Friendship and voluntary servitude: Plato, Ficino, and Montaigne.

 
    Aussi demeure il une autre servitude volontaire, non subjette a 
    aucune infamie: Ascavoir celle que concerne la vertu. 
 
    [Thus there remains another voluntary servitude, not subject to any 
    infamy: that is, that servitude which concerns virtue.] 
    Plato translated by Louis Le Roy (1559) (1) 

It is a well-known fact that in the original conception of his Essais, Montaigne had intended to organize the first book around what he considered Etienne de la Boetie's most important work, the Discours de la servitude volontaire, also called Le Contr' un. As early as 1574, while working on the chapter "De l'amitie" [Of Friendship], he had decided to honor the memory of his friend by placing La Boetie's short treatise at the "center"--"le plus bel endroit" [the best place]--of his first volume. (2) Around this "riche peinture" [rich picture], he declared, his own writings would be but graceless, strange grotesques (183a). (3) If Montaigne later decided not to publish his friend's Discours in his own collection of essays, it was, as he himself remarked, for political reasons. (4) La Boetie's attack on tyranny had since been used by Huguenots in their propaganda against the royal family. It had become dangerous for a writer to refer to the treatise, and even more so to give it a conspicuous place within his own work: (5)

 
    Parce que j'ay trouve que cet ouvrage a este depuis mis en lumiere, 
    et a mauvaise fin, par ceux qui cherchent a troubler et changer 
    l'estat de notre police, sans se soucier s'ils l'amendront, qu'ils 
    ont mesle a d'autres escris de leur farine, je me suis dedit de le 
    loger icy. (194a) 
 
    [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.] (144a) (6) 

We might wonder, however, just what initially compelled Montaigne to insert a condemnation of tyranny into a celebration of friendship, especially since he was perfectly aware of the aesthetic limitations of La Boetie's Discours. Indeed, in 1580 he underlined its imperfections:

 
    Et affin que la memoire de l'auteur n'en soit interessee en 
    l'endroit de ceux qui n'ont peu connoistre de pres ses opinions et 
    ses actions, je les advise que ce subject fut traicte par luy en son 
    enfance, par maniere d'exercitation seulement, comme subject 
    vulgaire et tracasse en mille endroits des livres. (194a) 
 
    [And so that the memory of the author may not be damaged in the eyes 
    of those who could not know his opinions and actions at close hand, 
    I beg to advise them that this subject was treated by him in his 
    boyhood, only by way of an exercise, as a common theme hashed over 
    in a thousand places in books.] (144a) 

Though readers of La Boetie have long examined the political aims and rhetorical design of this youthful work, they have not seemed particularly interested in the meaning it acquires when it becomes the central panel of the first book of the Essais. And yet, when the Servitude volontaire is included in Montaigne's text, it takes on a different meaning from the one we generally attribute to it. I propose a rereading of La Boetie's treatise in light of the Platonic theories of love as Montaigne understood them, through Marsilio Ficino's Latin and Louis Le Roy's French translations of the Symposium. (7) Indeed in Ficino and Le Roy the expressions "voluntaria servitus" and "servitude volontaire" carry an entirely different sense from that which La Boetie assigns to them in his treatise against tyranny. The new reading which I present here would seem to justify Montaigne's surprising choice of a political treatise to celebrate the memory of his friend.

Curiously, the Servitude volontaire is in fact the opposite of an essay on friendship. (8) La Boetie's thesis is clear: by willingly abandoning political liberty to the sovereign, subjects not only renounce their fundamental rights, but also unknowingly lose any possibility of future good relations with the sovereign. At the beginning of his treatise, La Boetie suggests that humans have a natural penchant for friendship--that is, altruistic desire, par excellence: