his fiercest twentieth-century critic Henri Guillemin has continually pointed out,^11
although by any reckoning Constant would more than make up later for any arrivisme
with exhaustingly hard work in the best of causes, a fact Guillemin invariably neglects.
Constant was certainly no Machiavelli, and that indeed is his endearing quality: his two
best-known attempts to back political winners—Prince Bernadotte, and later Napoleon
during the Hundred Days—turned out to be almost laughably bad choices.
We live in an age when lip service is routinely paid to a rather hollow Europeanism
and internationalism, but here was a man of cosmopolitan background and upbringing
who spoke three languages fluently and read several more, who actually lived as a
European and poured virulent invective on narrow nationalism and empire-building,
notably condemning French intervention across the Pyrenees to reinstate a conservative
Bourbon monarch in Spain, but whose concern for oppressed peoples led him to
campaign for Greek independence and against slavery in Senegal. At the same time
Constant applauded the fact that small communities, towns and provinces wished to run
their own affairs in their own way, to cherish the uniqueness of their own local traditions,
history and speech, and to reject attempts at centralization: ‘Variety is life’, he wrote
famously, ‘uniformity is death’.^12 After all, defending a region’s right to retain its own
specific character, its entitlement to be different from others, was absolutely consistent
with upholding the individual’s right to freedom of thought and expression. For Constant
was a Lausannois and a Vaudois and, no doubt as the result of his Swiss origins, a
federalist.
Constant’s lifespan of 63 years covers an era of sometimes violent political and social
change, unparalleled perhaps before our own time. He experienced the ancien régime,
observed the Revolution from a distance, and lived under the Directory, Consulate,
Empire, First Bourbon Restoration, ‘Hundred Days’, Second Restoration and July
Monarchy. He was born in the middle of the Enlightenment, in 1767, the year when
Voltaire published L’Ingénu and Sterne was about to publish his Sentimental Journey. In
1830 when he died Victor Hugo’s Romantic drama Hernani had already unleashed a
furious literary storm in Paris and Tennyson had published his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. It
was Hugo who paid tribute to Constant in his diary on 9 December 1830:
Benjamin Constant, who died yesterday, was one of those rare men
who are able to sharpen, hone and polish the ideas of their time,
those arms of the people which will break any that an army can
throw against them. It is only revolutions that can thrust such men
to the fore in society. It takes volcanoes to produce pumice stone.^13Yet Constant’s ceaseless public activity and political campaigning were
often conducted against a private background of acute depression,
occasionally of despair. As he noted with a degree of feeling:
Of all the scourges to which human beings are a prey, the worst is
dejection [le découragement]. It prevents them from judging their
position and seeing what their resources are. This sickness, which
afflicts individuals, can also overwhelm organized groups.^14Introduction 7