election at some future date. His efforts on Germaine’s behalf had meanwhile borne fruit,
and in December Constant was able to go to Coppet and accompany her back into France
with the prospect of her taking up residence there permanently. The couple stayed at
Hérivaux on and off from January to May 1797, receiving many distinguished visitors
including Talleyrand, before Germaine was finally allowed to return to live in Paris at the
end of May. On 30 March Constant’s political ambitions began to be realized in a minor
way when he was elected chairman of the municipal administrative body in Luzarches.
He told Anne de Nassau:
The people of the canton have elected me chairman of their
administrative committee, which gives me the opportunity to make
sure the laws which I cherish are respected in a small community,
and to protect republicans against the malevolence of priests who
are stirring up fanaticism in our countryside.
(Letter of 14 April 1797^54 )In March 1797 Constant’s pamphlet Des réactions politiques came off the
press. Once again he gave his support to the legal Directorial government,
and this time his venom was aimed particularly at journalists such as the
Catholic Jean-François de La Harpe. In a Preface Constant stressed that it
was impossible to be more French than he was, on account of his birth, his
principles, the properties he owned and by legal right.^55 Once more his
pugnaciously dogmatic anti-monarchist and anti-Catholic tone attracted
attention, bringing him hostile reviews and making him unwelcome in
some salons. Perhaps the most unexpected response—and one which has
considerably outlived Constant’s ephemeral brochure—came from the
philosopher Immanuel Kant who published a famous essay entitled ‘On a
supposed right to lie out of love of humanity’ in Berlinische Blätter on 6
September 1797 in which he sharply contested a passage about the
defensibility of telling a lie in order to save a human life.
56
Constant
brought out a second edition of Des réactions politiques in late May or
early June, accompanied by a new essay, Des effets de la Terreur (On the
Consequences of the Terror), intended, he wrote ‘to prove that the Terror
was not necessary to save the Republic..., that the Terror did nothing but
harm, and that its legacy to the Republic of today is all the perils which
threaten the Republic even now’.
57
Citizen Constant, the scourge of priests
and émigrés, was now becoming an established figure on the political
stage after only three years in Paris, and in mid-June delivered the opening
address at the Club de Salm
58
of which, together with Talleyrand, M.-
J.Chénier, P.-L.Ginguené, P.Cabanis and other distinguished names, he
was a founder member. The Club, which met at the Hôtel de Salm (former
Benjamin constant 164