Introduction: O hommes disposez & prompts à la servitude

The quotation which forms the title of this Introduction comes from an anecdote about the emperor Tiberius reported by the Roman historian Tacitus when denouncing in his Annals the sycophancy of the age of empire:

There is a tradition that whenever Tiberius left the senate house, he exclaimed in Greek: ‘Men fit to be slaves!’. Even he, freedom's enemy, became impatient of such abject servility.¹

Here a despotic, freedom-hating ruler contemptuously castigates the obsequiousness of the Roman Senate, which abases itself before him despite being composed of free-born citizens. The quotation was invoked as a parallel for current circumstances in late sixteenth-century French political literature and was later alluded to by Racine.² Its very popularity is an index of the extent to which in early modern French historical, political, and literary traditions, questions of freedom and servitude remained perennial topics of debate. They came to the fore with particular acuity during the French Wars of Religion (1562–98) when tyranny and submission, liberty and obedience attracted particular scrutiny in relation to the legitimacy and authority of monarchy and the authenticity of political systems.

For the purposes of coherence, this special issue of Early Modern French Studies chooses a particularly exemplary focus for its investigations of these themes: Estienne de La Boétie's La Servitude volontaire (also called Discours de la servitude volontaire). Originally composed, according to the historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, in response to the protests against ‘la gabelle’ in 1548,³ this treatise certainly underwent a stage of major re-writing in the mid-1550s.⁴ Its arresting central proposition – that people willingly submit to their own slavery – made it a radical choice for political use and commentary in the sixteenth century when it was favoured by all sides in the civil conflict long after its author's early demise in 1563. Its interest, though, is more than merely historical. Its popularity remains undiminished today as a point of conceptual reference in a variety of contexts.⁵ Long considered a classic of political theory, it presents in advantageously concentrated form central questions of government, society, and the individual. In this special issue, La Servitude volontaire is discussed as a work fully embedded in its own time, as a springboard to more abstract questions, and as a piece of writing with long-range resonances among other early modern French writers. Its significance can be seen in the span of areas covered in these pages – philosophy, political and legal theory, history of ideas, vernacular literature – and in their thematic spectrum: political problems such as obedience vs servility, or monarchy vs tyranny; models for freedom, including the social bond; civic and personal liberty and institutional belonging; more fundamentally still, the vocabularies of freedom and enslavement. As the articles gathered here will demonstrate, these are not necessarily discrete themes and approaches, but interlinked and intersecting, giving a prismatic sense of La Boétie's treatise as well as of its intellectual reach and influence.

Among the most central issues La Servitude volontaire raises is that of the subject and subjecthood in relation to slavery and freedom. This topic forms the basis of Laurent Gerbier's article. The historian Thierry Wanegffelen had claimed that ‘la Modernité occidentale a d’entrée été constituée de deux phénomènes, l’assujettissement et la subjectivation […] bien plus que simultanés : inséparables et proprement dépendants l’un de l’autre’.⁶ It is in this light that Gerbier considers La Boétie's contribution to the modern philosophical understanding of subject formation, in the first instance cementing the crucial lexical link between subject and subjection in La Servitude volontaire (‘tout se passe comme si seule la sujétion parvenait à nous subjectiver’, p. 16). But his analysis then turns to ‘le sujet libre et la question de la naissance’ (p. 19), giving close consideration to the two passages in La Servitude volontaire devoted to ‘fictions de la naissance’⁷ and the states of solitude and company which can give rise to different modalities of subjectivisation. For Gerbier, indeed, La Boétie's philosophical contribution will lie in the idea of ‘la naissance du sujet’ where both nouns have equal weight and value.

Picking up the philosophical tradition from a more legal slant, Sophie Nicholls sets out to present a more traditional picture of La Boétie than sometimes encountered. In particular reaction to the conception of the Sarladais as a neo-republican radical, she emphasises the classical and medieval components of his thinking. These components are by no means always openly avowed in La Boétie's treatise. Notwithstanding, Aristotle's Metaphysics and Politics, the lex regia and 1 Samuel 8, and the De Tyranno of Bartolus of Sassoferrato all compose, Nicholls argues, an intellectual substratum revealing La Boétie's debt to a particular legal, political, and Scholastic heritage which, in some manifestations, could be sceptical of the power of both monarchs and the people. Nicholls thus confirms the anti-democratic stance of La Boétie.⁸

