Montaigne, Author of On Voluntary Servitude

But contrary to Rothbard’s claim about VS’s supposed “vital insights” into the “eternal problem” of “strategy,” if by “strategy” Rothbard simply means people’s “refusing to concede that the state is in charge,” such a proposal is hard to take seriously. (Imagine the fate of those who would dare to deny that the leaders of the world’s various despotisms are “in charge,” either in Montaigne’s time or in our own.) Moreover, the work’s explicit praise of tyrannicides, and its obscuring of the distinction between kings and tyrants (following Machiavelli in this respect) casts further doubt on the “strategy” of “civil disobedience” that Rothbard attributes to it (The Politics of Obedience, p. 17).

Having long studied Montaigne—my published works include The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Cornell University Press, 1990; second ed. 2019) and an edited volume of Freedom Over Servitude: Montaigne, La Boétie, and “On Voluntary Servitude” (1998)—I was invited to speak on his thought at George Mason University in 2022. ² I was then asked by the editors of the Just Sentiments collection at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org to compose this article about why I think Montaigne wrote VS.

Were Montaigne to have authored VS, that would obviously affect our understanding of Montaigne’s own political intent. But while my essay “Montaigne and La Boétie” in Freedom Over Servitude analyzes the argument of VS, as well as its authorship, in the present remarks I limit myself to the latter question of authorship. In doing so, I also draw on contributions to the 1998 book by three other scholars: Daniel Martin, Michael Platt, and Régine Reynolds-​Cornell.

VS was first published during France’s politico-​religious wars, which lasted from 1562 to 1589. A part of VS (without a named author) was published in 1574 by Protestant editors. The work then appeared for the first time in its complete form in 1576–77, again anonymously and at the hands of the Protestants.

Despite the revolutionary appearance of the author’s protest against monarchical rule, made clear in its opening lines, the unidentified author fills his “discourse” with allusions to classical Greek and Roman history and makes only a single reference to contemporary political events. He never makes specific the action he wishes to provoke. While VS is reported to have enjoyed a widespread diffusion, sometimes in translation, in Scotland, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, as well as France, its argument was sufficiently general that it might have had different political consequences in those areas. However, it seems clear that VS denounces monarchic and even oligarchic rule as illegitimate, by comparison with republicanism. And as already noted, despite Rothbard’s interpretation of it as a work advocating for “nonviolent” resistance to authority, the praise the author gives to tyrannicides compels us to doubt how truly “civil,” let alone passive, was the disobedience he favored.

Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563) was a member of an aristocratic family in the Périgord region of southwestern France. He was appointed to the Bordeaux Parlement (a judicial court) in 1554, when he was twenty-​four years old, much younger than normal for such appointments. There is evidence that he performed an important role in certain negotiations with the royal Court. He served on the Bordeaux Parlement until his death at the age of thirty-​three in 1563. La Boétie was known to some of his leading contemporaries as a man of erudition. Practically all our other knowledge of him derives from Montaigne.

It is only in 1580, seventeen years after La Boétie’s death, that anyone—namely, Montaigne—claimed that VS, which, again, had appeared anonymously in the mid-​1570s, was written by La Boétie. And no other basis for that claim has ever been confirmed.

In 1580, Montaigne published the first edition of his Essays. In the chapter “On Friendship” (I.28), Montaigne reports having contemplated imitating the technique of Mannerist painters who put the most carefully crafted part of their work in its very center. “On Friendship” is the twenty-​eighth chapter, and it immediately precedes the numerically central chapter of Book I of the Essays.

Claiming to be unable “to undertake a rich, polished picture” himself, the author recounts having chosen to install in its place a “discourse” by La Boétie, which Montaigne reports La Boétie had titled Voluntary Servitude while others subsequently “rebaptized” it with the title “Against One.”³ While claiming that La Boétie wrote it “in his earliest youth, in honor of liberty against tyrants,” Montaigne adds that the work “has long been circulating in the hands of men of understanding, not without great and well-​merited commendation, for it is a fine thing, and as full as can be.” Still, Montaigne laments, “It was far from being the best he could do, and if at the more mature age when I knew him, he had adopted a plan such as mine, of putting his ideas in writing, we should see many rare things which would bring us very close to the glory of antiquity.” Unfortunately, in the absence of La Boétie’s having followed such a plan, “nothing has remained except” VS and “some observations on that Edict of January [1562], made famous by our civil wars, which will perhaps yet find their place elsewhere.” “That was all I could recover of what he left,” Montaigne adds, “I, to whom in his will, with such loving recommendation, with death in his throat, he bequeathed his library and his papers—except for the little volume of his works which I have had published.”

