Benjamin Constant

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Benjamin Constant

Benjamin Constant , actually Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (born October 25, 1767 in Lausanne , † December 8, 1830 in Paris ) was a Francophone writer, liberal politician and state theorist of Swiss origin.

He examined the relationship between state power and the individual , which became problematic during the French Revolution . In 1802 he was sidelined by Napoleon, but in 1815 he invited him to write an amendment to the French constitution. Constant influenced with his ideas u. a. the November Uprising , the Greek Revolution , the Liberal Revolution in Portugal and the Belgian Revolution .

Life and work

childhood

Benjamin Constant, who, like so many francophone authors, shuttled between literature and politics (that is his name in literary and intellectual history) was the descendant of a family of French Huguenots who emigrated to Switzerland in the 16th century . His mother died soon after his birth and he had a rather unsteady childhood (which probably contributed to his later incapacity), initially with his grandparents in Switzerland, and later as an appendage to his father, an apparently very mobile professional officer, in Holland Switzerland, then still Austrian Brussels and England, where he had sometimes better, sometimes worse tutors.

The younger years

Benjamin Constant de Rebecque

When he was fifteen, he began studying law at the University of Erlangen , where he was employed by Sophie Caroline Marie von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel . Three semesters later, when he had to leave the city because of an affair, he moved to Edinburgh . At the same time he read a lot (including Claude Adrien Helvétius ) and began to write, but also fell into the game and ran into debt. In addition, he traveled often and had love affairs early on. 1786 he met in a Paris stay the then widely read author Isabelle de Charriere (1740-1805), who a married in Switzerland native Dutch woman that was him to a (first probably not only platonic) maternal girlfriend and their country estate Le Pontet at Colombier he often stayed shorter or longer in the next few years.

In 1788 he became chamberlain at the court of Duke Karl II of Braunschweig and a year later he married the lady-in-waiting Wilhelmine von Cramm. However, he did not last long with her, often went on trips and finally filed for divorce in order to be in a relationship with another Braunschweig lady-in-waiting, who was also married but willing to divorce, Charlotte von Hardenberg, whom he did not until 1808, after several interim relationships with other women and a second marriage on her part, without the two being happy afterwards.

In 1794 Constant met Madame de Staël, who was one and a half years his senior, in Switzerland : It was the beginning of a long, nerve-wracking relationship that resulted in a daughter (Albertine) in 1797.

The middle time

In 1795, after the reign of terror and the establishment of the Directory , Constant accompanied Mme de Staël to Paris, where he began to work as a highly respected political publicist and speaker. His lover created a stage for him with the meetings she organized at the Hôtel de Salm . This conservative intellectual circle soon came to be known as the Salm Club . After Napoleon's coup d'état in 1799, he even played an active role in high politics as a member of the tribunate before he was sidelined in 1802. Claude Fauriel became a frequent guest in the salons of Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constants. His questioning of the absolute nature of the prohibition of lies in Des réactions politiques , sl 1796, published in 1796, led to Immanuel Kant's reply about a supposed right to lie out of human love .

He then traveled a lot again, including with Mme de Staël, whom he accompanied on parts of their trip to Germany in 1803/04 and who, after she was widowed in 1802, urged him to get married, while he kept leaving her in favor of new and old lovers and finally married Charlotte von Hardenberg (see above).

His difficult psychological situation during this time of separation and partner change is reflected in the novel Adolphe , written in 1806/07 (but not printed until 1817) , in whose indecisive swaying first-person narrator Constant visibly portrays himself. During the same period (1807/08) he translated Schiller's Wallenstein into French verse (printed in 1808). In 1811 he began another autobiographical novel, Cécile , which remained a fragment and was not rediscovered until 1951. Also in 1811 he began an autobiography with the title Ma Vie ("My Life"), which only lasted until the end of his youth and was only printed in 1907 from the estate as Le Cahier rouge ("The red booklet").

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In 1812 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . Around 1813 he was in Göttingen; 1814, when after the defeat of Napoleon the old royal family of the Bourbons returned and Louis XVIII. Having ascended the throne, Constant published a plea for a constitutional monarchy . In 1815 he joined Napoleon when he unexpectedly returned to power in March and designed an appendix to the French constitution on his behalf during the reign of the Hundred Days . After Napoleon's final defeat (June 18) in the Battle of Waterloo , Constant had to leave France and spent a year and a half in England.

The later years

In 1817 he returned to Paris and into politics. He was elected to the new Chamber of Deputies and acted there, re-elected several times, as a feared parliamentary speaker and pamphleteer . At the same time he wrote important state and constitutional writings and became with them a co-founder of liberalism , i. H. the doctrine that the state should interfere as little as possible in the personal and especially the economic interests of its citizens and should leave as much initiative and responsibility as possible to them. He or the monarch have to withdraw to the role of a neutral authority ( pouvoir neutre ).

