Abstract
Drawing on mostly unfamiliar material, often from anonymous political pamphlets, this article examines the use made of La Boétie's treatise La Servitude volontaire among pro- and anti-monarchical French Catholic writers in the 1580s. The purpose of the treatise was the defence and critique of sovereign power. The article demonstrates how pro-monarchical writers used the Homeric quotation which opens La Servitude in order to defend kingship, then how ligueur writers developed alternative views of sovereignty, freedom, and the nature of the constitution. La Boétie's work occurred in both camps in the form of references, allusions, and, more ambitiously, dense verbal quotations.
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