Benjamin Constant; J. Powell

Constant described the dynamic of collec tivism that would become a scourge during the twentieth century. For instance: "the primitive conquerors were satisfied with out ward submission; they did not inquire into the private lives or local customs of their victims . . . the conquerors of today are resolved to gaze over the level surface of their empire and to encounter no deviation from uniformity ... local interests and traditions contain a germ of resistance, which a centralized authority tolerates unwillingly and attempts to eradi cate at the first opportunity. It finds the isolated individual easier to deal with; without effort it crushes him beneath its mighty weight." He denounced war, "the greatest offense that a government today can commit. It Mr. Powell is editor of Laissez Faire Books and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He has writtenfor the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, American Heritage, and more than three dozen other publications. Copyright © 1997 by Jim Powell.

destroys every social guarantee without com pensation; it jeopardizes every form of liberty; it injures every interest; it upsets every secu rity; it weighs upon every fortune. It combines and legitimizes every kind of internal and external tyranny." Constant believed the key issue is to keep political power out of private life. "For forty years," he reflected, "I have defended the same principle: freedom in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in indus try, in politics-and by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual both over an au thority that would wish to govern by despotic means and over the masses who claim the right to make a minority subservient to a majority.... The majority has the right to oblige the minority to respect public order, but everything which does not disturb public order, everything which. is purely personal such as our opinions, everything which, in givingexpression to opinions, does no harm to others either by provoking physical violence or opposing contrary opinions, everything which,.in industry, allows a rival industry to flourish freely-all this is something individ ual that cannot legitimately be surrendered to the power of the state."

Constant made some spectacular flip-flops, he had tangled love affairs, and he ran up big gambling debts, so he was an easy target for criticism. These things, noted intellectual his torian Biancamaria Fontana, "were all dis tinctive marks of a traditional aristocratic 632 education. Though they may strike the mod~ ern reader as adventurous and romantic, there was nothing especially odd or unusual about them. What was truly eccentric about Constant's life was ... the unsettling extent of his cosmopolitanism." He moved easily among intellectuals in France, Germany, Hol~ land, Belgium, and Britain, as well as his native Switzerland. He absorbed the ideas of Baron de Montesquieu about law and the ideas of Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say about markets. He was a friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. In the French Chamber of Deputies, Constant championed civil liberties with the legendary Lafayette.

Victor Hugo believed that Constant was "one of those rare men, who furbish, polish, and sharpen the general ideas of their times." Said Lafayette: "Endowed with one of the most extensive and varied esprits which has ever existed ... the master of all the languages and literatures of Europe, he united to the highest degree sagacity ... and the faculty, especially attributable to the French school, of making clear abstract ideas." Constant was an eyeful. "His appearance was striking," noted biographer J. Christo pher Herold, "tall and gangling, in his late twenties; a pale, freckled face surmounted by a shock of flamboyant red hair, braided at the nape and held up by a small comb; a nervous tic; red-rimmed myopic [blue] eyes; ironic mouth; a long, finely curved nose; long torso, poor posture, slightly pot-bellied, long~ legged, wearing a long flapping riding coat-a decidedly gauche, unhandsome, yet interest ing and attractive figure of a man, certainly somebody altogether out of the ordinary."

By his fifties, Constant had become a fa miliar figure as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the French elected legislative body where he was an outstanding champion of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Baron de Loeve-Veimars recalled Constant "dressed in his gold-embroidered deputy's uniform so as to be ready to address the House from the tribune where it was obliga~ tory to wear this formal dress. His hair was blond and turning white, and on his head he 633 wore an old round hat. He carried under his arm a coat, books, manuscripts, printer's proofs, a copy of the budget and his crutch. Once he had got rid of all these impedimenta and was seated on his bench, on the far left, he began to write and send offan unbelievable quantity of letters and notes to people ... answered the questions of all those crowding around him." According to historian Paul Thureau Dangin, "At first sight one would never have said that he had the usual qualities necessary to make an orator. He seldom improvised without having a pen in his hand; but his pen had the quickness of speech, and sometimes he wrote out his reply in full while still listening to the harangue he was to refute. He normally read his speeches from little pieces of paper which he was constantly obliged to put in order ....

