CONSTANT, BENJAMIN (1767–1830)

CONSTANT, BENJAMIN (1767–1830)

Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was best known in his lifetime as a politician and political journalist, but he acquired a largely posthumous reputation as a Romantic novelist that for long overshadowed his political reputation. With the resurgence of interest in liberal ideas in France in the 1980s, however, his importance as a political theorist began to be appreciated. Formerly he was often dismissed as a political adventurer, who at different times expressed sympathy for the Jacobins, constructed equally principled defences of the liberal republic against monarchy and of constitutional monarchy against republicanism, and also briefly rallied to Napoleon during the Hundred Days. Now he is increasingly regarded as one of the outstanding theorists of nineteenth- century LIBERALISM. He is best known for his searching distinction between ancient

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and modern liberty, but this has to be set in the context of his broader enquiry into the nature of the modern self.

Constant was born in Lausanne in 1767. His mother was from an old French Protestant family who had sought refuge in the Vaud for religious reasons; she died after giving birth. His father, Juste, was a colonel in a Swiss regiment in the service of Holland. Constant was educated at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria in 1782–3, and at the University of Edinburgh, where he spent two formative years in 1783–5 and was an active member of the Speculative Society. At Edinburgh he came into contact with the central ideas of Scottish political economy, and these were to have a profound impact on his political thought, for the idea that the advent of commercial society must bring about

a new kind of politics was an enduring theme in his writings, shaping both his defence of representative government and his concept of the liberty of the moderns.

Constant was in Paris in 1785–6, living in the house of the distinguished critic Jean- Baptiste Suard. He returned to Lausanne in 1786. In 1788 his father obtained for him the post of Gentleman of the Chamber at the court of Brunswick, which he held until 1794. The failure of his marriage in May 1789 to the Baroness Wilhelmina von Cramm, a lady- in-waiting at the same court, led to his return to Switzerland. There, in September 1794,

he met and fell in love with MME DE STAËL, whom he accompanied to Paris in May 1795. Their relationship was to endure, intermittently, for a decade and a half, and Constant probably fathered Staël’s daughter Albertine, subsequently Duchesse de Broglie, who was born in 1797. In the same year as he met Stael he bought the property of Hérivaux, near Luzarches, as the precondition for acquiring French citizenship. Constant was thus a Frenchman by choice, and in a sense he was drawn to France by the world-historical significance of the French Revolution. From the outset he welcomed the revolution: he acknowledged that much revolutionary politics consisted of ‘knavery and folly’, but preferred to be on the side of the folly that destroyed injustice than to be on the side of those, such as BURKE, who as Constant saw it defended injustice and absurdity.

In the late 1790s Constant met and won the patronage of that great survivor of French revolutionary politics, EMMANUEL-JOSEPH SIEYÈS. Sieyès, another political activist whose reputation as a theorist began to blossom at the end of the twentieth century, both promoted Constant’s political career and had a powerful influence on his political thinking. He was instrumental in securing Constant’s election to the Tribunate in January 1800, but Constant’s advocacy of freedom of speech antagonized Bonaparte, who dismissed him in 1802. He spent the years 1802–14 in exile with Staël, whom Bonaparte had expelled from France. He had prolonged stays both at Staël’s family estate at Coppet, near Geneva, and in Germany (Weimar 1803–4, Göttingen, Brunswick and Hanover 1812–13). In 1808 he married Charlotte von Hardenberg, with whom he had had a prolonged if irregular relationship since their first meeting in 1793. He finally broke with Mme de Staël in 1811.

Constant lived predominantly in France from 1814 onwards, apart from a spell in London from January 1816 to the summer of 1817. He served as a deputy for various constituencies from 1819 to 1822 and from 1824 to 1830, and championed such causes as the freedom of the press, the abolition of the slave trade and Greek independence. He lived to see the advent of the July Monarchy, but died in December 1830. He is often viewed as a thinker of the Restoration, since it was during this last period that he published most; but in fact his political views had taken a more or less definitive form by

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1806. From that time he dissociated the question of the form of government from that of liberty: in other words, he came to believe that political liberty was compatible either with monarchy or a republic. The location of sovereignty was less important than its limits.

Constant was the author of a short novel, Adolphe (1816), which enjoyed some success during his lifetime but has subsequently become recognized as something of a classic, not least for its innovative introspective narrative style. It recounts the relationship between the hero and a somewhat older woman named Ellénore, a Polish exile. Along with a posthumous novel, Cécile (1951), and his autobiographical works also published posthumously from manuscripts, Adolphe articulates a powerful sense of the importance of personal independence.

His chief political works, however, remained unpublished in his lifetime. The most important were two manuscript drafts towards a projected treatise on political theory: the Principes depolitique applicables à tous les gouvernements (Principles of Politics Applicable to all Governments), which was completed in draft in 1806, and Fragments d’une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays (Fragments of a Republican Constitution in a Large Country), which was composed between 1795 and 1807. Constant drew on these manuscripts for a number of smaller pieces, including his celebrated speech on ancient and modern liberty.

