Benjamin Constant

accorded to a small and arguably parasitic group when many thousands

more had also suffered. In its zeal to roll back the consequences of the

Revolution, the ultra-royalist government of Charles X also brought in a
law on sacrilege which only added to the anti-clerical and anti-Bourbon

feeling that was mounting in France. It took no small degree of courage on

Constant’s part to attack such a measure—which he viewed as interfering

with the citizen’s right to hold private opinions—and then to carry on

working as he did throughout the summer of 1825 on the second volume
of De la religion.^35 And by the time his book went on sale in October 1825

he was already involved in yet another new campaign, this time in favour

of Greek independence from Turkish rule. Word had reached France of

Greek Christians being massacred or sold into slavery by the Muslim

Turks. Despite its recent readiness to intervene in Spain on behalf of the
Catholic Bourbon king, the French government showed itself slow to react

in defence of the Orthodox Greeks. In September Constant had published

a pamphlet entitled Appel aux nations chrétiennes en faveur des Grecs

(Appeal to Christian Nations on behalf of the Greeks):
36
his instinctive

abhorrence of religious fanaticism and his longstanding opposition to
slavery and to all infringements of individual liberty made his defence of

Greece as natural as his resistance to those moves which now threatened to

take France back towards the world of the Inquisition.
Perhaps the most remarkable development, however, in Constant’s pamphlets and
speeches in 1825–6, is the expression of a growing unease at the way society was now
evolving among the advanced nations of Europe, an uneasiness shared by his fellow
novelist Stendhal who in December 1825 published his anti-Saint-Simonian pamphlet
D’un nouveau complot contre les industriels (Concerning a New Plot against the
Productive Members of Society). Seeing the very considerable Luddite unrest in Britain,
Constant made a speech to the Chamber on 9 May 1826 in which he condemned the
concentration of large tracts of land in the hands of a few people, a development which
was driving the poor into despair and revolt:

Will people tell me that [the dispossessed] are rising up against

industry; that they do not attack the châteaux but the looms and

machines which threaten to deprive them of their means of

existence? No doubt: they are attacking what appears to be the

immediate cause of their impoverishment. But who does not feel

that this impoverishment stems from a more distant source, the

system of concentration [of property] which leaves thousands of

proletarians at the mercy of circumstances, and makes even

mechanical inventions and improvements work to the detriment of

mankind?^37

Benjamin constant 252