Étienne de La Boétie

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Statue de la Boéties in Sarlat-la-Canéda (Dordogne, France)

Étienne de La Boétie [ etjɛn də la bɔeˈsi ] (born November 1, 1530 in Sarlat , † August 18, 1563 in Germignan ) was a French high judge, occasional author and close friend of Michel de Montaigne .

Pronunciation: Étienne de la Boétie

Life and work

The well-preserved town house of the La Boétie family in 2007

La Boétie came from the lower official nobility of Sarlat , the seat of a diocese and sub-center of the royal justice system. He received a good education, including a. at the renowned Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, and became interested in classical Greek and Latin authors from an early age. No doubt he tried his hand at Latin and French verse early on.

In 1548 he was likely to have witnessed first hand how, after the new King Henry II had also introduced the salt tax in southwest France , revolts broke out there and were bloodily suppressed by royal troops.

At the same time he began studying law at Orléans University . Among his professors was Anne du Bourg , who a few years later became a judge ("conseiller") at the highest court of justice, the Parlement of Paris, and there openly objected to the persecution of the Huguenots , which in 1559 earned him a heretic trial including the death penalty Martyr made.

Presumably during his student days, La Boétie wrote his flaming Discours de la servitude volontaire (= treatise on voluntary servitude ) , visibly under the impression of the revolts mentioned and the discussions in Du Bourg's environment , in which he defends the thesis that the oppression of many people by a single one is only possible as long as the many submit, instead of resisting collectively.

After completing his studies, La Boétie was judge at the Parlement of Bordeaux, the highest court of the province of Aquitaine, in 1553 at the age of 23 . Here he made friends with Michel de Montaigne , who was a good two years his junior , when he was also a judge in 1557 in Bordeaux. Montaigne later reported that he had already become aware of La Boétie through the Discours . The friendship between the two had a special, decisive meaning in the life of Montaigne.

From 1560 La Boétie was asked by Michel de L'Hospital , the Chancellor of France , Chancelier de France , with whom he was on friendly terms, to participate in negotiations aimed at pacifying France, which was drifting apart from one another and increasingly into violence. So he was (like his friend Montaigne) someone who on the one hand stood loyally behind the crown, but on the other hand had enough understanding for the concerns and convictions of the Huguenots to be able to have a balancing effect.

He also represented this conciliatory stance in his last work, the Mémoire sur l'édit de janvier [1562] (= memorandum on the January dict ), in which he stands behind the king or regent who had just met the Protestants and them had granted certain rights.

La Boétie died young and suddenly of one of the common epidemics of the time, dysentery or plague . Michel de Montaigne was with the dying man and admired his stoic composure, as he reports in a letter to his father. Montaigne received the extensive book collection that formed an integral part of his library .

In 1570 Montaigne printed various writings from La Boétie's estate in Paris. These were Latin and French verses - the latter mostly in the style of the Pléiade - as well as translations of texts by the ancient Greeks Xenophon and Plutarch (who had provided the impetus for the Discours ). In addition , Montaigne considered it inappropriate to print the Discours , which until then had only been handwritten, because the Protestant side now used the work as ammunition against the once again unyielding policy of the Crown and its claim to rule absolutely, and in particular the religion of the To determine subjects. In addition, the revolutionary little work no longer corresponded to the compensatory loyalty that the late La Boétie had practiced and which Montaigne also represented.

The Discours was first printed in 1574 as part of a Protestant martial arts script and again in 1577 as part of the propagandistic Mémoires des états de France sous Charles IX . Later generations of opposition activists, e. B. Pre-revolutionary authors of the late Enlightenment and socialist and anarchist thinkers of the 19th century, often resorted to the work of La Boétie and his core sentence: “Soyez résolus de ne servir plus, et vous voilà libres!” (Make up your mind not to serve anymore , and you are free!).

To the "Discours de la servitude volontaire"

Graffito in Geneva 2007

A handwritten copy by the author has not survived. The Discourse was first passed in a small circle in copies. A first print was not made until 1574; the first German translation appeared in 1593. Early on, the title of the Discour was extended by the addition “Le Contr'un”; this inauthentic addition means "against the one ( tyrant )". La Boétie describes his goal with the words: “This time I would just like to explain how it can happen that so many people, so many villages, cities and peoples sometimes suffer a single tyrant who has no more power than they give him, who is only able to harm them insofar as they are willing to tolerate it, who could not harm them if they did not rather suffer it than to oppose him. ”He dresses his declaration of tyranny in the form of the rhetorical question: “How does he come to power over you if not through you? How dare he persecute you if you did not agree? ”That in every tyranny the oppressed paradoxically accept the oppression voluntarily, was the core thesis of the whole work.

