constituting the senate a high court of justice, and taking police measures against the Ligue des patriotes. He resigned on the 1st of March 1890, but his resignation involved the fall of the cabinet, and he resumed his portfolio in the Freycinet cabinet on the 17th of March. On the 29th of December 1889 he had been elected senator by the department of the Haute-Garonne. He was violently attacked by the press and the Boulangist deputies, but did not resign until the whole cabinet withdrew, on the 26th of February 1892. In December 1898 he was appointed ambassador at Constantinople.
CONSTANT, BENJAMIN (1845–1902), French painter, was
born in Paris, and studied under Cabanel. His first Salon picture,
“Hamlet et le Roi,” was hung in 1869, and he became at once
one of the recognized modern masters in France. In addition
to a number of subject-pictures, such as “Trop Tard” (1870),
“Samson et Delilah” (1871), and others taken from Moroccan
studies, he was an eminent painter of portraits of some of the
most prominent men and women of the day, one of his last being
that of Queen Victoria (1900). He was a member of the Institut
de France and received several French and foreign decorations.
CONSTANT DE REBECQUE, HENRI BENJAMIN (1767–1830), French writer and politician, was born at Lausanne on the
25th of October 1767. His mother, Henriette de Chandieu, died
at his birth; and his father, Juste Arnold de Constant, commanded
a regiment in the Dutch service. After a good private
education at Brussels, he was sent to Oxford, and thence to
Erlangen; a subsequent residence at Edinburgh and the relations
there formed with prominent Whigs profoundly influenced his
political views. He returned to Switzerland in 1786, and in
the next year visited Paris, where he met Madame de Charriére,
a Dutchwoman who had married into a Swiss family with which
his own was connected. Madame de Charriére, although twenty-seven
years older than Constant, became his mistress, and the
liaison, an affair possibly more of the intellect than of the heart,
lasted until 1796, when Constant became intimate with Madame
de Staël. After an escapade in England in 1787, he spent two
months with her at Colombier before becoming, in deference to
his father’s wishes, chamberlain at the court of Charles William,
duke of Brunswick, where in 1789 he married one of the ladies-in-waiting,
Wilhelmina, Baroness Chramm. The duke’s share
in the coalition against France made his service incompatible
with Constant’s political opinions, which were already definitely
republican, and, on the dissolution of his marriage in 1794,
he resigned his post. Meanwhile his father had been accused
of malversation of the funds of his regiment; Benjamin helped
him with his defence, with the result that he was finally exonerated
and restored to the service with the rank of general.
Constant, who had met Madame de Staël at Lausanne in 1794,
followed her in the next year to Paris, where he rapidly became
a personage in the moderate republican circle which met in her
salon; and by 1796 he had established with her intimate
relations, which, in spite of many storms, endured for ten years.
In 1796 he published two pamphlets in defence of the Directory
and against the counter-revolution, “De la force du gouvernement
actuel et de la nécessité de se rallier” and “Des réactions
politiques.” He was one of the promoters of the constitutional
club of Salm, formed to counterbalance the royalist club of
Clichy, and he supported Barras in 1797 and 1799 in the coups
d’état of 18 Fructidor, and of 18 Brumaire. In December 1799,
he was nominated a member of the Tribunate, where he showed
from the outset an independence quite unacceptable to Napoleon,
by whom he was removed in the “creaming” of that assembly
in 1802. His incessant opposition was attributed partly to his
association with Madame de Staël, whose salon was a centre
for those disaffected from the Napoleonic régime, and in 1803
he followed her into exile. After M. de Staël’s death in 1802,
there was no longer any obstacle to their marriage, but Madame
de Staël was apparently unwilling to change her name. Much
of Constant’s time was spent with her at Coppet; but he also
made long sojourns at Weimar, where he mixed in the Goethe-Schiller
circle, and accumulated material for the great work on
religion which he had begun, so far back as 1787, at Colombier. His relations with Madame de Staël became more and
more difficult, and in 1808 he secretly married Charlotte von
Hardenberg, whom he had known at Brunswick, and whose
divorce from her second husband, General Dutertre, he had
secured. Even his marriage, which did not prove a happy one,
was insufficient to cause an entire breach with Corinne, who
insisted on his return to Coppet for a short time. In 1811, while
residing with his wife’s relations at Hardenberg, near Göttingen,
he was brought into contact with German mysticism, which
considerably modified his earlier sceptical views on religion.
The Napoleonic reverses of 1813 brought him back to politics, and in November he published at Hanover his De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne, directed against Napoleon. He also entered into relations with the crown prince of Sweden (Bernadotte), who conferred on him the order of the Polar Star. On his return to Paris, during its occupation by the allied sovereigns, he was well received by the emperor Alexander I. of Russia, and resumed his old place in the Liberal salon of Madame de Staël. In a series of pamphlets he advocated the principles of a Liberal monarchy and the freedom of the press. At this point began the second great attachment of his life, his unfortunate infatuation for Madame Récamier, under whose influence he committed the worst blunder of his political career. At the beginning of the Hundred Days he had violently asserted in the Journal des débats his resolution not to be a political turncoat, and had left Paris. Attracted by Madame Récamier, he soon returned, and after an interview with Napoleon on the 10th of April, he became a supporter of his government and drew up the Acte constitutionnel. The return of Louis XVIII. drove him into exile. In London in 1815 he published Adolphe, one of the earliest examples of the psychological novel. It had been written in 1807, and is intrinsically autobiographical; that Adolphe represents Constant himself there is no dispute, but Ellénore probably owes something both to Madame de Charriere and Madame de Staël. In 1816 he was again in Paris, advocating Liberal constitutional principles. He founded in 1818 with other Liberal journalists the Minerve française and in 1820 La Renommée. In 1819 he was returned to the Chamber of Deputies, and proved so formidable an opponent that the government made a vain attempt to exclude him from the Chamber on the ground of his Swiss birth. Perhaps the greatest service he rendered to his party was his consistent advocacy of the freedom of the press. At the outbreak of the revolution of 1830 he was absent from Paris, having undergone an operation, but he returned at the request of Lafayette to take his share in the elevation of Louis Philippe to the throne. On the 27th of August he was made president of the council of state, but he died on the 8th of December of the same year. During his later years he had been a cripple in consequence of a fall in the Chamber of Deputies, and he fought the last of his many duels sitting in a chair. After the death, in 1817, of Madame de Staël, whom he continued to visit daily until the end, he had ceased to go into society, giving himself up to his passion for play. To pay his gambling debts he accepted a gift of 200,000 francs from Louis Philippe, thus affording a ready handle to his enemies. The failure of his candidature for the Academy in 1830 is said to have been a shock to his enfeebled health.
Constant’s political career was spoiled by his liaison with Madame de Staël, and at the Restoration was further disturbed by his unreturned passion for Madame Récamier. His defects as a debater were not compensated entirely by the excellence of his set speeches; but his wide culture and powerful intellect were bound to leave their mark on affairs. His political inconsistencies were more apparent than real, for there was no break in his advocacy of Liberal principles. His best writing is to be found in his journalism and correspondence (only a small part of which has been published), rather than in his more pretentious political pamphlets.
In the most important of his writings, De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes, et ses développements (5 vols., 1825–1831), he traces the successive transformations of the religious
