Table Of Content
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
BENJAMIN
CONSTANT
A biography
Dennis Wood
London and New York
First published 1993
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1993 Dennis Wood
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wood, Dennis Michael
Benjamin Constant: a biography
I. Title
848.609
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wood, Dennis.
Benjamin Constant: a biography/Dennis Wood.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Constant, Benjamin, 1767–1830—Biography. 2. Novelists,
Swiss—19th century—Biography. 3. Intellectuals—France—
Biography. I. Title.
PQ2211.C24Z95 1993
944.06′092—dc20
[B]
ISBN 0-203-19163-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-32917-1 (OEB Format)
ISBN 0-415-01937-0 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS
List of plates v
Preface vi
Brief chronology ix
A NOTE ON BENJAMIN CONSTANT’S FAMILY 1
INTRODUCTION 4
1 ‘THE GRIEF THAT DOES NOT SPEAK’: CONSTANT
AND HIS FATHER (1767–1783) 9
2 ‘THE CHARMS OF FRIENDSHIP’ (1783–1785) 43
3 ISABELLE DE CHARRIERE (1785–1787) 64
4 ESCAPE (1787–1788) 89
5 THE BRUNSWICK YEARS (1788–1794) 106
6 GERMAINE DE STAEL (1794–1800) 152
7 ‘THE INTERMITTENCES OF THE HEART’ (1800–
1806) 174
8 ‘ITALIAM, ITALIAM’ (1806–1812) 196
9 THE END OF AN EMPIRE (1812–1816) 215
10 ADOLPHE (1816–1819) 230
11 APOTHEOSIS (1819–1830) 241
EPILOGUE 263
List of abbreviations used in the notes 267
Notes 269
Index 320
PLATES
(Between pages 114 and 115.)
1 The High Street, Edinburgh in about 1780, by David Allan (1744–
96)
2 Benjamin Constant aged about 20, miniature on ivory, artist
unknown
3 Sir James Mackintosh, engraving from Mackintosh’s Memoirs
(1836) after a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830)
4 Isabelle de Charrière in 1777, portrait in oils by the Danish artist
Jens Juel (1745–1802)
5 Benjamin Constant as a young man, anonymous drawing
6 ‘Benjamin Constant en 1792’, after a silhouette by Marianne
Moula (1760–1826)
7 and Ludwig Ferdinand Huber (1764–1804) and his wife Therese
8 Forster-Huber, née Heyne (1764–1829), miniatures, artist
unknown
9 Germaine de Staël, miniature made by Firmin Massot probably in
the spring of 1812
10 Benjamin Constant in his thirties, miniature by Firmin Massot
11 Julie Talma, after a portrait by Pascal Glain
12 Charlotte von Hardenberg
13 View of Göttingen in 1791, after a drawing by Heinrich Wilhelm
Grape
14 Portrait in oils of Benjamin Constant dating from 1815 or later,
artist unknown
15 Engraved portrait of Benjamin Constant from Discours de M.
Benjamin Constant à la Chambre des Députés (volume II, 1828)
16 Portrait in oils of Benjamin Constant, probably in 1830, signed
‘Hercule de Roche’
17 18 Three views of the death mask of Benjamin Constant made by the
and sculptor Gois and recently rediscovered by Kurt Kloocke in the
19 anthropological collection of the Musée de l’Homme, Paris
PREFACE
It may be helpful to state from the outset what this book is not. It makes
no pretence at being the full and definitive biography which its subject
demands: to do justice to such a life, one that was so cosmopolitan,
eventful and filled with emotional agitation would require several volumes
and many hundreds of pages of text and notes. Such a biography will have
to await the complete publication of the works and correspondence of
Constant, a project that will run well into the next century. Nor is the
present work a study of Constant the novelist, the political theorist, the
historian of religion, the autobiographer, the diarist or the letter-writer:
many books and articles have already been devoted to these areas by
specialists more competent than myself—Stephen Holmes on Constant’s
political thought, for example, and Pierre Deguise on Constant and
religion. Even as a biography the present volume does not set out to deal
fully with every aspect of Constant’s intellectual activities or with his very
many publications as did Kurt Kloocke in his Benjamin Constant: une
biographie intellectuelle (1984). Its purpose is more modest: to provide
the English-speaking reader with a concise and factual account of an
important historical and literary figure, an account which includes the
findings of the most recent research, some of it my own. To this end I
have translated all quotations into English, while also giving the text in the
original language where the wording is of particular importance. (When
quoting from original documents in French, English or German I have
retained their spelling and punctuation.)
My hope, nevertheless, is that both the general reader and the specialist in French
literature will find something of interest in the pages that follow. Only two significant
attempts at a full biography of Benjamin Constant have been made in English, by
Elizabeth W.Schermerhorn (1924) and Sir Harold Nicolson (1949). Both are long out of
print but, more important, both predate the many important discoveries made in the past
forty years, for example that of the semi-autobiographical Cécile first published in 1951
by Alfred Roulin. Sir Harold Nicolson’s biography, the most readily available, is a
delight to read, elegant, witty and shrewd, but in some areas it is now inaccurate both in
its facts and the judgements that depend on those facts. My intention is to tell the full
story within a necessarily limited compass, devoting proportionately more space to
Constant’s early, formative years than has sometimes been the case. It goes without
saying that there are gaps in our knowledge which the edition of Constant’s complete
works and correspondence may yet fill (at the time I am writing only one volume of each
has so far gone to press), as well as subsequent volumes of the systematic Chronologie of
Constant’s life and works, of which only the first, covering the years 1767–1805, has so
far appeared. It seems useful nevertheless to faire le point: to take stock and attempt to
summarize the present state of our knowledge about Constant’s life. If there is any other
claim to originality in this book, besides its giving as many of the ascertainable facts as
possible, it is to be found in a tentative reinterpretation of Constant’s personality in the
light of modern clinical studies of attachment and bereavement by John Bowlby (1907–
90) and others—a study which, incidentally, I began long before Bowlby’s compelling
life of Darwin appeared in 1990. Madame de Charrière once called Constant ‘a true
chameleon’, and changeability—violent swings of mood from energetic elation to the
most profound and overwhelming melancholy and fatalistic despair—was a central
feature of his character. There is a mystère Constant which the first four chapters of the
book in particular seek to identify and understand.
