In his famous Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, written around 1548, Etienne de la Boétie fiercely attacks the brutalities of power, brutalities of his time certainly, but ultimately of all times, making the bitter observation that tyranny has always hung like a shadow over the destiny of peoples.

On stage, it’s a man out of time, or rather a man “of all times” who takes up La Boétie’s torch. A former magistrate resembling Diogenes, imbued with wisdom and truculence, having long observed men and traveled the ages, he dissects, with implacable logic and biting irony, the perpetual confrontation between one man, armed with the apparatus of the state, and a multitude, so often silent, resigned, indifferent, convinced of their powerlessness.

This feverish text, a sort of J’accuse! addressed to tyrants and peoples, is not from any one country or era. This is why it is extremely topical: dictatorships, which we naively believed to be from another time, are flourishing and strengthening around the world. And our beautiful democracies hasten to imitate them when, thanks to a certain pandemic, they establish a new form of social control, with the consent of the “good people”.

It’s time that we are reminded that tyrants only draw their strength from our shameful weakness, and that freedom is not an empty word but, always, an act, a risk, a conquest.

Filmed at the Avignon Off Festival