French writer
Etienne of Boétie is famous for his Speech of the voluntary constraint, which it composed around 1548, but its life is about unknown. In 1554, he became adviser at the Parliament of Bordeaux, where he met, in 1557, Montaigne, to which bound a very sharp friendship; this one devoted chapter to him XXVIII of the first book of its Tests, heading Of the friendship.
Boétie translated various opuscules of the Greeks: Menagerie, of Xénophon; Rules of the marriage and Letter of consolation to its wife, Plutarque. He is perhaps the author of the Report on the pacification of the disorders, written around 1562, which preached a religious harmony.
The Speech of the voluntary constraint Boétie entrusted the manuscript of its Speech to Montaigne, which affirms in its Tests: “It is all that I ay to little recover of his relics <… > moy which it left <… >, by its will, heir to its library and its papers”. Only two handwritten copies us arrived from there, whose the first editions made by the calvinists differ, in their polemical works Clock alarm of François (1574) and Mesmoires of Estats de France under Charles Neuviesme (1577).
The Speech of the voluntary constraint was made up whereas Boétie was eighteen years old according to the first testimony of Montaigne, which hoped to insert it in its Tests; it would have been intended to denounce the repression carried out by the constable of Morello cherry in Guyenne in 1548 following the revolt of the pitaux one. But, following the publication of the Speech under the title of Contr' One in the version of 1574, Montaigne affirmed that Boétie had actually composed it in 1546; he thus sought to mark his difference of with the Protestants. Thus, the statute of the work was some confused as of its publication; was it indeed of a lampoon of circumstance, a fundamental reflection or a simple essay of a brilliant child??
The goal of the Speech is to discover how the men can accept their constraint so easily; according to Boétie, indeed, the tyrants have power only that which the people want to give them well; we all are “naturally free, since we all are equal”, and even if one can distinguish three types of tyrants - according to whether they are based on the force of the weapons, the dynastic succession or the election by the people -, Boétie notes that “their manner of reigning is always about the same one”. Thus, an infinite number men are found tyrannized by “only one hommeau, and generally more lasche and femelin of the nation”. However, it is not simple “cowardice” because, “to have freedom, it should only be wished”: Boétie wonders whether the men do not refuse this conquest because it is “too easy”. The first teaching of the Speech is thus optimistic: “Be determined not to be useful more, and you will be free.”
However, Boétie does not give up understanding how the men accept their constraint. The first explanation holds with the practice that they acquired to be useful: “… nourished and raised in serfdom without looking at front, are satisfied to live as they were born”. From this first reason rises that, “under the tyrants, the men become loose and effeminate”. The base of the domination holds in the structure even of the company, in which a chain of tyranny, more general smallest, makes it possible each one to make reign its characteristic and poor power on increasingly weaker than oneself: “Thus the tyrant controls the subjects the ones by the others.”
Boétie does not propose any method to leave the constraint; it does nothing but evoke, at the end of its Speech, the friendship which links “people of good” and which the tyrant cannot know, suggesting thus that the relations of mutual regard are a means of breaking the infinite cascade of tyrannies and of escaping the constraint. It also notes that some, with the image of Ulysses, “prouder and inspired better than the others, feel the weight of the yoke and cannot prevent oneself from shaking it”, preceding the designs which Nietzsche will develop three centuries later.
The reflection of Boétie is of a great modernity: it precedes thinkers as various as Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx or Clastres in the research of the origin of the political power and its nature. Unlike Machiavel, which a few years before him had revealed the power of the prince in his most secret springs, Boétie seeks to circumvent the power, and shows that the men have always freedom not to serve the tyrant.