position, and by a massive majority. The Tribunate consisted of 100
members, each receiving a salary, whose function was to examine
proposed projets de loi or bills, to accept or reject them, and to express a
view on them. It could not, however, change a bill. To this toothless and
essentially advisory body Constant was appointed on 24 December 1799
thanks to the support of Sieyès. Constant recommended a friend, the
Genevan lawyer J.-M.Pictet-Diodati (1768–1828), to Sieyès to represent
Geneva on the Legislative body, and the friend was duly appointed.
89
Constant’s appointment was the culmination of an ambition stretching back more than
six years, the satisfaction of which had so often eluded him. His father had in the
meantime become embittered, seeing Benjamin reject a salaried post in Brunswick in
order, as Juste saw it, to squander his fortune and his talents with Germaine de Staël in
France. Lately their relationship had deteriorated still further in a lengthy, acrimonious
and complicated wrangle over monies which father and son both felt were due to them
from the estate of Benjamin’s mother. The rift between them was to last until Juste’s
death. But now, finally, Constant had the chance to prove he had been right: he
immediately resigned from his post in Luzarches and on the first day of the new century
attended the first sitting of the Tribunate, making it his special concern to represent the
interests of Geneva. He also continued work—begun possibly under the Directory—on a
political treatise now known as Fragments of an Abandoned Work concerning the
Possibility of a Republican Constitution in a Large Country.^90 Constant’s deep distrust of
Bonaparte and of the military led him, with the encouragement of Germaine, to use his
very first speech to the Tribunate on 5 January 1800 to demonstrate the possibility of
using it as a platform for independent opposition to the Consulate and to warn the public
of the threat of tyranny in France.^91 It was a bold high-risk gesture: it made his name as
an orator and won him the respect of his fellow tribunes. Bonaparte never forgave him for
it, nor did the press which the First Consul controlled. Constant recalls the occasion in an
entry in his Journaux intimes dated 6 January 1805:
I was due to have many, many people to dinner at my house, all
rallying around the fledgling government, and gathering around me
as around a favoured candidate. But I had shown too much
independence when I had spoken the previous day. Only two
turned up and they couldn’t avoid me because they were my
colleagues and met me at the Tribunate. It was from that moment
that my tribulations began, the attacks by my enemies, and
Biondetta’s [Germaine’s] despair.^92Germaine recalls in her Dix années d’exil (Ten Years in Exile) being
summoned by Bonaparte’s sinister chief of police Joseph Fouché (1759–
- and being told of his master’s displeasure at her involvement in
Constant’s opposition. It was suggested to her that she spend some time in
the country.^93 Constant, after years of angling for a position and behaving
Germaine de stael 171