(Outline of an Essay on the Literature of the Eighteenth Century) in Beatrice
Camille Fink, op. cit., p. vi.
- On the historical context of Lausanne in the eighteenth century, see Charles Burnier,
La Vie vaudoise et la Révolution. De la servitude à la liberté, Lausanne: Bridel,
1902.
- May wrote to his sister Jane at some date before 19 February 1781: ‘Young
Constants passions are sometimes very strong it is only the presence and authority of
his Father that can govern him. If he will not conduct himself well with me I shall
not stay with him long’ (Benjamin Constant, Correspondance I [1774–1792],
Appendice A.21).
- Beatrice Camille Fink’s neat summary, op. cit., p. 161. In De la force du
gouvernement actuel et de la nécessité de s’y rallier (1796) Constant stated that ‘le
grand art est de gouverner avec force, mais de gouverner peu’, ‘the great art is in
governing firmly but governing very little’ (ed. Philippe Raynaud, Paris:
Flammarion [Champs], 1988, p. 64).
- On this, see Dennis Wood, Benjamin Constant: ‘Adolphe’, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press (Landmarks of World Literature), 1987.
- In such books as Benjamin Constant muscadin, 1795–1799, Paris: Gallimard, 1958,
Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant et Napoléon, Paris: Plon, 1959, and Pas à pas,
Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
- Benjamin Constant, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation, ed. Ephraïm Harpaz,
Paris: GF Flammarion, 1986, Chapitre XIII, ‘De l’uniformité’, p. 122: ‘La variété,
c’est la vie; l’uniformité, c’est la mort.’
- Quoted in Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin Constant: une biographie intellectuelle, Geneva:
Droz (Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, 218), 1984, p. 296.
- Quoted in Beatrice Camille Fink, op. cit., p. 188, from Constant’s manuscript ‘Du
moment actuel et de la destinée de l’espèce humaine, ou histoire abrégée de
l’humanité’ (‘Concerning the present moment and the destiny of the human race, or
a short history of humanity’).
1 ‘THE GRIEF THAT DOES NOT SPEAK’: CONSTANT AND HIS
FATHER (1767–1783)
- On the circumstances surrounding Benjamin Constant’s birth, see Ma Vie, ed.
C.P.Courtney, pp. 3 and 71; Rudler, Jeunesse, pp. 31–5; and the correspondence in
Appendice I to Constant’s Correspondance I (1774–1792), ‘La mort de la mère de
Benjamin Constant’. Pierre Cordey established that Benjamin Constant was born in
the house of his maternal grandfather, Benjamin de Chandieu, now 7 Place Saint-
François (premises currently occupied by the Lausanne Cercle littéraire) opposite the
church where he was shortly to be christened (Mmede Staël et Benjamin Constant sur
les bords du Léman, Lausanne: Payot [collection ‘Paysages de l’amour’], 1966, p.
233). Although he was christened Benjamin-Henri, from an early age he always
signed himself Henri-Benjamin Constant. The significance of this might be worth
exploring. John E.Jackson, in his Passions du sujet. Essais sur les rapports entre
psychanalyse et littérature, Paris: Mercure de France, 1990, pp. 94–6, elaborates an
intriguing Freudian hypothesis concerning Stendhal’s autobiographical La Vie de
List of abbreviations 268
