Étienne de La Boétie
French judge, writer and philosopher · France · Writers · Lived 1530 to 1563 · aged 32
Étienne de La Boétie is read about 580 times a day, in 49 languages.
Counted to 15 September 2026, not since.
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 360 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A 16th-century French magistrate whose teenage essay on why people submit to tyranny became a quiet bomb in the hands of Protestant rebels - and later, a cornerstone text for anarchists and civil disobedience theorists he never met.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
Statue d'Étienne de La Boétie
Boetie 1
Bordeaux - Rue Pierre de Coubertin - Plaque à Étienne de La Boëtie.jpg?width=1200)
Contre la tirannie et tirans, La Servitude Volontaire (f1)
D'avoir plusieurs seigneurs, aucun bien je n'y voy
La Boétie - De la servitude volontaire ou Le Contr'un, page de titre, Chamerot, 1835
La Boétie - Manuscript du Discours de la servitude volontaire, sd
La Boétie, Bonnefon, Discours de la Servitude volontaire, Incipit, 1892In their own words 6
, Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good!
The good seed that nature plants in us is so slight and so slippery that it cannot withstand the least harm from wrong nourishment.
The dictator does not consider his power firmly established until he has reached the point where there is no man under him who is of any worth. ...
About this person
Étienne de La Boétie was born 1 November 1530 and trained as a magistrate and classicist, moving through the courts and the humanist circles of Renaissance France. He wrote poetry and political theory, but his early treatise Discourse on Voluntary Servitude asked a question that wouldn't stay buried: why do people obey tyrants when they outnumber them? After his death on 18 August 1563, Huguenots circulated the manuscript as ammunition against the crown. Centuries later, utopians and anti-statists found in it a founding text. But in his lifetime, he was best known for one thing: his friendship with Michel de Montaigne, who made that bond the subject of the most famous essay on friendship ever written.
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