Two articles which I wrote for the journal French Studies in the early 1980s provided
the starting point for Chapter 2 of this book: I recall the kindness and generosity of the
then editor, Professor Malcolm Bowie, with deep gratitude. My colleagues on the team
editing Constant’s complete works and correspondence have offered encouragement and
stimulus on many occasions, particularly Simone Balayé, Dr C.P.Courtney, Professor
Paul Delbouille, Professor Alison Fairlie and Dr Kurt Kloocke, as well as my friends and
colleagues in Birmingham, Dr Ceri Crossley, Dr David Hill, Dr Alex Hughes, the late
Professor Derek Lomax, Professor R.E.F.Smith and Dr Marcus Walsh. My Head of
Department, Professor Jennifer Birkett, Professor Michael Butler of the School of
Modern Languages, and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Leon Pompa have also
greatly facilitated my work.
I should like to thank the many librarians, archivists and owners of private collections
who have helped me over the years in my research, particularly Jacques Rychner,
Director of the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, Neuchâtel; Jean-Daniel Candaux
and other members of the staff of the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, Geneva; the
staff of the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, Lausanne; Etienne Hofmann,
Christian Viredaz and the staff of the Institut Benjamin Constant, University of
Lausanne; Dr Alain Rivier of Vevey and his family for permission to consult the Rivier
archives at Le Désert, Lausanne; Professor Claude Reymond; Annie Angremy of the
Département des manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris; Dr Matthes, the staff of the
Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, Wolfenbüttel, and the Von Marenholtz family for access
to the Von Marenholtz family papers; Professor Dr Paul Raabe, Director of the Herzog
August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel and his staff, especially Dr Gillian Bepler; the
university libraries of Göttingen and Erlangen, and the Stadtarchiv Erlangen; the
Bodleian Library, Oxford, and university libraries of Cambridge and Edinburgh; the
Harrowby Mss Trust, Sandon Hall, Stafford; the National Library of Scotland and the
Secretary and members of the Speculative Society, Edinburgh; Peter Fox, Librarian of
Trinity College, Dublin; and Dr Ben Benedikz, Rare Books Librarian, University of
Birmingham.
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Foundation for a Fellowship in 1986 which enabled
me to make a number of discoveries in Germany, and to the British Academy, Pro
Helvetia Foundation and the University of Birmingham for their generous support of my
research through travel grants. At Routledge, Richard Stoneman’s forbearance since 1986
has been worthy indeed of the Constant family motto, ‘In arduis constans’. My wife
Katherine and my sons Orlando and Francis have shown exemplary patience and given
unstinting support: this book is dedicated to them.
Birmingham, Whitsun 1992
BRIEF CHRONOLOGY
1767 25 October: Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque born in Lausanne,
Switzerland, the son of Juste de Constant de Rebecque, an officer in the
service of Holland.
10 November: death of Benjamin’s mother Henriette, née de Chandieu.
Benjamin entrusted to nursemaids.
1772 Juste puts Benjamin in the care of Marianne Magnin, later his second
wife. Subsequently the boy is educated by a number of unsatisfactory
tutors.
1780 Benjamin spends two months at Oxford with his father.
1782– Student at Erlangen University, Germany. Fights duels.
3
1783– Student at Edinburgh University, friendship with John Wilde and James
5 Mackintosh. Begins study of the history of religions. Attends many
debates at the Speculative Society. Gambling debts.
1785 Affair with Madame Johannot in Brussels.
1786– Friendship with the novelist Isabelle de Charrière whom Constant meets
7 while staying in Paris. Runs away to England and Scotland during the
summer of 1787.
1788 After staying with Madame de Charrière near Neuchâtel, Switzerland,
Constant takes up a post at the Court of the Duke of Brunswick (1788–
94). Unhappy at Court.
1789 Marries Minna von Cramm, a lady-in-waiting at the Court of Brunswick,
whom he divorces in 1795. Friendship with Jakob Mauvillon, who dies in
1794.
1793 Friendship with Charlotte, née von Hardenberg.
1794 Meets Germaine de Staël in Switzerland, will have a long relationship
with her.
1795 Beginning of Constant’s political activity in Paris, publishes pamphlets.
1799 24 December: Constant elected to the Tribunate.
1800 Passionate affair with Anna Lindsay (1800–1).
1802 Constant excluded from the Tribunate for his opposition to Bonaparte.
1804 In Weimar with Madame de Staël. Meets Goethe, Schiller and Wieland.
1806 October: begins affair with Charlotte von Hardenberg, and the novel from
which Adolphe and Cécile will eventually emerge.
1807 Torn between Madame de Staël and Charlotte. Falls under influence of a
