A NOTE ON BENJAMIN
CONSTANT’S FAMILY
In view of the complex family background to Constant’s life and its
importance in, for example, his claim to French nationality and in his
relationship with his father, uncle Samuel and cousins, it may be useful to
outline the salient facts here. On his father’s side Baron Henri-Benjamin
de Constant de Rebecque, known to his contemporaries and posterity as
Benjamin Constant, had ancestry that could be traced back as far as the
thirteenth century to the Rebecque family of Aire-en-Artois in northern
France. He owed his Swiss Protestant identity to the fact that during the
Reformation the Protestant Augustin Constant (d. 1593) moved from
Aireen-Artois to settle in Geneva. Benjamin Constant’s grandfather on his
father’s side, Samuel de Constant de Rebecque (1676–1756), was a
distinguished army officer in the service of Holland who re-established the
family’s aristocratic credentials, re-adopted the surname de Rebecque and
the title of baron. In 1721 he married Rose-Susanne de Saussure (1698–
1782), Benjamin’s grandmother, a strong-willed woman known as ‘la
Générale’, and they had four sons and a daughter. Of these, three of the
sons survived into Benjamin Constant’s lifetime: Benjamin’s father Louis-
Arnold-Juste de Constant (1726–1812), who like his father entered the
service of Holland as an army officer, and later became estranged from ‘la
Générale’; and Benjamin’s two uncles, David-Louis, known as Constant
d’Hermenches (1722–85), an officer in the Dutch and later the French
army, a friend of Voltaire and correspondent of Belle de Zuylen, later
Isabelle de Charrière; and François-Marc-Samuel de Constant (1729–
1800), author of sentimental novels and of works on economic and ethical
matters. Constant’s aunt on his father’s side, Suzanne-Angélique-
Alexandrine, Marquise de Gentils-Langalerie (1731–72), who died when
he was very young, was the mother of his first cousin Charles, Chevalier
de Langalerie (1751–1835), leader of the Ames intérieures of Lausanne to
whose religious practices Constant was attracted in 1807. For Benjamin
the most important relatives of his own generation on his father’s side
were the children of his uncle Samuel, his cousins Rosalie-Marguerite