A young French judge argued tyrants rule only because people keep obeying
In the 1550s a law student from the Perigord wrote that no tyrant holds power on his own: subjects hand it over, and they can simply stop. Étienne de La Boétie died at thirty-two, yet his short essay later inspired anarchists and the theorists of nonviolent resistance.
He was born on 1 November 1530 in Sarlat, in southwest France, into an aristocratic family; his father served the crown in the Perigord and his mother's brother presided over the Bordeaux Parliament, the regional court of lawyers. Orphaned young, he was raised by an uncle of the same name, a curate, and took a law degree at Orleans in 1553. His talent won him a royal appointment to the Bordeaux Parliament the next year even though he was below the minimum age, and he built a respected career there as a judge and negotiator. He also translated Xenophon and Plutarch and moved in the circle of the Pleiade poets, among them Pierre de Ronsard.
His lasting work is the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, also called the Contr'un or Anti-Dictator. Its central puzzle is obedience. Fear alone cannot explain why whole populations let a single ruler plunder them, he argued, because the ruler depends on their consent, and that consent can be withdrawn without violence. By tying domination to obedience he anticipated later anarchist theory and became one of the earliest voices for civil disobedience. Montaigne claimed the essay was written in 1549, when its author was eighteen, but recent scholars think 1552 or 1553 more likely, and a few Montaigne specialists have even suggested Montaigne wrote it himself. It circulated privately and appeared in print only in 1576.
On religion he was a conciliator rather than a radical. He feared that tolerating two faiths could split France into two hostile states, would have granted Protestants private worship at most, and hoped church reform would coax them back to Catholicism. The Huguenots nevertheless adopted his treatise after his death.
He sat alongside Montaigne in the Bordeaux court, and the essayist immortalised their bond in his essay on friendship; historians still disagree about whether the two were lovers. La Boétie died of illness at Germignan near Bordeaux in 1563, and Montaigne described his final days in a long letter to his own father. In the 20th century anarchists such as Gustav Landauer and Simone Weil claimed him as a forerunner, and Gene Sharp cited him repeatedly in his writing on nonviolent struggle.
Source: Étienne de La Boétie