Equally legal in its vision, Olivier Guerrier's article studies the vocabularies of enslavement and emancipation through the notion of word as bond and bind. It takes a Latin legal tag (brocard), ‘humankind is bound by words, the horns of bulls by ropes’, which quickly becomes a French proverb, and traces its (and their) transit from the original judicial contexts in medieval and Renaissance glossators, to literary expressions in Rabelais, La Boétie, and Montaigne. Guerrier highlights the semantic transformations the brocard underwent, transmuting its original, positive meaning (bond) into its opposite (bind: what constrains or tethers). Yet a perceptible shift occurs when the tag migrates to vernacular literature. The bond is now re-defined not as a legal obligation, but as a human linkage characteristic of the ‘bien nés’ for La Boétie and the ‘âmes bien réglées et fortes d’elles-mêmes’ for Montaigne. ‘Bond’ is re-energised to become the expression of an ideal community or just of the human giving and receiving of the word – the word as bond, binding but not a bondage: ‘Nous ne sommes hommes, et ne nous tenons les uns et les autres que par la parole’ is Guerrier's telling quotation from Montaigne's ‘Des menteurs’ towards the end of his article.

In a complementary perspective, John O’Brien begins on a similar track to Nicholls – in this case, La Boétie as he occurs in the modern neo-republican thinking of Pettit and especially Skinner – but follows partly in the legal tradition of the word studied by Guerrier through exploring the Ciceronian notion of free speech as it was received and understood in the parlementaire circles represented by La Boétie, L’Hospital, and Montaigne. He argues that that notion of free speech, present in La Boétie, is gradually erased by the onset of the Wars of Religion, but restored indirectly through the role Montaigne allots Socrates within the Essais as well as through the function of historical figures such as Cremutius Cordus or writers such as Herodotus and Lucan. The essayist is thus seen as re-staging the relation and tension between personal and civic freedom and institutional belonging already articulated by Michel de L’Hospital, but now expressed through a model that uses literary devices as its primary medium.

Montaigne's adjustments to La Boétie's thinking are also explored by Emma Claussen's analysis of the good and bad life within a political framework. Her discussion is informed by a consideration of both Classical thinking (Aristotle, Seneca, Plato) about the good life and modern writers describing ‘bare life’ (Agamben) and ‘social death’ (Patterson). Fed by images of sleeping and waking, forgetting and recollecting, Claussen's particular emphasis on the ethics of the biological life demonstrates what it means to lead the hollow, ghostly existence of the unfree according to La Boétie's account. This then leads to an analysis of Montaigne's rather different reactions to the ‘tyranny’ of kidney stones, how they inflect his attitude towards living, and how a life such as his, even if less than philosophically perfectly good, may nonetheless sustain a philosophy of existence able to accommodate the constraints of the biological body. By firmly emphasising states of concrete existence rather than states of contemplative being, Claussen thus draws our attention to the axiological re-evaluations undertaken by Montaigne in particular.

Wes Williams rounds off this special issue with an analysis of the imagery underpinning the notion of tyranny and its lexicon. In De regimine civitatis (c.1350), Bartolus had studied political regimes using traditional distinctions drawn from Aristotle and Plato. But he added to this conventional series another form of government, that of the ‘regimen monstrosum’, characterised by a multitude of heads.⁹ That same notion of ‘monstrosum’ is the subject of Williams's essay here. From tyranny itself as monstrous to the figure of Nero as the very embodiment of ‘ce vilain monstre […] ceste orde et sale peste du monde’ in La Boétie,¹⁰ and then on to Hobbes and Racine, Williams describes a political monster, the tyrant, defined as the object of others’ passion as much as the agent of his own will. Williams underlines that if we name the monster, it also names something in us. He thus offers us a particular perspective on the politics of naming, which has been crucial to critical thinking about La Boétie since at least the time of Lefort.¹¹ At the same time, he approaches from another direction the problem of obeying and serving, bonding and binding, that recurs in other articles: what is it that keeps the political subject in thrall, or enthralled, and why? And so Williams returns us, via that crucial dimension of desire,¹² to those questions of being and belonging paradoxically at play in the concept of enslavement. Shifting the terms to these questions also helps explain why it is, according to La Servitude volontaire, that the slave makes the master rather than the reverse: subjects take pleasure in their own subservience, finding perverse comfort in the experience of political domination.¹³ (Tiberius turned out to be right, after all.)

