subsequently of a rather motley assortment of private tutors. Early stirrings of rebellion
by Benjamin against those tutors (one of them, the Englishman Nathaniel May, found
him more than a little truculent^8 ), perhaps against Marianne, and by implication against
Juste were followed by political engagement against the Pays de Vaud’s oppressive
masters the ‘Bears’ of Berne, as he called them, responsible for Lausanne’s genuine,
albeit mild servitude, then against the monarchy in France, against Napoleon and against
the excesses of the Bourbon Restoration. In what was to become a lifelong political
vocation, there was, of course, no readily available continental model for Constant to
follow at this time: he naturally looked to Britain and to the great Opposition orators of
the House of Commons, a noble ideal he had glimpsed during a happy and formative
period at Edinburgh University in 1783–5 and which never left him. By temperament he
was in any case an inveterate individualist, far better suited to being an opposition sniper
than to holding ministerial office or automatically toeing a party line.
‘The least government [is] the best government’^9 was Constant’s belief from the mid-
1790s onwards, an idea that has become an axiom of modern liberalism of the more
economically conservative kind—a development, incidentally, of which he would not
necessarily have approved. He detested unfairness, but his primary concern was with
unfairness of the most fundamental kind, loss of freedom. His craving for political liberty
for his fellow citizens and his desire to preserve the sanctity of their private lives and
personal beliefs were matched by his own permanent need for independence from others,
from father and from family but also from the women in his life—a factor which blighted
his many love affairs. This preoccupation with freedom and this fear of dependence on
others—or by others on him—give to Constant’s writings an anguish-laden urgency
which continues to speak to our own times. The need for personal freedom is dramatized
in his best-known work, his novel Adolphe (1816), through the characters of Adolphe and
Ellénore, where the individual’s desire for freedom is set against the power of the wider
social group—all the more powerful because the individual has internalized its
expectations and shibboleths consciously or unconsciously. Adolphe’s apparently
straightforward task of freeing himself of a woman he has grown tired of is complicated
by society’s hostility to Ellénore as a ‘kept woman’ which makes him protective towards
her, and by his own need to be independent and pursue a career worthy of his intellect
and talents within that same society. A superficially simple story written in Constant’s
characteristically limpid, incisive and often memorable French prose thus generates a
remarkably complex range of responses and reflections on the part of the narrator and
subsequently the reader.^10 The revelations in Constant’s diar-ies similarly concern his
painful sense of responsibility towards the women he had loved, his own fluctuating
desire to be free from them, but his terror at the idea of causing them suffering.
Political liberty and personal independence: these continue to be the two principal
focuses of interest for modern commentators on this exceptional man’s life, a man whom
some continue to find repellent. It will be evident that the present writer does not find
him so. The sheer mass of Constant’s letters, diaries and other autobiographical writings
as well as accounts of his life by contemporaries give the picture of a man of formidable
intelligence as well as intellect, erudite, perceptive, humane and frequently funny at his
own expense. Like Montaigne, he invites us to see ourselves mirrored in his
contradictions: he could be changeable and filled with self-doubt, then pugnaciously
dogmatic—and he was not above opportunism either, particularly under the Directory, as
Benjamin constant 6