Benjamin Constant

INTRODUCTION

The inglorious collapse of the Communist régimes of Eastern Europe

between 1989 and 1992, an unexpected and extraordinary turn of events

which seemed to mark the beginning of a new era for humanity, drew a

less dramatic response from French intellectuals than uninformed
observers in Britain or America might have expected. This muted reaction

was undoubtedly the result of a major shift in attitudes which had already

taken place in France in 1977–8 and at the time was attributed to a group

of former Marxists and veterans of 1968 known collectively as les

nouveaux philosophes, ‘the new philosophers’, of whom Bernard-Henri
Lévy and André Glucksmann were the chefs de file. The revolt against

Marx in France—prompted by the revelations in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s

The Gulag Archipelago (1973–5) about Soviet labour camps as much as

by observation of conditions in the Soviet empire—dislodged the USSR

from the pedestal it had hitherto occupied among the French intelligentsia,
and in the late 1970s brought about a revival of interest in liberalism and

liberal democracy, words which during the preceding radical decade no

self-respecting intellectual would have uttered without a sneer. This

qualitative change in thinking naturally led to a re-examination of the

origins of the liberty which had for too long been taken for granted in the
West—the right to disagree with the government in power and to organize

peaceful opposition without fear of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment or exile,

freedom of conscience and worship, an unmuzzled press, the inviolability

of property ownership and so on. Coincidentally the 150th anniversary of

Benjamin Constant’s death fell in 1980, and the event was marked by a
conference, publications and broadcasts^1 in which his struggles as a liberal

parliamentarian and humanitarian campaigner were accorded the general

public recognition in France and Switzerland which they deserve.
For, as the century of Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Pol Pot draws to a close, it is
fitting that we should remember the man whom Sir Isaiah Berlin has called ‘the most
eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy’.^2 At the end of his life Constant wrote:

For forty years I have defended the same principle: freedom in all

things, in religion, philosophy, literature, industry and politics. And

Benjamin constant 4