Benjamin Constant

But the obvious reason is not always necessarily the real reason for a person’s feelings
and actions, and Constant’s reasons were undoubtedly more complex than this. The
démocrate, the radical republican in him would, as a young man, have found the city’s
provincial conservatism and rigid hierarchy of social castes a stumbling block to all
political progress, and personally stifling into the bargain. Yet even this would hardly
account for Constant’s animosity against Lausanne. The answer must probably be sought
elsewhere, in memories of family life and relationships during childhood and adolescence
that the city conjured up in him. As we have seen, Lausanne and the surrounding area had
been associated with emotional suffering and above all of helpless dependence—on his
relatives, on his nurse, on Marianne, on his father. Lausanne to Constant meant emotional
bullying of one kind or another, and at 19 he was now too big to be bullied. Indeed it was
a sign of the strength of his defence mechanisms against a renewal of childhood anxieties
and miseries that he was able to display a quite exceptional degree of insubordination not
only towards his immediate relatives but indeed towards all and sundry in Lausanne, and
that far from reacting in a depressive way to the city’s political impotence vis-à-vis
Berne, he was filled with indignation and harangued his fellow Lausannois on the need
for political change.^26
But there was little rejoicing among members of Constant’s family. In their eyes the
time he had spent away from Lausanne had ruined his character. They found him on his
return from his four apprenticeship years to be insufferably conceited. What they saw
before them now was a vain and ambitious young man, ready to humiliate friend and
enemy alike with his ironic wit and superior cosmopolitan education. Worse still there
was about him the taint of political sedition, a dangerous and unwanted luxury in
Lausanne. Besides which each member of his family had a personal reason to resent the
change that had come about in his character. Rosalie could not forget that he had not
written to her for four years while he was in Erlangen, Edinburgh, Paris and Brussels.
And her father shortly would have reason to regret nurturing such a viper in his bosom.
Samuel, hypersensitive and unsure of himself at the best of times, had nonetheless taken
Benjamin into his confidence and affection, and on his nephew’s return to Switzerland
asked him to write a mémoire on discipline in the Roman army. It would be a
constructive way of exhibiting his newly acquired Classical learning—this was no doubt
the intention in Samuel de Constant’s mind. As with the other project of 1786, Gillies’s
History, Benjamin seems to have been determined to expend as little energy as possible
on it, although it is not without significance that the better of the two pieces of work was
done for his father. After completing his short piece (fifteen pages of quarto manuscript),
in which he merely listed a number of remarkable punishments handed out to members of
the Roman army, Benjamin sent it to Samuel in Geneva. When his uncle pointed out
justifiably that this was not at all the general and rather philosophical study he had asked
for, Benjamin sent him the following reply on 2 May 1786. From its tone it is easy to see
why he had now become so unpopular with the rest of the Constant clan:

Many thanks for the far too generous way in which you have

judged the few ideas I assembled in haste on the subject you spoke

to me about. If in your first letter you had said that you wanted

observations on discipline amongst the Romans and on their

concept of honour—which is very different from what you were

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