despite its shortcomings, at the cost of their lives if necessary.^25 Constant’s
greatest fear was a return of the ancien régime with a vindictive monarchy
and aristocracy seeking retribution against the regicides and their
sympathizers, and the Catholic church once again all-powerful in France.
Indeed an attempted invasion by émigrés with British support had been
defeated by General Hoche at Quiberon Bay in Brittany (June-July 1795)
and émigré prisoners taken had been massacred. Constant now attracted
the attention of the novelist and politician Jean-Baptiste Louvet de
Couvray (1760–97), and at Louvet’s invitation collaborated with him in
writing a speech which the deputy delivered to the Convention on 20
August 1795.^26
All of Constant’s activity, in the complex and shifting political scene of that summer
of 1795, was directed to two ends: impressing and winning over Germaine—who
continued to refuse to become his mistress and was now taking an interest in an old
acquaintance, François de Pange; and giving support to the setting up of a legally
established Republican government with a new constitution, a government that would
resist both Royalist and Jacobin extremism. The Constitution of Year III, adopted in
August 1795, enshrined the respect for private property which had been challenged
during the Terror. Through it the Convention abolished universal suffrage, and limited
the franchise to the propertied classes. This move may appear shocking to modern eyes,
but to eighteenth-century eyes—and especially to those of people who had witnessed the
excesses of 1793–4—it was absolutely logical: the government needed to be elected by
those with the best education and who, because they owned property, obeyed the laws
and had a vested interest in ensuring a stable future for the country. Such was, indeed, the
principle which Constant himself held to throughout his political career. To prevent any
return to a pre-1789 situation, priests and former émigrés were disenfranchised, and the
‘law of the two-thirds’ decreed that in any case two-thirds of the members of a new
legislative body would have to come from among the members of the outgoing
Convention. That last item was eventually to be the Convention’s undoing: such a blatant
attempt to perpetuate its own power led to an uprising on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October
1795) by moderates and royalists, which was crushed by the army under an energetic
young general by the name of Bonaparte.
At about this time Constant began to plan a future for himself in his adopted country,
and bought three properties in France in order to become an enfranchized citizen, farms
near Rouen (only five hours travel from Paris) and near Dreux, and land at Vaux.^27 Juste,
showing his usual lack of understanding of his son—but also, it has to be said, fearing
Benjamin’s eventual financial ruin—wished him to take up his post in Brunswick again.
Germaine de Staël left the capital in September for Mathieu de Montmorency’s château
at Ormesson not far away lest she be accused of using her salon to interfere in the
elections that were currently taking place.^28 Needless to say Constant accompanied her
there, but he was back in Paris at the Convention during two all-night sittings (26–7
September and 3–4 October 1795) with Louvet ready to defend it against a threatened
royalist revival.^29 In a tragicomic misunderstanding Constant found himself caught up in
a street disturbance following the failed 5 October monarchist insurrection and spent the
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