"With his clever rather than highly co loured speeches, subtle rather than powerful in their delivery, he showed great skill in argument, rare presence of mind, he had a way of sayingeverything, despite legal restric~ tions, so that even the most intolerant audi ence understood what he was implying,and he was nimble enough to slip through his oppo nent's fingers and to stand up for himself even in the tightest corner." Beginnings As Constant began the story of his life, he wrote that "I was born on 25 October 1767,in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of Henriette de Chandieu, who was from a formerly French family which had taken refuge in the Pays de Vaud for religious reasons, and Juste Constant de Rebecque, a colonel in a Swiss regiment in the service of Holland. My mother died as a result of givingbirth, a week after I was born." He had a succession of tutors and read eight to ten hours a day. Mter trying to get him admitted to Oxford University ·(he was too young), Juste sent him to the University of Erlangen (Bavaria), where he began learning German and became addicted to gambling.

Then he transferred to the University of Edinburgh where faculty included such dis634 THE FREEMAN • OCTOBER 1997 tinguished friends of liberty as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart. Con stant mainly studied history and Greek. Mter two years, he went to Paris and studied with the intellectual Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Su ard-his friends included Scottish philoso pher David Hume, English playwright David Garrick, English novelist Lawrence Sterne, French mathematician Jean Ie Rond d'Alembert, French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, and Lafayette. Before Constant was 18, he had learned to get along in three languages, and he was exposed to the ideas of brilliant thinkers. In May 1789 he married Baroness Wil helmina von Cramm, lady-in-waiting for the Duchess of Brunswick, but she didn't share his intellectual curiosity, and they were divorced. Constant watched the French Revolution as it lurched from constitutionalism to Jaco bin Terror. "I am currently busy reading and refuting Burke's book against the French levellers," he wrote a friend. "This famous book contains as many absurdities as it does lines, and thus it is highly successful in all English and German circles. He defends the nobility, the exclusions of the sectaires, the establishment of a dominant religion, and other things of this nature .... I believe, as you do, that what we are witnessing is fundamen tally knavery and fury. But I prefer the knavery and fury which overthrow citadels, destroy titles and similar follies, and place all religions on an equal footing, to those which seek to preserve and hallow these wretched monstrosities .... "

Madame de Stael On September 18, 1794, Constant met Germaine de Stael on a road between Nyon and Coppet, Switzerla~d. She was the 28 year-old daughter of Suzanne Curchod, former lover of historian Edward Gibbon, and Jacques Necker, a Geneva banker who had served as tij,e last finance minister under French King Louis XVI and had lent him some 2 million francs. She was married off to Eric-Magnus de Stael, impecunious Swedish aristocrat who became ambassador to France. He got some of her money, and she got better connections at the French court. Madame de Stael emerged as the most influential woman in Europe-brilliant, bold, vain, and sensuous. She launched a fabled salon that attracted the leading lights .of French life, including Condorcet and Lafayette. As Constant de scribed his impressions of her: "I have seldom seen such a combination of astounding and attractive qualities; so much brilliance cou pled with so much good sense; such expansive, positive. kindness; such immense generosity; such gentle and sustained politeness in soci ety; such charm and simplicity; such absence of all restraint within the circle of her inti mates." Constant particularly admired her for operating a remarkable network to help friends escape from the French Reign of Terror.

One of Madame de Stael's friends, Jean Lambert Tallien, launched the political attack on Maximilien Robespierre that brought his overthrow and execution in July of 1794, ending the Reign of Terror. Almost a year later, May 25,1795, Constant and Stael ven tured to Paris and witnessed the ruins of revolution amidst runaway inflation. They found many neighborhoods deserted. All around they saw signs saying that properties which the government had confiscated were for sale. Impoverished aristocrats held tag sales on the streets, offering their clothing, furniture, draperies, statues, anything that might fetch money for food. "The capital of the world," according to Stael's friend Henri Meister, "looks like an immense junk shop." On September 23, 1795, the ruling Con vention approved the third constitution since the Revolution began. This one established an executive consisting of a five-person Directory and a two-chamber legislature~ The franchise was limited to those of substantial means.