Scholars have long puzzled over the apparent contradiction between the seemingly revolutionary argument of On Voluntary Servitude and the conservative character of La Boétie’s remarks on the Edict of January regarding royal policy towards the Protestants (nearly all scholars are confident that the existing text is La Boétie’s work). The other “works” that Montaigne published under his friend’s name were a set of Latin poems, French verses, and translations of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Plutarch’s “Rules of Marriage” and “Letter of Consolation to His Wife.” Montaigne published all of them in 1571.

Montaigne claims to have encountered VS in manuscript form “long before [he] had seen” La Boétie, leading to a most “entire” and “perfect” friendship between them. However, for most of this section of the Essays (I.28), he largely subordinates his account of that relationship in favor of the more general theme of the different forms of friendship and their relative merits, illustrated by classical examples and judgments. Only late in the chapter does he invite us to “listen a while to this boy of eighteen.” (In the final, posthumously published edition of the Essays, however, Montaigne claims that La Boétie was only sixteen when he wrote VS.)

Starting with the first edition of the Essays, having aroused the reader’s expectation that the following chapter will consist of the text of VS, Montaigne suddenly purports to have changed his mind. That is, because the 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” (presumably, its Protestant publishers), and “because they have mixed [La Boétie’s] work up with some of their own concoctions,” Montaigne claims to have altered his plan. Then, having previously celebrated the work’s merits, Montaigne proceeds to disparage it so as to avoid besmirching the author’s reputation. He advises readers that the work was composed “in his boyhood, only by way of an exercise, as a common theme hashed over in a thousand places and books.” While assuring readers that its author “believed what he wrote,” and that he would rightly “have been born in [republican] Venice rather than Sarlat [La Boétie’s actual French birthplace],” Montaigne stresses that La Boétie “had another maxim sovereignly imprinted in his soul, to obey and submit most religiously to the laws under which he was born.” He writes that “there was never a better citizen, or one more devoted” to his country’s “tranquility,” or “more hostile to the commotions and innovations of his time,” which he would rather “suppress” than provide them with “material that would excite them further.”

In consequence of his ostensible change of mind, instead of including VS, Montaigne proposes to devote the following chapter to something “gayer and more lusty” from “the same season of his [friend’s] life”—and then supplies in that chapter (I.29) “twenty-​nine sonnets of Étienne de la Boétie.”

Several questions are in order here.

First: If Montaigne really wished to avoid associating La Boétie’s name with VS, why did he leave any reference to it? Again, without Montaigne’s discussion, nobody would have reason to identify it as La Boétie’s work at all.

Second: Having praised the work so highly at the start, why disparage it as a conventional schoolboy’s exercise (while lowering its author’s age) at the end of the chapter?

Third: Why reduce La Boétie’s age by two years in the final edition the Essays?

Fourth: While the sonnets that Montaigne attributed to La Boétie were included in all editions of the Essays published in his lifetime, he removed them from his final manuscript, remarking that “these verses may be seen elsewhere.” Why did Montaigne remove those sonnets? (Note that no copy of the sonnets other than the one Montaigne includes in his book has ever been discovered.)⁴

The foregoing problems lend strong support to the thesis that the author is simply playing with his readers, a theory advanced by Montaigne scholar Daniel Martin. No fair reading of VS, in my opinion, can view it as in any way expressive of the conservatism Montaigne attributes to its author near the end of I.28 (even though the conservatism is qualified by his attribution to La Boétie of a preference to have lived under a republic rather than a monarchy, a wish Montaigne endorses). Again, that conservatism is expressed in the Memoir on the Edict of 1562, which indeed appears to have been the work of La Boétie. But in removing the sonnets from the final edition of the Essays, was Montaigne not effectively inviting readers to seek out a copy of VS, which he had initially praised so highly? (Starting with Pierre Coste in 1727 and running into the nineteenth century, editors of the Essays did include VS in the twenty-​ninth chapter of Book I.)

Among scholars of Montaigne’s work, it was the great Arthur Armaingaud (1842–1935) who first noticed certain anachronistic references in VS—that is, observations that seemed to clearly refer to events and publications that occurred after La Boétie’s death—that made it seem likely that Montaigne had at least altered the text of the work, if not composed it entirely.

The story gets even more complicated when we examine both the dedicatory prefaces that Montaigne composed for each of his friend’s works and an extended letter Montaigne directed to his own father. In the letter, Montaigne describes La Boétie’s death, which he appended to the volume he published in 1571 containing both works. These dedications add several more mysteries to the tale:

Mystery 1: In 1571, Montaigne’s father had already been dead for seven years, yet the dedicatory preface addressed to him is presented as if newly written for the 1570 edition.

Mystery 2: In the “Notice to the Reader,” with which he prefaces his volume of La Boétie’s translations, Montaigne ambiguously remarks, “you owe to me all that you enjoy of the late Monsieur Étienne de la Boétie.”

