PREFACE
It may be helpful to state from the outset what this book is not. It makes
no pretence at being the full and definitive biography which its subject
demands: to do justice to such a life, one that was so cosmopolitan,
eventful and filled with emotional agitation would require several volumes
and many hundreds of pages of text and notes. Such a biography will have
to await the complete publication of the works and correspondence of
Constant, a project that will run well into the next century. Nor is the
present work a study of Constant the novelist, the political theorist, the
historian of religion, the autobiographer, the diarist or the letter-writer:
many books and articles have already been devoted to these areas by
specialists more competent than myself—Stephen Holmes on Constant’s
political thought, for example, and Pierre Deguise on Constant and
religion. Even as a biography the present volume does not set out to deal
fully with every aspect of Constant’s intellectual activities or with his very
many publications as did Kurt Kloocke in his Benjamin Constant: une
biographie intellectuelle (1984). Its purpose is more modest: to provide
the English-speaking reader with a concise and factual account of an
important historical and literary figure, an account which includes the
findings of the most recent research, some of it my own. To this end I
have translated all quotations into English, while also giving the text in the
original language where the wording is of particular importance. (When
quoting from original documents in French, English or German I have
retained their spelling and punctuation.)
My hope, nevertheless, is that both the general reader and the specialist in French
literature will find something of interest in the pages that follow. Only two significant
attempts at a full biography of Benjamin Constant have been made in English, by
Elizabeth W.Schermerhorn (1924) and Sir Harold Nicolson (1949). Both are long out of
print but, more important, both predate the many important discoveries made in the past
forty years, for example that of the semi-autobiographical Cécile first published in 1951
by Alfred Roulin. Sir Harold Nicolson’s biography, the most readily available, is a
delight to read, elegant, witty and shrewd, but in some areas it is now inaccurate both in
its facts and the judgements that depend on those facts. My intention is to tell the full
story within a necessarily limited compass, devoting proportionately more space to
Constant’s early, formative years than has sometimes been the case. It goes without
saying that there are gaps in our knowledge which the edition of Constant’s complete