almost no one agreed with Armaingaud at the time, and few do now, but his hypothesis has won over a new generation of mavericks, notabl
y Daniel Martin and David Lewis Schaefer. Schaefer is keen to find a revolutionary underbelly in Montaigne on principle, as was Armaingaud, while Daniel Martin has a general penchant for approaching the book like a cryptic crossword full of clues. “Removing On Voluntary Servitude from the Essays would be like removing the flute from a symphony orchestra,” he writes.

  The idea of Montaigne writing a radical, proto-anarchist tract, then whipping up a dust storm of false information and hiding hints where only the sharp-eyed could spot them, appeals on several levels. Like all conspiracy theories, it offers the thrill of fitting the pieces together, and it makes Montaigne glamorous: a one-man revolutionary cell and a master of intrigue.

  Occasional signs can be found in the Essays that Montaigne was capable of playing the slyboots when he wanted to. Once, he used an elaborate trick to help a friend who suffered from impotence and was afraid a spell had been cast on him. Instead of reasoning him out of it, Montaigne gave the friend a robe and a magical-looking coin engraved with “celestial figures.” He told him to perform a series of rituals with this medallion whenever he was about to have sex, first laying it over his kidneys, then tying it around his waist, then lying down with his partner and pulling the robe over both of them. The trick worked. Montaigne felt a bit guilty, even though he had done it for his friend’s benefit. Yet this shows that he could practice deception if he felt the situation called for it, or if the psychology of the case fascinated him enough.