move. He left for Hanover to declare his support for Prince Bernadotte. He was followed
by Charlotte and her son. His diary entry for 6 November 1813 reads:
Dined with the man from Béarn [Bernadotte]. He was extremely
friendly. Tomorrow or never. I have perhaps stupidly put him off
me by being polite but familiar with him. Tomorrow we shall see,
and in any case if I decide not to follow him, I must choose which
alternative course to follow and have no regrets about it. Even if I
am successful, there will be painful consequences.^20Over subsequent days he saw Bernadotte again several times and, in a
surge of self-confidence, on 22 November resumed work on an essay
which was soon to become perhaps his finest and best-known piece of
political analysis and polemic, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation
dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne (On the Spirit of
Conquest and Usurpation in their Connection with European
Civilization). It was finished in record time: by 30 January 1814 his
‘bombshell’ as he called it was already printed and ready for publication.
21
De l’esprit de conquête, based on political manuscripts accumulated over a decade or
more such as the Principes de politique and the Fragments of an Abandoned Work
concerning the Possibility of a Republican Constitution in a Large Country written many
years earlier, is a savage philippic against the despotism of Napoleon. Its importance,
however, far transcends its original purpose. The psychology and mechanisms of what we
would now call totalitarian rule by a dictator are described with extraordinary and
prophetic perceptiveness, so that Constant, although unaware of the prodigious
sophistication which methods of surveillance and coercion would attain in the modern
police state, seems at times to have anticipated the internal conditions of Hitler’s Reich
and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The book marks a decisive development in Constant’s thought
and links his writings on religion and politics with his autobiographical fiction. For by
now he had come to the conclusion that there was a strong parallel between the historical
growth of oppressive priestly government among religious groups and that of tyrannical
rule based on military conquest and enslavement. The former ran counter to the natural
modern aspiration to freedom in religious belief, just as the latter belonged to the violent
world of distant Antiquity.
In Constant’s view what characterizes our modern world are commerce and the
production of goods, activities which need peace among nations and the maximum
personal liberty to be carried out successfully. The rights of individuals to self-
expression, to property and to privacy have therefore become essential in modern
societies. An intimidating priestly caste or rigidly imposed dogmas are as out of place in
the religious life of nineteenth-century Europe as Napoleon’s military dictatorship is in its
civil life; it is a dictatorship moreover which perpetuates itself by waging expansionist
wars and suppressing all opposition. Constant sees that guaranteeing the freedom of the
individual against the encroachments of the wider group or of society as a whole must
henceforth be the chief concern of politicians and legislators. Similarly Adolphe, Cécile
The end of an empire 219