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

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-DEC-05

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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:

Nostre nature est ainsi, que les communs devoirs de l'amitie l'emportent une bonne partie du cours de nostre vie. Il est raisonnable d'aimer la vertu, d'estimer les beaus faicts, de reconnoistre le bien d'ou l' on l'a receu, et diminuer souvent de nostre aise pour augmenter l'honneur et avantage de celui qu'on aime et qui le merite. (35) (9) [Our nature is such that the mutual obligations of friendship win out for a good part of the course of our lives. It is reasonable to love virtue, to hold good deeds in esteem, to recognize good whence it has been received, and often to diminish our comfort to increase the honor and advantage of him whom, deservingly, we love.]

Friendship is "la victoire de la liberte sur la domination, de la franchise sur la convoitise" [victory of liberty over domination, of freedom over covetousness] (37). Nature intended to found human society upon "fraternal affection," in the mutual desire to bring good to others, and to help them when in need, "ayans les uns puissance de donner aide, les autres besoin d'en recevoir" [some having the power to give assistance, others being in need to receive it] (41). Here we should recall the magnificent portrait, Neo-Platonic in its idealism, which La Boetie paints of universal human friendship:

Puis doncques que ceste bonne mere [Nature] nous a donne a tous ce grand present de la voix et de la parolle pour nous accointer et fraterniser davantage et faire par la commune et mutuelle declaration de nos pensees une communion de nos volontes, et si elle a tasche par tous moyens de serrer et estreindre si fort le noeud de nostre alliance et societe, si elle a monstre en toutes choses qu'elle ne vouloit pas tant nous faire tous unis que tous uns, il ne faut pas faire doute que nous ne soions tous naturellement libres puisque nous sommes tous compaignons. Et ne peut tomber en l'entendement de personne que nature ait mis aucun en servitude, nous aiant tous mis en compaignie. (42) [Since, therefore, this good mother [Nature] gave us all this great gift of voices and words in order to acquaint us, to make us all the more brothers, to create, by the common and mutual declaration of our thoughts, a communion of wills; if she has tried to tie and bind so tightly the knot of our alliance and our society, if she has demonstrated in all things that she desired less to unite us all than to make us all one, we must not doubt that we are naturally free since we are all companions. And no one can understand that nature placed anyone in servitude, she who rather put us in company.]

We understand better why the author of the Essais compared La Boetie's treatise to a "tableau riche, poly et forme selon l'art" (183) [a rich, polished picture, formed according to art], for La Boetie's eloquence must have seduced Montaigne. Certainly...

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