Mystery 3: In the dedicatory letter to La Boétie’s translation of Plutarch’s “Letter of Consolation to His Wife,” Montaigne consoles his own wife for the loss of their daughter “in the second year of her life.” Montaigne’s daughter had passed away at the age of about only two months. (It was Plutarch’s daughter who died at two years. As Daniel Martin observes, given the high rate of infant mortality in Montaigne’s time, it would not have been customary to offer written consolation for the loss of a two-​month-​old baby.)

Mystery 4: Then, in that same letter, Montaigne reports that his late friend had bequeathed him “his papers and his books,” whereas the letter dedicated to his father had mentioned only his “library and [his] books.” The absence of any reference to “papers” casts doubt on whether La Boétie had bequeathed him any unpublished materials at all—though Montaigne asks his wife to “remember” the later version of the gift.

Further mysteries about Montaigne’s relationship with La Boétie have been uncovered by scholars Floyd Gray and Barry Weller.⁵ As Gray notes, Montaigne’s claim in “On Friendship” that he had enjoyed La Boétie’s companionship for four years before the latter’s death seems to be contradicted by a remark in the “Notice to the Reader” where Montaigne writes that their acquaintanceship “began only about six years” earlier. Gray supplies evidence based on their overlapping memberships in the Bordeaux Parlement that Montaigne and La Boétie might have known each other for as many as nine years, while noting that “the two could have been together but a few months at the very most,” considering the repeated trips away from the Bordeaux area the two men took from 1559 on.

Gray also points out that Montaigne’s account of his friend’s death bears a curious resemblance to classical accounts of the death of Socrates (to whom he compares La Boétie in Essays III.12), while Weller notes that it echoes the Biblical account of the death of Christ—turning La Boétie, on his deathbed, into a combination of “Jesus … and Socrates in [Plato’s] Phaedo.”

All of the foregoing provides ground for taking seriously the contention of Professor Martin that Montaigne was the author not only of VS but of all works he published under his friend’s name. Martin offers a plausible speculation: following La Boétie’s death, the outrages committed by Catholic forces under the supervision of Catherine de Medici increased. Provoked by the outrages, Montaigne might have composed VS and then circulated it among a few friends. (We have testimony of an Italian bibliophile who read a copy of VS  in 1570 at the home of Montaigne’s friend Henri de Mesmes, the dedicatee of one of the works Montaigne published under La Boétie’s name.) But as the religious wars increased in severity, Montaigne may have realized that to have himself identified as its author would be hazardous, even putting his life at stake, despite his aristocratic status and political influence. Wanting to see VS in print, while obscuring his status as its author, he then had to turn his late friend into an “author” by publishing in a series of translations and poems that he himself had composed, thus making the attribution of VS to La Boétie more plausible. Yet, not wanting to deprive VS of future influence, Montaigne, in 1580, took care to whet readers’ appetite for it by first praising it to the skies in his essay “On Friendship,” even while claiming (even in the first edition of the Essays) to have decided at the last moment to omit it from the Essays (at least a decade after its presumable composition), and finally choosing to remove the sonnets with which he had replaced it from the last edition of his own book. Was that removal not designed to incite readers to seek out a copy of VS?

In my contribution to Freedom over Servitude, I argue that the anti-​monarchical thrust of that work harmonizes with the liberal-​republican teaching of the Essays itself, as I articulate in The Political Philosophy of Montaigne.⁶ I refer interested readers to both books for elaboration of those claims. I must close this essay with just two more points.

First, fortifying the likelihood that Montaigne composed VS, Malcolm Smith, in his 1987 edition of the work, cites numerous stylistic parallels between that work and the Essays. This includes, as Régine Reynolds-​Cornell puts it, “an exact duplication of many quotations” (I should note that Smith does not endorse the contention that Montaigne composed VS.)

Second, in his contribution to my 1998 volume, Michael Platt provides what I believe is the only plausible interpretation for the claim made in VS that peoples who are enslaved by the rule of “one” could liberate themselves from that situation simply by refusing to obey their “tyrant.” That refusal could be effective if the “One” to whom they have been subjected is the Biblical or Christian God, in whose name so many had been persecuted or killed. In The Political Philosophy of Montaigne, I provide substantial evidence that Montaigne aimed for such a liberation—though it would probably take centuries to accomplish. In other words, I argue that Montaigne was one of the early exponents of the liberal political and religious Enlightenment that came to fruition in the eighteenth century. Its aim was not the abolition of religion, but the softening of its demands and the removal of its political authority. The American Constitution, with its establishment of republican government, the separation of church and state, and the guarantee of freedom of conscience and other individual rights, remains the finest fruit of that enterprise.