Although La Boétie himself portrayed himself as a good Catholic and loyal to the king in his writing "Les Troubles - Memorandum on the January Edict of 1562" and although his administration corresponded to this attitude, his early writing against tyranny is seen by many as a forerunner of anarchism and the civil disobedience ; probably not without reason, because there is already a remark in Montaigne's essais about the relationship between La Boétie and his ancient source Plutarch : “For example, his suggestion that the inhabitants of Asia are slaves of an autocratic ruler because they have a single syllable, namely no , could not pronounce, Étienne de La Boétie may be the occasion and theme of his treatise on voluntary servitude . ”In his essay On Friendship, Montaigne assessed the text, to which he owed the first notice of his later friend, who died too young, as“ an exercise (in) his early youth, in honor of freedom, against the despots. It has passed from hand to hand among knowledgeable men and has received much praise and applause for being well written and very rich in content. Nevertheless it can be said that it is not the best that he could have written. "

expenditure

German
  • Of voluntary servitude. Abbreviated and trans. v. Gustav Landauer . In: Der Sozialist , 2 (1910), pp. 130-134, 138-140, 146-148, 162-164, 170-171; 3 (1911), pp. 2-4.
  • About voluntary servitude. Translated and introduced by Felix Boenheim , Malik-Verlag , Berlin 1924.
  • Look for the slave in yourself. Treatise on Voluntary Servitude. Trans. U. a. v. Wolfgang Hoffmann-Harnisch. Berto-Verlag, Bonn 1961.
  • Of the voluntary servitude of man. Ed. U. a. v. Heinz-Joachim Heydorn, trans. v. Walter Koneffke. European Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1968.
  • Of voluntary servitude. Translated and edited with the assistance of Neithard Bulst . by Horst Günther . European Publishing House, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-434-00704-0 .
  • Bondage. New edition of the translation (abridged) by Gustav Landauer (1910/11). Klemm & Oelschläger, Münster / Ulm 1991, ISBN 3-9802739-2-X .
  • Of voluntary servitude . Revised and supplemented version of the translation by Gustav Landauer, supplemented by the previously shortened passages, first complete edition in German. Nevertheless publishing house , Frankfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-86569-903-9 .
  • Treatise on Voluntary Servitude. Complete edition in translation by Johann Benjamin Erhard (1821). With a glossary and an afterword by Bernd Schuchter . Limbus Verlag, Innsbruck 2016, ISBN 978-3-99039-081-8 .
French German
  • Of voluntary servitude. Trans. U. ed. v. Horst Günther. EVA, Frankfurt / M. 1980, ISBN 3-434-00704-0 . (Extensive appendix: "Sources, radius, impact.")
French
  • Œuvres complètes. Editions William Blake & Co., Bordeaux 1991, ISBN 2-905810-60-2 :
    • Raoul de Cambrai (1580); Mémoire touchant l'Édit de janvier 1562.
  • Discours de la servitude voluntary. Mille et une nuits, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-910233-94-4 .
  • Discours de la servitude voluntary. Flammarion, Paris 1993, ISBN 2-08-070394-3 .
  • Discours de la Servitude voluntary. Payot, collection Petite bibliothèque, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-228-89669-1 .

literature

  • Gustav Landauer : The Revolution. Rütten & Loening, Frankfurt 1907, pp. 72-92.
  • Murray N. Rothbard : The Political Thought of Etienne de La Boetie. Introduction to La Boetie: The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Free Life Editions, New York 1975, pp. 9-42.
  • Nannerl O. Keohane: The Radical Humanism of Etienne de La Boetie. In: Journal Hist. Ideas , 38, pp. 119-130 (1977).
  • Nicola Panichi: Plutarchus redivivus? La Boétie et sa réception en Europe. Champion, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-7453-1486-4 .
  • Jean Starobinski : Montaigne and La Boétie. "Brouillars et papiers espars." (Doodles and scattered papers). In: Fragment and Totality. Lucien Dällenbach & Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig (Eds.). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1984, pp. 141-159, ISBN 3-518-11107-8 .
  • Saul Newman : Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered: Radical Politics and the Problem of Self-Domination . In: ADSC, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies , No. 1 (2010), pp. 31–49. Available online at The Anarchist Library

Web links

Wikisource: Étienne de La Boétie  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nannerl O. Keohane: The Radical Humanism of Étienne De La Boétie. Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 38, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1977), pp. 119-130.
personal data
SURNAME La Boétie, Étienne de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1530
PLACE OF BIRTH Sarlat
DATE OF DEATH August 18, 1563
Place of death Germignan