d’Hermenches when Constant died, and subsequently at least some of the
documents went into d’Hermenches’s family archives.
41
After an autumn spent partly in Paris and partly in the country, Constant returned for
the parliamentary session of January to June 1827 and to its familiar themes for debate,
including the slave trade in Africa and the government’s continuing attempts to curb the
press. Despite his age and clear signs of a physical decline in him, he remained an active
speaker in the Chamber, and from this point until his death was considered a sufficiently
serious threat to Villèle’s ultra-royalist ministry to be spied on by the government’s secret
police.^42 Constant’s eloquence was to have a more fitting and permanent memorial than
police reports, however, for in June 1827 a subscription list was opened for the first
volume of his collected speeches to the Chamber from April 1819 to May 1827: the first
volume appeared in July 1827, the second in March 1828.^43 This was followed in mid-
August 1827 by the publication of volume III of De la religion.^44 Still followed
everywhere by police spies, he made a triumphant visit to Alsace between August and
November 1827 in order to court the electorate, having been invited there by Coulmann.
By an irony that Constant would have appreciated, we are better informed than we
otherwise would have been about his activities and movements thanks to the copious
private correspondence of Esmangart—Prefect in Strasbourg and particularly ill-disposed
towards him—with the Minister of the Interior in Paris. From 23 May 1827 when
Constant was still in Paris, Esmangart was sending reports of the effect of Constant’s
speeches to the Chamber on Catholic-Protestant relations in the Bas-Rhin department,
losing no opportunity to blacken Constant’s name for having suggested, for example, that
Protestants were being unfavourably treated in Alsace. Once Constant reached
Esmangart’s own region after having taken the waters at Baden-Baden, the Prefect’s
small-minded and malevolent zeal in compiling his dossier became worthy of the KGB or
Stasi in our own time. Biased reports went off almost daily to Paris saying that Constant
had been seen at the roulette wheel while in Baden-Baden, that Constant’s audience in
Alsace was made up mostly of students and tradesmen, that people only turned up at
meetings to hear the band play, and so on. Yet Esmangart was unable actually to stop his
enemy’s royal progress through Alsace or prevent a banquet from being given in his
honour in Strasbourg, though Constant’s every move was noted, even during his stay out
at Brumath with Coulmann. Indeed even in Baden-Baden there had been no escape from
his fervent admirers. A group of Alsaciens had arranged a dinner there in Constant’s
honour on 23 August 1827: the text of the song written and printed in praise of him has
been preserved.^45
Towards the end of October 1827 Constant returned to Brevans near Dole, where his
late father Juste and late step-mother Marianne de Constant had made their home. His
plan was to visit his cousin Rosalie in Lausanne, something he had been unable to do the
previous year. Once again he was prevented from doing so by the surprise announcement
that the Chamber of Deputies had been dissolved and there were to be elections the
following month. He immediately returned to Paris and there learned of the death of
Madame de Staël’s son Auguste. It prompted the following lines to Rosalie in December
1827:
Life is hard, and when I remember I am 60 years old, I’m
delighted. I have kept only one illusion, that of being famous whenBenjamin constant 254