Étienne de la Boétie

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces." 

Étienne de La Boétie  has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most notable friendships. But he would be better remembered, as some historians have come to recognize, as one of the seminal political philosophers, not only as a founder of modern political philosophy in France but also for the timeless relevance of many of his theoretical insights.  Étienne de la Boétie was born in Sarlat, in the Perigord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an aristocratic family. His father was a royal official of the Perigord region and his mother was the sister of the president of the Bordeaux Parlement (assembly of lawyers). Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by his uncle and namesake, the curate of Bouilbonnas, and received his law degree from the University of Orléans in 1553. His great and precocious ability earned La Boétie a royal appointment to the Bordeaux Parlement the following year, despite his being under the minimum age. There he pursued a distinguished career as  judge and diplomatic negotiator until his untimely death in 1563, at the age of thirty-two. La Boétie was also a distinguished poet and humanist, translating Xenophon and Plutarch, and being closely connected with the leading young Pleiade group of poets, including Pierre Ronsard, Jean Dorat, and Jean-Antoine de Baif.

La Boétie's great contribution to political thought was written while he was a law student at the University of Orleans, where he imbibed the spirit of free inquiry that prevailed there. In the ferment of his law school days at Orleans, Étienne de La Boétie composed his brief but scintillating, profound and deeply radical Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Discours de la Servitude Volontaire).  The Discourse was circulated in manuscript form and never published by La Boétie. One can speculate that its radical views were an important reason for the author's with holding it from publication. It achieved a considerable fame in local Perigordian intellectual circles, however. This can be seen by the fact that Montaigne had read the essay long before he first met La Boétie as a fellow member of the Bordeaux Parlement in 1559.