Alongside these criss-crossing perspectives are the implications of sub-themes raised by the contributors. One subterranean thread linking a number of articles – Laurent Gerbier, Sophie Nicholls, and John O’Brien among others – is agency. The intellectual positions these three contributors study help throw into relief the question of bodily agency as the instrument of habitual enslavement. In one particular passage of La Servitude volontaire, for instance, infant kings are described in this way: ‘nés et nourris dans le sein de la tirannie, tirent avec le lait la nature du tiran’.¹⁴ That is the reading of many of the manuscripts. It is already a disturbing image, with the apparently comforting ‘sein … lait’ suddenly becoming the channel of tyranny into the infant's body. But Beale and a few other manuscripts, as well as the print traditions, present the variant ‘dans le sang’.¹⁵ The familiar image of nurturing has now become further disrupted by violence; on this reading, the milk was always already blood, and the tyrant's hold over his people is not just a matter of the mesmerising power of the name, but of a digested habit that sustains his metabolism by feasting, leech-like, on the people as ‘serfs hereditaires’. Different understandings of agency, varying in intensity and implication, are thus on offer depending on the textual tradition one follows. Meanwhile, Olivier Guerrier's discussion of the role of animals in La Servitude volontaire and elsewhere raises the question of the distribution of agency across human and non-human spheres by La Boétie and its effect on the political process. It also opens up the question of the instinct. If animals can teach us about the instinctual understanding, recognition, and defence of freedom, then the yearning for freedom is not only part of reason, as La Boétie has it, but lies also at a more fundamental level of the embodied life, a basic biological ethics, to extend Emma Claussen's model. Equally, Wes Williams’s more-than-animalistic monster harbours imagery of the tyrant as a cannibal in the Renaissance understanding of that term: not literally (or only) a man-eater, but someone who devours public and private goods.¹⁶ Substantial passages in the early pages of La Servitude volontaire are given over to precisely this idea,¹⁷ composing what is in effect an extensive gloss on the Homeric epithet of the ruler as ‘folk-devouring’ (Iliad, I, l. 231) which La Boétie otherwise expressly reserves for the tyrant's henchmen and hangers-on.¹⁸ This image is related to avarice, as La Boétie knew before Ronsard.¹⁹ The political monster, along with his followers, is thus also a palimpsest of insatiable, all-consuming, cannibalistic greed. The tyrant's ‘regimen’ is bicephalous, matching monster size with cannibal quantity.

In early modern France and indeed Europe, La Servitude volontaire enjoyed a vibrant and usually controversial life as a political treatise.²⁰ But it did not suffer, and has never suffered, the usual fate of such ephemera. The articles in this special issue help explain why.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John O’Brien

John O'Brien is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Durham. He is most recently (2022) the editor of ‘Montaigne outre-Manche’, a special number of the Bulletin de la Société Internationale des Amis de Montaigne. He is currently working on a book entitled De la codicologie à l'exégèse. Études sur La Boétie.

Notes

1 Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. by Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), III, 65, p. 147; in the original, Tiberius exclaims, ‘O homines ad servitutem paratos’. The French version is taken from Les Annales de P. Cornile Tacite, trans. by Estienne de La Planche [and Claude Fauchet] (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1581), fol. 116^v.

2 For some other occurrences of this phrase, see the anonymous (Protestant) tract Discours par Dialogue, sur l’Edict de la revocation de la paix ([n.p.], Imprimé nouvellement, 1569), sig. [Ciij^r]; Jean du Tillet, Memoires et recerches (Rouen: Pour Philippe de Tours, 1578), p. 1; André Maillard, Apologie ([n. p., n. pub.], 1588), p. 67; Charles de Boss, Le Theatre de France (Paris: Guillaume Bichon, 1589), fol. 78^v; Plaidoyé des gens du roy faict en Parlement (Paris: Jehan Musar, 1593), p. 109; Jean Bouchet, Sermons de la simulée conversion […] de Henry de Bourbon (Paris: Guillaume Chaudiere, Robert Nivelle and Rolin Thierry, 1594), fol. 376^v. According to the Protestant pamphlet Copie d’une des lettres de M. Pierre du Quignet […] envoyee à l’esprit du Seigneur Marforio ([n. p.], Imprimé nouvellement, 1569), sig. Bii^r, Cardinal Charles de Lorraine used this phrase about the Royal Council. For Racine, see Britannicus, act IV, scene 4, l. 1444: ‘Leur prompte servitude a fatigué Tibère’.

3 This traditional explanation is challenged by Michel Magnien in Estienne de La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire ou Contr’un, ed. by Malcolm Smith with additional notes by Michel Magnien (Geneva: Droz, 2001), pp. 86–9.

