As Kurt Kloocke points out, Constant’s far-sighted analysis of the sources
of social change and friction anticipates that of Karl Marx two decades
later.
38
Constant was never a proto-socialist, but by 1826 he was beginning
to distance himself somewhat from the bourgeoisie and to consider the
good of society as a whole, including the proletariat. Nevertheless he still
placed his faith in the importance of the property-owning class to whom at
this period the franchise was limited under the arrangement known as the
cens. People of independent means were the best guarantee of
independence of thought at elections: an employee, on the other hand,
might be bullied into voting as directed by his employer. In accepting the
so-called régime censitaire whereby ownership of property governed
one’s right to vote or otherwise, Constant was, of course, simply thinking
and behaving like any man of his time. His hope was in a constitutional
monarchy, in the development of a range of institutions comparable to
those in Britain—a free press, well-informed public opinion, an impartial
judiciary, and so on—and in the gradual spread of les lumières, of
education and enlightened attitudes, through society as a whole, and for
the good of all. His political thinking had its limits which were those of his
time: unlike ours, however, it was dominated less by economics than by
more general philosophical and moral considerations.
In the summer of 1826 Charlotte fell ill, which prevented a trip to Switzerland that
Constant had been planning. His parliamentary activity had lately seemed increasingly
futile and more tiring than ever to him, and in the latter half of the year he concentrated
his remaining energies on work on the third volume of De la religion, the last to appear
during his lifetime.^39 On 23 October 1826 he wrote to Sismondi from the château of the
liberal General Marquis de Lafayette at La Grange-Bleneau where he had been invited to
stay:
I am working on my third volume as much as my rather poor
physical shape allows me to—I don’t know why it should be so. Or
rather I do know: it’s because the day after tomorrow is my fifty-
ninth birthday.^40To add to his worries, a large chest full of papers—legal documents
concerning his lengthy financial wrangle with his father, letters to
cherished friends and relatives and perhaps even the manuscript of
Cécile—which he had left in Göttingen in the care of a friend was now on
its way to Rosalie in Lausanne from whom Constant was to have collected
it when he was in Switzerland. Sadly he was never to see the chest or its
contents again; Rosalie seems to have given it to her cousin Auguste
Apotheosis 253