Бенжамен Констан: Жизнь и политические взгляды

Swiss French politician and writer (1767–1830)
the European writer and politician

Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (kɔ̃stɑ̃; 25 October 1767 – 8 December 1830), or simply Benjamin Constant, was a Swiss political thinker, activist and writer on political theory and religion. A committed republican from 1795, he backed the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797) and the following one on 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799). During the Consulat, in 1800 he became the leader of the Liberal Opposition. Having upset Napoleon and left France to go to Switzerland then to the Kingdom of Saxony, Constant nonetheless sided with him during the Hundred Days and became politically active again during the French Restoration. He was elected Député in 1818 and remained in post until his death in 1830. Head of the Liberal opposition, known as Indépendants, he was one of the most notable orators of the Chamber of Deputies of France, as a proponent of the parliamentary system. During the July Revolution, he was a supporter of Louis Philippe I ascending the throne. Besides his numerous essays on political and religious themes, Constant also wrote on romantic love. His autobiographical Le Cahier rouge (1807) gives an account of his love for Madame de Staël, whose protégé and collaborator he became, especially in the Coppet circle, and a successful novella, Adolphe (1816), are good examples of his work on this topic. He was a fervent classical liberal of the early 19th century. He refined the concept of liberty, defining it as a condition of existence that allowed the individual to turn away interference from the state or society. His ideas influenced the Trienio Liberal movement in Spain, the Liberal Revolution of 1820 in Portugal, the Greek War of Independence, the November uprising in Poland, the Belgian Revolution, and liberalism in Brazil and Mexico.

Henri Benjamin Constant was born in Lausanne to the Constant de Rebecque family, descendants of French Huguenots who had fled from Artois to Switzerland during the French Wars of Religion in the 16th century. His father, Jules Constant de Rebecque, served as a high ranking officer in the Dutch States Army, like his grandfather, his uncle and his cousin Jean Victor de Constant Rebecque. When Constant's mother, Henriette Pauline de Chandieu Villars, died soon after his birth, both his grandmothers took care of him. Private tutors educated him in Brussels (1779) and in the Netherlands (1780). While at the Protestant University of Erlangen (1783), he gained access to the court of Duchess Sophie Caroline Marie of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel. He had to leave after an affair with a girl, and moved to the University of Edinburgh. There he lived at the home of Andrew Duncan and was befriended by James Mackintosh and Malcolm Laing. When he left the city, he promised to pay back his gambling debts. In 1787, he returned to continental Europe, travelling on horseback through Scotland and England. In those years European nobility, with their prerogatives, come under heavy attack from those, like Constant, who were influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. Constant's family criticized him for leaving out part of his last name. In Paris, at the home of Jean Baptiste Antoine Suard he became acquainted with Isabelle de Charriere, a 46 year old Dutch woman of letters, who later helped publish Rousseau's Confessions, and who knew his uncle David Louis Constant de Rebecque extremely well by virtue of a 15 year correspondence. While he stayed at her home in Colombier Switzerland, together they wrote an epistolary novel. She acted as a maternal mentor to him until Constant's appointment to the court of Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel that required him to move north. He left the court when the War of the First Coalition began in 1792. In Braunschweig, he married Wilhelmina von Cramm, but she divorced him in 1793. In September 1794, he met and became interested in the famous and wealthy already married Germaine de Staël, herself brought up on the principles of Rousseau. They both admired Jean Lambert Tallien and Talleyrand. Their intellectual collaboration between 1795 and 1811 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of the time.

