Kurt Kloocke, in his Benjamin Constant: une biographie intellectuelle,
argues a case for seeing a parallel between Constant’s pessimism in
Brunswick and the intellectual nihilism of nineteenth-century Germany,
but to speak with confidence, as Kloocke does, about a ‘crisis of nihilism’
seems somewhat excessive as well as anachronistic.^42 References to ‘le
néant’, nothingness, in his letters are symptomatic of serious depression,
for which Constant had more than adequate justification, rather than
constituting anything like the adoption of a coherent philosophical system.
Indeed that depression, like occasional suicidal tendencies, might, as I
have argued earlier, have had far deeper roots in Constant’s infancy and
childhood.
Worse was to come for Constant. On 16 July 1791 the Conseil de Guerre national
suisse pronounced a final and irrevocable verdict against Juste who in consequence lost
his position in the Régiment de May and had to pay ruinous legal costs. Juste was forced
to sell all his property in the Pays de Vaud, and took up residence across the border in
France, at Brevans, near Dole. He also sought the French nationality to which he was
now entitled, taking advantage of a new law which allowed those whose ancestors had
been driven into exile because of their religious beliefs to return to France: Juste’s distant
forbears had been Huguenot refugees. Constant immediately appealed to the Prince of
Orange on Juste’s behalf against the court’s verdict, and spent the period from September
to December 1791 seeing to the sale of his father’s property in Lausanne. Yet another
absence from Minna: she had declined to accompany him to Switzerland and on his
return to Germany, after a journey on which he had passed through the lines of the
opposing armies of revolutionary France and a counter-revolutionary alliance led by the
Duke of Brunswick, Constant found a wife who seemed to have definitively changed in
her feelings towards him. It is as well that he did not also know that his father was at the
same time drawing up a contract of marriage with Marianne Magnin (the document
exists, dated Dijon, 11 January 1792^43 ); he was not to learn of their legal relationship
until some years later, nor that Marianne was about to bear Juste a daughter, Louise—
Constant’s half-sister—the following June.^44
Minna’s coolness was directed towards a man who, despite at last being back with his
wife, seemed exclusively obsessed with obtaining justice for his father. In about June
1792 it appears that she spent some time in the country away from Constant,^45 while he
seems to have had his mind fully occupied elsewhere, with political developments in
Paris. By September 1792, however, it had finally dawned on him that things had gone
irretrievably awry between himself and Minna. On 17 September 1792 he felt moved to
send the following balance sheet of his life to Isabelle de Charrière:
I felt at 18, at 20, at 24 and I now feel again at 25 that I must, for
other people’s benefit as well as my own, live alone.... Literature
and solitude, that is my real element. It remains to be seen if I shall
be able to find these in a France that is in turmoil or in an obscure
retreat somewhere.Benjamin constant 138