A four-volume treatise on religious studies, De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31), on which Constant began to work as a young man, received little attention and was soon forgotten.

reception

Despite his unsteady way of life, Constant wrote constantly: mostly historiographical and / or political or political writings and articles. However, it owes its place in literary history above all to the successful story Adolphe (written 1806/07, published only in 1816). The story tells the story of a young man (Adolphe) who seduces a ten years older woman (Ellénore), when he realizes that she loves him too much and clings to him, tries to break away from her, but because of the many sacrifices that she cannot make to him, but then wills again and, through his indecisive back and forth and his eventual turning away, drives her into illness and death. It evidently reflects an almost pathological conflict on the part of the author himself between desire for attachment and fear of attachment and is probably primarily inspired by his difficult situation between Mme de Staël and Charlotte von Hardenberg. The Adolphe is regarded as a first example and pattern of evolving in the 19th century psychological novel .

Works from the estate

In addition to the fragment of the novel Cécile and the also unfinished autobiography, his extensive diary ( Journal intime ) , which was not actually intended for publication, and his equally extensive correspondence with various correspondence partners appeared from the estate of Constant .

The writings of Constant

German transmission

  • Works . Edited by Axel Blaeschke and Lothar Gall. German by Eva Rechel-Mertens. 4 volumes. 1970ff. (The relevant German collection of works. Volumes 1–2 follow the 1957 Pléiade edition)

Essays

  • De la force du gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s'y rallier (1796)
  • Des réactions politiques (1797)
  • Des effets de la Terreur (1797)
  • Fragments d'un ouvrage abandonné sur la possibilité d'une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays (published in 1991 by Aubier, written between 1795 and 1810)
  • De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilization européenne (1814)
  • Réflexions sur les constitutions, la distribution des pouvoirs et les garanties dans une monarchie constitutionnelle (1814)
  • Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements représentatifs (written 1806, published 1815)
  • Memoires on the Cent-Jours
  • Cours de politique constitutionnelle (1818–1820)
  • De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes (célèbre discours prononcé en 1819)
  • De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes et son développement (1824-1830)
  • Appel aux Nations chrétiennes en faveur des Grecs. (1825)
  • Mélanges de littérature et de politique (1829)
  • You polythéisme romain considéré dans ses rapports avec la philosophie grecque et la religion chrétienne (1833)

Fiction

  • Adolphe (1816) (novel)
  • Le Cahier rouge (1907) (autobiography)
  • Wallstein (1808), translation of Schiller's Wallenstein into French
  • Cécile (1951) (fragment of a novel)

Letters on the Wilfrid Regnault affair

  • Lettre à M. Odillon-Barrot, avocat en la Cour de Cassation, sur l'affaire de Wilfrid Regnault, condamné à mort (1818, puis publié chez P. Plancher en 1819)
  • Deuxième lettre à M. Odillon-Barrot, avocat en la Cour de Cassation, sur l'affaire de Wilfrid Regnault, condamné à mort (1818, puis publié chez P. Plancher en 1819)
  • De l'appel en calomnie de M. le marquis de Blosseville, contre Wilfrid-Regnault (1818, puis publié chez P. Plancher en 1819)

literature

  • Norbert Campagna: Benjamin Constant. An introduction. Parerga, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-930-45085-2 .
  • Lothar Gall : Benjamin Constant. His world of political ideas and the German pre-March. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1963, DNB 451424220 .
  • Helena Rosenblatt: Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion. Cambridge University Pres, 2008, ISBN 978-0-511-49072-9 .
  • Helene Ullmann: Benjamin Constant and his relationship to German intellectual life. Ebel, Marburg 1915, DNB 362922616 .
  • Florian Weber: Benjamin Constant and the liberal constitutional state. Political theory after the French Revolution. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-531-14407-3 .

Web links

Commons : Benjamin Constant  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Benjamin Constant  - Sources and full texts (French)
Wikiquote: Benjamin Constant de Rebecque  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ His grandfather was friends with Voltaire, his great-grandfather, pastor in Coppet , with Pierre Bayle .
  2. ↑ Albert Soboul The Great French Revolution , Athens, 1988, p. 481
  3. ↑ Benjamin Constant: philosophers, histories, novelists, homme d'état [1]
  4. ↑ German: From the political counter-effects, in: France in the year 1797. From the letters of German men in Paris, ed. by Karl Friedrich Cramer, Vol. 2, Altona 1797, 6th piece, No. 1, pp. 123-127, see below under web links.
  5. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 60.
personal data
SURNAME Constant, Benjamin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Constant de Rebecque, Henri-Benjamin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1767
PLACE OF BIRTH Lausanne
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 1830
Place of death Paris