CONSTANT, BENJAMIN (1767–1830), French politician, writer, and theorist.
Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was best known in his lifetime as a politician and political journalist and later as a novelist. With the resurgence of interest in liberal ideas in France in the 1980s, however, his importance as a political theorist has come to be appreciated. Previously he was dismissed as a political adventurer, but since the late twentieth century scholars have found a deeper theoretical consistency in Constant's writings, and he is increasingly regarded as one of the outstanding theorists of nineteenth-century liberalism.
Constant was born in Lausanne in 1767. His mother, who died shortly after giving birth, came from an old French Protestant family; his father was a colonel in a Swiss regiment in the service of Holland. Constant was educated at the Universities of Erlangen (Bavaria) and Ed in burgh, where he came in to contact with the central ideas of Scottish political economy, which would have a profound impact on his political thought. From 1788 to 1794 he served at the court of Brunswick, where in 1789 he married the Baroness Wilhelmina von Cramm. The failure of that marriage led him to return to Switzerland where he met and fell in love with Germaine de Staël, whom he accompanied to Paris in May 1795. His relationship with the brilliant but manipulative Staël was to endure, intermittently, for a decade and a half.
In France, Constant was elected to the Tribunate in January 1800, but his advocacy of freedom of speech antagonized Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1804–1814/15), who dismissed him in 1802. He spent the years from 1802 to 1814 in exile with Staël, whom Bonaparte had expelled from France. In 1808 he married Charlotte von Hardenberg, with whom he had had a prolonged if irregular relationship since their first meeting in 1793. From 1814 he lived predominantly in France, where he served as a deputy from 1819 to 1822 and from 1824 to 1830, and championed such causes as the freedom of the press, the abolition of the slave trade, and Greek independence. He died in December 1830.
Constant was the author of a short novel, Adolphe (1816), which has come to be recognized as something of a classic, not least for its innovative introspective narrative style. Along with a posthumous novel, Cécile (1951), and his autobiographical works also published posthumously from manuscripts, Adolphe articulates a powerful sense of the importance of personal independence. He also engaged in a lifelong study of the history of religion. This remained incomplete at his death, although at the end of his life he published a five-volume study, De la religion (1826–1831). It was initially intended as a sophisticated defense of the radical Enlightenment proposition that ancient polytheism had been more conducive to religious toleration than had Christianity. But the final work reversed this position, for Constant came to see ancient toleration as a consequence of indifference. Modern toleration, by contrast, rested on a sense of the radical importance of religious belief to personal identity, and hence on a profound respect for individual belief.
As a political writer Constant is often viewed as a thinker of the Restoration, since it was during this last period that he published most; but in fact his political views had taken a more or less definitive form by 1806. However, they remained in manuscript form at his death: notably his Principes de politique, which was completed in draft in 1806, and Fragmens d'un ouvrage abandonne sur la possibilitéd'une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays, which was composed between 1795 and 1807. Constant drew on these manuscripts for a number of shorter pieces, including his celebrated speech on ancient and modern liberty.
Constant was criticized, in his lifetime and after, for his political inconsistency: a republican under the Directory, he rallied to Napoleon during his Hundred Days and then, during the Restoration, defended the superiority of constitutional monarchy. But Constant always believed that the contes