liberals during the Restoration, gives a somewhat more sympathetic
portrait of the redoubtable parliamentary debater in action:
At first sight one would never have said that he had the usual
qualities necessary to make an orator. He seldom improvised
without having a pen in his hand; but his pen had the quickness of
speech, and sometimes he wrote out his reply in full while still
listening to the harangue he was to refute. He normally read his
speeches from little pieces of paper which he was constantly
obliged to put in order. His voice was high like a woman’s,
sometimes had difficulty in making itself heard and its intonation
could be monotonous. He lacked the powerful lungs and strength of
emphasis that are needed for great eloquence. But despite these
disadvantages, he was always a tricky adversary to have in the
Chamber, sometimes a formidable one. With his clever rather than
highly coloured speeches, subtle rather than powerful in their
delivery, he showed great skill in argument, rare presence of mind,
he had a way of saying everything, despite legal restrictions, so that
even the most intolerant audience understood what he was
implying, and he was nimble enough to slip through his opponent’s
fingers and to stand up for himself even in the tightest corner.^31In September 1824 Louis XVIII died and was succeeded by Charles X.
Under Louis the power of the Catholic church had returned to something
like that which it had enjoyed under the ancien régime. Secondary and
even university education was placed under church supervision, and legal
penalties were introduced for printing anything offensive to the Church in
the press. In the country at large there was also something of a religious
revival, although the rationalism and anti-clericalism inherited from the
eighteenth-century philosophes and the Revolution remained strong in
many quarters. Something like the tense opposition between socialist
rationalism and the Catholic church which occasionally persists in French
towns and villages even today was already coming into being at this time.
Constant anticipated being caught again in the crossfire between the two
sides as he worked that September on the second volume of De la
religion: for the rationalists he took religion too seriously and for
Catholics he was too relativistic in his views and too critical of the
Catholic church’s structures and beliefs. On 22 September 1824 he wrote
to Rosalie:
Benjamin constant 250