4 See La Première Circulation de la ‘Servitude volontaire’ en France et au-delà, ed. by John O’Brien and Marc Schachter (Paris: Champion, 2019), pp. 75 and n. 7, 207–09, 212, 214.

5 See for example Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996); Frédéric Lordon, Capitalisme, désir et servitude (Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2010); Nicolas Chaignot Delage, La Servitude volontaire aujourd’hui : esclavages et modernité (Paris: PUF, 2012); Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule. Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013); André Bernard, Du refus de la servitude volontaire (Lyon: Atelier de création libertaire, 2015); Emmanuel Renault, Reconnaissance, conflit, domination (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017); Frédéric Gros, Désobéir (Paris: Albin Michel, 2017); David Bernasconi, En finir avec la servitude volontaire? Retrouver notre libre arbitre (Paris: Éditions Libre & Solidaire, 2019). Parts of Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (London: The Bodley Head, 2017) are instantly recognisable to readers of La Boétie.

6 Thierry Wanegffelen, Le Roseau pensant. Ruse de la modernité occidentale (Paris: Payot, 2011), p. 17.

7 La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire, ed. by Smith, pp. 45, 51–2.

8 Already adumbrated by Michel Magnien, ‘La Boétie démocrate? Le Discours de la servitude volontaire à contresens,’ Le Contresens, 14 (2014), on the website Transitions, n° 14 – M. Magnien, « La Boétie démocrate? » <mouvement-transitions.fr> [consulted July 2, 2021].

9 Diego Quaglioni, Politica e diritto nel trecento italiano. Il ‘De tyranno’ di Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1314–1357) con l’edizione critica dei trattati ‘De Guelphis et Gebellinis’, ‘De regimine civitatis’, e ‘De tyranno’ (Florence: Olschki, 1983), p. 152. I thank Laurent Gerbier for this reference. Cf. for an Erasmian parallel, Louis Delaruelle, ‘L’Inspiration antique dans le Discours de la servitude volontaire,’ RHLF, 17 (1910), 34–72 (p. 42).

10 La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire, ed. by Smith, p. 59.

11 Claude Lefort, ‘Le Nom d’Un,’ in Le Discours de la servitude volontaire, ed. by Miguel Abensour (Paris: Payot, 1985), pp. 247–307.

12 See also Lordon.

13 Cf. Gros, p. 68: ‘le corps social s’adore lui-même dans sa prosternation’ (sc. to the ‘nom seul d’un’).

14 La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire, ed. by Smith, p. 44.

15 For the Beale reading, see La Première Circulation, p. 299; the Memoires de l’estat de France, the Vive Description de la tyrannie, ms. BnF 20157 and the recently discovered ms. Cassation 241 all support ‘dans le sang’. Compare also D’Aubigné’'s image of France as the mother of warring children who cries to them: ‘[…] vous avez felons ensanglanté/Le sein qui vous nourrit, et qui vous a porté:/Or, vivez de venin, sanglante geniture,/Je n’ay plus que du sang pour vostre nourriture’, Les Tragiques, ed. by Jean-Raymond Fanlo (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020), Miseres, vv. 127–30. Similarly, Guillaume Bouchet, Troisiesme Livre des Serees (Paris: Adrian Perier, 1598), ‘Vingthuictiesme Seree’, p. 181: a dying mother fears her baby will suckle her blood when her milk dies with her.

16 Cf. Pierre Charron, De la sagesse (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1601), p. 512: ‘ces tyrans ronge-subiects, mange peuples’. The anonymous Apologie ou defense de tresillustre Prince Guillaume […] d’Orange ([Leiden]: Charles Sylvius, 1581), p. 49, had likewise described tyrants as ‘mangeurs de peuple’. In 1592, Simon Bélyard attacked Henri III as ‘mange-peuple larron’ in Le Guysien (Troyes: Jean Moreau, 1592), p. 65, while an anonymous pamphlet regarded him as ‘ravissant […] par Imposts insuportables nostre substance’, Response du peuple catholique de Paris, aux Pardons de Henry de Valois (Paris: Didier Millot, 1589), p. 4.

17 La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire, ed. by Smith, pp. 35, 39.

18 Ibid., p. 76.

19 Ibid., pp. 66, 68, 70; Pierre de Ronsard, Le Quatriesme Livre de la Franciade in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager and Michel Simonin, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), I, 1138, ll. 1224–26: ‘C’est Chilperic indigne d’estre Roy,/Mange-sujet, tout rouillé d’avarice/Cruel tyran’. On the topic, see Jonathan Patterson, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

20 See La Première Circulation.