One of the first thinkers to go by the name of "liberal", Constant looked to Britain rather than to ancient Rome for a practical model of freedom in a large mercantile society. He drew a distinction between the "Liberty of the Ancients" and the "Liberty of the Moderns". The Liberty of the Ancients was a participatory republican liberty, which gave the citizens the right to influence politics directly through debates and votes in the public assembly. He praised the noble spirit of regenerating the state. However, he stated that it was naïve for writers to believe that two thousand years had not brought some changes in the customs and needs of the people. The dynamics of the state had changed. Ancient populations paled in comparison to the size of modern countries. He even argued that with a large population, man had no role in government regardless of its form or type. Constant emphasised how citizens in ancient states found more satisfaction in the public sphere and less in their private lives whereas modern people favoured their private life. Constant's repeated denunciation of despotism pervaded his critique of French political philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau and Abbé de Mably. These writers, influential in the French Revolution, according to Constant, mistook authority for liberty and approved any means of extending the action of the state. Alleged reformers used the model of public force of the Ancien Régime, and organised the most absolute despotism in the name of the Republic. He continually condemned despotism, citing the contradiction of a liberty derived from despotism, and the vacuous nature of this ideology. Furthermore, he pointed out the detrimental nature of the Reign of Terror, as an inexplicable delirium. In François Furet's words, Constant's "entire political thought" revolved around this question, namely the problem of how to justify the Terror. Constant understood the revolutionaries' disastrous over investment in the political sphere. This was only to last for "One Hundred Days" before Napoleon was defeated, but Constant's work nevertheless provided a means of reconciling monarchy with liberty. Indeed, the French Constitution (or Charter) of 1830 could be seen as a practical implementation of many of Constant's ideas: a hereditary monarchy existing alongside an elected Chamber of Deputies and a senatorial Chamber of Peers, with the executive power vested in responsible ministers. Thus, although often ignored in France, because of his Anglo Saxon sympathies, Constant succeeded in contributing in a profound (albeit indirect) way to French constitutional traditions.

Constant was an opponent of imperialism and conquest, denouncing French colonial policy in the West Indies and elsewhere as racist, unjust, and a violation of basic principles of human equality. He supported an extension of civil and political rights to non white colonial subjects. He supported the Haitian revolution, and argued that the institutions set up by Haitians were evidence that non Europeans could found institutions equivalent to those of Europeans. He was a staunch proponent of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Aside from his political and literary output, Constant spent forty years working on religion and religious feeling. His publications demonstrate his desire to grasp this social phenomenon inherent to human nature, which, in whatever forms it may present, is always a search for perfectibility. If its manifestations become rigid, splitting becomes inevitable. Thus, however religious feeling may present, it needs to adapt and evolve. Constant is adamant that political authority should not meddle in the religious beliefs of the citizenry, even to defend them. In his view it is up to each person to decide where to seek their consolation, moral compass or faith. External authority cannot act upon someone's convictions, it can only act upon their interests. He also condemns a religion that is commonly regarded as utilitarian, since it degrades authentic religious feeling. He considers that it was necessary for polytheism to decline in line with human progress. The more humans progress in their understanding, the more beneficial the effects of theism. Belief in a god has itself evolved. Christianity, especially Protestantism is, he argues, its most tolerant form and an indicator of intellectual, moral and spiritual evolution.

Constant published only one novel during his lifetime, Adolphe (1816), the story of a young, indecisive man's disastrous love affair with an older mistress. A first person novel in the sentimentalist tradition, Adolphe examines the thoughts of the young man as he falls in and out of love with Ellenore, a woman of uncertain virtue. Constant began the novel as an autobiographical tale of two loves, but decided that the reading public would object to serial passions. The love affair depicted in the finished version of the novel is thought to be based on Constant's affair with Anna Lindsay, who describes the affair in her correspondence (published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, December 1930 – January 1931). The book has been compared to Chateaubriand's René or Mme de Stael's Corinne.

The importance of Constant's writings on the liberty of the ancients and of that of his time has dominated understanding of his work, as has his critique of the French Revolution. The British philosopher and historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin has acknowledged his debt to Constant. Constant's wider literary and cultural writings (most importantly the novella Adolphe and his extensive history of comparative religion) emphasised the importance of self sacrifice and effect of human emotions as a basis for social living. Thus, while he pleaded for individual liberty as vital for individual and moral development and appropriate for modernity, he felt that egoism and self interest were not part of a true definition of individual liberty. Emotional authenticity and fellow feeling were critical. In this, his moral and religious thought was strongly influenced by the moral writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and German thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, whom he read in reference to his religious history.