French · 1530–1563
Étienne de La Boétie was a French judge, poet and writer born in Sarlat in 1530. He studied law at Orléans and in 1553 became a counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux, where he met Michel de Montaigne. The two became close friends. La Boétie wrote the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, also called Contr'un, when he was young, probably in the early 1550s. It argues that tyrants rule only because people consent to obey, and that withdrawing consent would end tyranny without violence. He also wrote sonnets and translated Xenophon and Plutarch. He died of illness in 1563 at the age of thirty-two, with Montaigne at his side. Montaigne published some of his works and planned to include the Discourse in his Essays, but Huguenot writers printed it first as a political tract. Later readers, including Lamennais, Tolstoy and modern anarchist and libertarian thinkers, have treated it as an early statement on consent, obedience and nonviolent resistance.