Friendship and Voluntary Servitude: Plato, Ficino, and Montaigne

Aussi demeure il une autre servitude volontaire, non subjette à aucune infamie: Asçavoir 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 Boétie'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'amitié" [Of Friendship], he had decided to honor the memory of his friend by placing La Boétie'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 Boétie'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 trouvé que cet ouvrage a esté depuis mis en lumiere, et à mauvaise fin, par ceux qui cherchent à troubler et changer l'estat de notre police, sans se soucier s'ils l'amendront, qu'ils ont meslé à d'autres escris de leur farine, je me suis dédit 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 Boétie's Discours. Indeed, in 1580 he underlined its imperfections:

Et affin que la memoire de l'auteur n'en soit interessée en l'endroit de ceux qui n'ont peu connoistre de près ses opinions et ses actions, je les advise que ce subject fut traicté par luy en son enfance, par maniere d'exercitation seulement, comme subject vulgaire et tracassé 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 Boétie 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 Boétie'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...