Benjamin Constant

by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual both over an

authority that would wish to govern by despotic means and over the

masses who claim the right to make a minority subservient to a

majority.^3

For too long Constant’s reputation as a freedom-fighter—a much abused

term but entirely appropriate in his case—was obscured by a sometimes

rather forced moral outrage at his sexual promiscuity, inspired initially by

the critic Sainte-Beuve and Madame de Staël’s descendants, the De

Broglie family.
4
His courage and resilience in sticking to his principles
through illness and disappointment remain exemplary for the generations

that have followed. In the English-speaking world this side of Constant’s

activity has received a considerable amount of attention lately from

political scientists, notably Stephen Holmes and Biancamaria Fontana,
5

but it would be unrealistic to say that it yet matches interest in Constant as
the author of Adolphe and the lover of Madame de Staël. And yet there is a

connection. Constant stated:

Literature is linked to everything else. It cannot be separated from

politics, religion or morality. It is the expression of people’s

opinions on each of those matters. Like everything in nature it is at

once both cause and effect. To describe literature as an isolated

phenomenon is not to describe it at all.^6

As recent commentators have increasingly emphasized, in Constant’s case

that link between literature and the rest of his writings and activity was
very strong, and intimately connected with what one might call the

problematics of freedom.
Constant was born into several forms of oppression and servitude. These were not the
most obvious hardships of poverty or a lowly position in the social hierarchy, but real
nonetheless, and he was acutely aware of them early in his life. His ancestors had fled
from France to French-speaking Switzerland to escape persecution for their Protestant
beliefs, and the memory of that was still very much alive in the family. His Swiss
homeland—the canton where he lived as a child that is, the Pays de Vaud—had been
under the domination of the German-speaking Bernese since the sixteenth century, with
the result that Vaudois aristocrats, like his father Juste de Constant, were excluded from
political office in Lausanne and were forced to pursue a military career in the service of
another country, in his case Protestant Holland.^7 The death of Benjamin’s mother a few
days after giving birth to him left him at the mercy of a loving but moody and
unpredictable father who—when he was not away in the Netherlands—alternated
between indulgence and heavy-handedness, and who later put him in the care of a
peasant-girl Marianne Magnin who was probably already Juste’s mistress, and

Introduction 5