Montaigne: Selected Essays

La Boétie begins with a warning that any commander or leader can become arbitrary: “[T]he power of a single man once he takes on this title of ‘master’ is harsh and unreasonable” (284). He wonders why so many subject themselves to arbitrary rulers when their tyranny is possible solely because the subjects are willing to put up with it.

One answer is that “we must often obey force: we need to play for time, we cannot always get the upper hand” (285). Another is that we sometimes choose one who has always been good and then “take him away from a place where he did good to put him where he may do ill” (286). The real mystery lies in mass acceptance of arbitrary rule from “a single puny man, and generally the most cowardly” (286).

Two armies of equal size meet in battle. One side wishes to enslave the other; the other side fights for its freedom. The odds should favor the freedom fighters. So much more should the odds favor an entire nation against one tyrant, yet “[i]t is the people who enslave themselves” (287). For the tyrants, meanwhile, “the more they ruin and destroy, the more they are granted, the more they are served, the stronger they grow and they keep on getting stronger and more able to demolish and destroy everything” (288).

La Boétie asks, “How does [a tyrant] have so many hands to strike you, if he does not get them from you?” (289). In not even overthrowing the tyrant, but simply withholding support for him, “you will see him collapse of his own weight and break up” (289). Freedom is natural—even the beasts crave it and fight against capture—and servitude requires one person to do an injustice to another. Yet people willingly give up their liberty.

There are three ways to become a tyrant: by conquest, inheritance, and election: “Those elected treat them as if they had taken on bulls to tame; the conquerors treat them as their prey; the successors think to treat them as their natural slaves” (292).

Aside from conquests and dynasties, people “often lose their liberty through deception, and they are not enticed into this by someone else so often as they are deceived by themselves” (293). This happens often during times of war, when citizens, “rashly looking only to the present danger” (293), offer up their freedom for safety. Once in power, the ruler becomes a tyrant, the people quickly get used to servitude, and this habit is passed to their children. Still, “in every country, in every clime, subjection is bitter and being free is agreeable” (296), and a people will ache for freedom once they let themselves consider it.

The quest for freedom begins among men of courage and learning, who, “even if liberty were completely lost and absent from the world, would imagine it and feel it in their minds and still savor it” (297). This rarely happens, though, as “together with liberty, bravery is lost at the same time,” and the people “lose their enthusiasm for everything else; their hearts are downcast and weak” (299).

Tyrants take measures to weaken their own people, keeping them uneducated, distracting them with festivals and games, and hiring outsiders to fill the military so that the people remain untrained and unarmed. The rulers make themselves rarely seen, and let it be known that they have performed miracles, which adds to their mystery and power. They build castles to live in, guarded by archers.

All this pales, however, in comparison to the one central technique that keeps a tyrant in power: he has a handful of advisors who, in turn, control hundreds who benefit from the association, and these hundreds control thousands who similarly benefit and, in turn, control the millions of citizens. “[…] there are almost as many people whom tyranny seems to profit as those for whom liberty would be agreeable” (306). Of these functionaries, “there is not one of them finally who does not have a share, if not in the main booty, at least in the hunt” (306).

Strangely, despite their power over others, even peasants are more free than the highest advisors: “It is not enough for them to obey him, they also have to please him, they have to break their backs, torture themselves, work themselves to death on his business […] give up their tastes for his, force their character, shed their own nature” (307). Even those loved best by the ruler—for example, Roman Emperor Nero’s mother, his wife, and his tutor, Seneca, all of whom Nero had executed — cannot find safety in servitude.

The court is a place of constant danger. When the king dies, a new one replaces him, along with new advisors, who seek to purge the old ones of their lives and wealth. Advisors can never trust anyone, nor have any true friends. Instead of honor, the tyrant’s minions are reviled by the masses, their memories excoriated even in death. La Boétie writes, “So once and for all, let us learn to do good” (312), adding that God reserves a place in Hell “for some special punishment of tyrants and their accomplices” (312).