Unfortunately the Deputy for the Sarthe now had little time left to devote
to writing of anything but an ephemeral kind. This is posterity’s loss, since
no longer would he be able to lecture at the Athénée royal, where on 26
December 1818 he had given a speech in praise of the life and liberal
principles of the Englishman Sir Samuel Romilly, who had recently
committed suicide,^4 and had begun a course of lectures on the British
constitution which would end in June 1819:
5
in fact his third lecture, on
freedom in ancient and modern times, given on 13 February 1819, was an
important summary of his political thought, drawing the distinction he had
made in De l’esprit de conquête in 1814 between the collectivistic view of
freedom in Antiquity, in the Greek city states for example, and the modern
world’s stress on the individual’s right to privacy.
6
Henceforth much of
Constant’s work is regrettably of interest only to the specialist
parliamentary historian, and appears either in the volumes of Discours à la
Chambre, the French equivalent of Hansard,^7 or in newspapers. He
himself was aware of this self-imposed limitation on his talents, and told
Rosalie in September 1820:
Despite all the interest which politics must and do inspire in me in
my present situation, I sometimes get terribly tired of my job as a
schoolteacher, having to repeat again and again the same ideas. I
have just finished a pamphlet, which will be my last, judging by
how much it’s bored me.^8Some of his campaigns still stand out amongst long-forgotten arguments
about budgetary policy, such as that against the slave trade in Senegal
which began in August 1819 with an article by Constant in the Minerve,
9
or the following year in favour of individual and press freedom. But it is to
Constant’s extra-parliamentary work that one now generally turns for
interest, such as his long-awaited seventeen letters on Napoleon’s Hundred
Days, serialized in the Minerve between September 1819 and March
1820,
10
at which date the newspaper was closed down by the government.
On 13 February 1820 the Duc de Berry, who was to succeed Louis XVIII to the
throne, was assassinated by a saddler named Louvel while leaving the Opera. Although
his murder was the work of a fanatic, it resulted in a sea change in French political life.
The relatively liberal Decazes was replaced by the Duc de Richelieu, and an already
reactionary and repressive government became considerably more so: censorship was
strengthened (hence the demise of the liberal Minerve), suspected persons could be
rounded up by the police, and richer members of the electorate were given a double vote.
Such severity gave birth to a secret insurrectionary movement, parallel to the Carbonari
in Italy, and the centre ground of French politics was increasingly eroded. There was a
Apotheosis 243