1816 to some acclaim.^22 The Second Restoration of Louis XVIII after
Waterloo was a very different affair from the First, and Constant had had a
brief taste of it before leaving for Belgium in the autumn of 1815. The
King, despite having been an exile in England, had never truly been
converted to the notion of parliamentary government. The Charte or
Charter he had given to his people recognized Roman Catholicism as the
official religion of France, and the Hundred Days and its aftermath had
reinforced what to Constant were illiberal tendencies in the King and his
government. The separation of church and state and the freedom of the
individual, two of Constant’s central political principles, were under
threat. Before he had left France in 1815, Constant had visited Count
Charles de Labédoyère in prison. Labédoyère had been condemned to
death for having rallied to Napoleon with his regiment on the road to
Grenoble in March 1815, and was executed by firing squad on 19 August
- In the south of France a White Terror had raged, Napoleon’s loyal
general Marshal Ney had been executed in December 1815, and a
staunchly royalist Chamber of Deputies, known as the Chambre
introuvable, had been elected. There was, however, a small chink of light
ahead. In September 1816 the reactionary Chambre introuvable was
dissolved and a new government with a working majority was elected
under a competent administrator, the Duc de Richelieu. Between
September 1816 and December 1818 when he resigned Richelieu restored
the finances of France. Richelieu was to draw his support from the Centre
and Right of the French political spectrum, but he was able to achieve
what he did only as long as he enjoyed the monarch’s favour. The extent
to which France was slipping back into ancien régime ways was
underlined when Louis XVIII replaced Richelieu with a personal favourite
of his, Count Decazes, in December 1818. Ironically Decazes, despite
being the King’s man, was to draw his support from the Left.
With Constant’s name gradually becoming respectable once again in France, during
the winter of 1816–17 he had a house in Paris made ready for him to occupy the
following summer (he was never in fact to live in it himself^23 ), and began a very active
career in political journalism with the relaunched newspaper the Mercure de France. Still
his expectations and morale were not high, and he told Rosalie on 6 December 1816:
‘The future is still doubtful and sometimes sombre, the present is monotonous, the past
somewhat depressing. And besides, life is running out and death profiting from
everything.’^24 But the Mercure de France which began appearing from 4 January 1817
was to prove a lifeline for Constant. Signed articles by him which appeared every week
soon established him as a respected liberal commentator not only on the activities of the
Chamber of Deputies, but also on wider political and literary matters.^25 In the midst of
these positive omens for his career he received a severe blow: Madame de Staël was
Benjamin constant 236