Benjamin Constant: The Early Years (1767–95)

Benjamin Constant’s reputation as a liberal political thinker has been growing during the past thirty years. He is now widely recognized as one of the most articulate and influential exponents of classic liberalism of the nineteenth century, sharing this honor with Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, and Thomas Hill Green, among others. During the last decade of his life—that is, during the 1820s—Constant’s reputation among his contemporaries paralleled this current assessment. He was a prominent liberal opponent of the restored Bourbon monarchy that, in his estimation, was not respecting the constitutional reforms introduced by the Charter of 1814 and was sliding back into the absolutist ways of the monarchy of the Old Regime. Though governments could rightly intervene, according to Constant, especially in the struggle against religious persecution, and though they had an obligation to protect the nation against foreign invasion and internal subversion, the inclination of the administrations appointed by Louis XVIII and especially Charles X was to monopolize power and progressively to expand prerogatives of the executive branch to new areas.