Constant was criticized, in his lifetime and after, for his political inconsistency: the man who supported the modern republic against advocates of a monarchical restoration under the Directory would later, during the Restoration, defend the superiority of constitutional monarchy; and the man who, in The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation (De l’esprit de la conquête et de l’usurpation), developed a fundamental critique of Napoleonic rule, would later, briefly, rally behind Napoleon’s Hundred Days. But Constant always insisted that constitutional forms—the contest between hereditary monarchy and republic—meant little in comparison with the need to establish constitutional guarantees for individual freedom. Along with Staël he was among the first to articulate the post-revolutionary liberal critique of the French Revolution: he saw that the transfer of a formally unlimited sovereignty from king to people offered little guarantee of individual freedom. The lesson of the Terror was that popular. The lesson of the Terror was that popular sovereignty could pose a still deadlier threat to liberty than absolute monarchy. The principle of popular sovereignty, for Constant, had a negative significance; it stipulated that no individual or group may subject the body of citizens to its particular will. But the principle that all legimate power must belong to the body of citizens does not imply that they may use that power however they wish. Opression does not become legimate just by virtue of being committed by a majority against a tiny minority. Here he drew on a distinction Sieyes had drawn between the ‘ré-publique’ and the ‘ré-totale’ and anticipated nineteenth-century liberalism’s quest to limit the scope of the public authority. Furthermore, Constant was never a mere defender of the status quo. On the contrary, during the period of the Restoration Constant showed an unusally perceptive insight in his analysis of parliamentary monarchy. He saw, for instance, that it required ministerial responsibility; that this responsibility must be collective and not merely individual; and that collective ministerial responsibility required an organized opposition and hence disciplined political parties. He saw, for instance, that it required ministerial responsibility; that this responsibility must be collective and not merely

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individual; and that collective ministerial responsibility required an organized opposition and hence disciplined political parties.

Constant’s most important contribution to political theory was his distinction, which has become classical, between the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. This was expounded in a famous lecture he gave at the Athénée Royal in 1819, but it was not a product of the immediate circumstances of the Restoration, for the essential distinction may be found in the 1806 manuscript of his Principes de politique. It was clearly influenced by similar ideas developed by Mme de Staël in her Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République en France (The Present Circumstances which Might Close the Revolution in France and the Principles that Should Underpin the Republic in France) written in 1798–

9 though not published until 1906. Drawing on Condorcet’s pronouncement that the ancients had no notion of individual rights, Constant followed Staël in arguing that ancient liberty consisted in active participation in the public affairs of the state, whereas the distinctive characteristic of the modern concept of liberty was the far greater emphasis on negative rights against the state. Although Constant has been read—for example, by Sir Isaiah Berlin—as an advocate of the negative concept of liberty, his position was in fact much more complex. His central point was the historical one that it is impossible for the moderns to recapture the ancient concept of liberty in its integrity, for the growth in the size of modern states, the shift from a society geared to war to a society geared to commerce, and the demise of the institution of slavery had combined to undermine the social foundations of ancient liberty. When the moderns sought to rediscover ancient liberty, as the Jacobins did under the influence of Rousseau and Mably, the result could only be despotism and terror. So Constant was not arguing that one understanding of liberty was right and the other wrong, or that one was better or more conceptually precise than the other. His point was that each was tied to a given kind of social order. In this respect Constant’s political theory was profoundly historicist. Moreover, Constant certainly did not give up on political participation. He saw that it was instrumentally important to the protection of individual liberty; but, more importantly still, he also felt profoundly that there was something noble about active citizenship, and that the political theorist should be concerned not solely with the maximization of happiness but also with self-development. It was important not just that our actual wants should be satisfied, but that we should become better and fuller human beings.

Why did Constant cherish liberty with such passion? Our understanding of the sources of his political beliefs has been deepened by being studied in the light of his long- standing interest in religion and its history: this project, conceived in the 1780s, remained incomplete at his death, although at the end of his life he published a five-volume study, De la réligion (On Religion). When he conceived the project as a young man he undoubtedly intended to produce a sophisticated defence of toleration in which he would defend the radical Enlightenment proposition that the polytheism of antiquity had been more conducive to religious toleration than had Christianity. But the final work abandoned this position, for he came to see ancient toleration as a consequence of indifference. Modern toleration, by contrast, rested on a sense of the radical importance of religious belief to personal identity, and hence on a profound respect for individual belief. Under the influence, no doubt, of German Romanticism (see ROMANTICISM, INDIVIDUALISM AND IDEAS OF THE SELF), Constant had become deeply

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conscious of the claims of personal integrity and authenticity, and his main point now was not so much to defend the individual’s right to freedom of worship as to advocate an ideal of emotional authenticity. He thought this was impeded by the authority of the institutional Church.