And on 23 August 1793: ‘Lausanne...always fills me with profound
melancholy, and has the effect of making me see everything as being
black’ (p. 157). Since the annexation of the Pays de Vaud by Berne in
1536 Lausanne had lost all autonomy in government. One major
insurrection had been crushed and its leader Davel executed in 1723. The
consequence for an aristocratic family like Constant’s was that, as subjects
of Berne, they were permanently debarred from holding political office,
this being reserved exclusively for the ruling Bourgeois of Berne.
25
Lausanne and the Vaud canton were ruled firmly by a group of patricians
in Berne, the Council of Two Hundred, whose representative in Lausanne
was the Bailli. Thus the Constants, the Chandieus and families like them
harboured political ambitions at their peril, and were left with the army or
the church as the only choice of career. And since that church was not the
rich Catholic church of France with its bishoprics and sinecures but the
church of Calvin, what was on offer was nothing more than the ascetic and
scholarly life of a Calvinist pastor. A career in the army meant in fact a
life in permanent exile as an officer in the service of a foreign regiment.
Benjamin Constant had at least two Calvinist pastors among his ancestors,
and his father was, of course, a colonel in a Swiss regiment in the service
of Holland. Yet it was not the uninspiring choice of career open to a
Vaudois aristocrat which the young Baron Constant resented most. The
most irksome thought to him was that he and his fellow countrymen had
no say in their own government, and were entirely dependent on the
Bernese. For Constant Berne was a tyranny, and all Vaudois were
condemned to live under alien rule until their political oppressor could be
shaken off. This was the belief in which he had been brought up by Juste,
and his father’s later experiences of injustice at the hands of ‘Leurs
Excellences de Berne’, ‘their Excellencies of Berne’, merely confirmed it
as a fact. Lausanne was therefore a city in the hands of an occupying
power, although the evidence of that occupation was discreetly out of
sight. In Constant’s mind Lausanne became a symbol of subjection, and
worse still its citizens seemed almost to have lost their taste for freedom
when in the late eighteenth century their city had become a centre of
elegant cosmopolitan désœuvrement, idleness and pleasure. If the
Lausannois were content to live in a state of complete political docility,
Constant certainly was not, and this, as well of course as his need to act on
a wider political stage, was a reason for his later change of allegiance to
France and his eventual adoption of French nationality.
Isabelle de charriere 71