Revolution, Reaction, Restoration: The Meanings and Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Political Thinking of Benjamin Constant, c.1797–1830

Abstract

Comparisons, juxtapositions or analogies between France's recent Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history and England's experiences of Revolution, Civil War and Restoration between the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were a common but controversial feature of political discourse dealing with France's contemporary situation in the decades following the Revolution of 1789. The present article probes this dimension of post-Revolutionary political debate, by tracking the shifting meanings and uses of seventeenth-century English history in the published and unpublished political writings of the leading liberal thinker and politician Benjamin Constant, from the 1790s through to his death in 1830. Such an analysis reveals the sometimes striking reversals and inconsistencies to which Constant was driven in his effort to adjust his historical readings to France's rapidly changing political conditions, but it also reveals underlying continuities in his historical and political thinking. The exemplarity of England's case lay, for Constant, less in the provision of a constitutional model that France might hope to appropriate than in the historical spectacle of a nation's struggle for liberty, and the value of this spectacle lay as much in its cautionary messages—focused on the sterile brutality of the Stuart Restoration—as in its eventually progressive outcomes.

Résumé: Dans les décennies qui suivirent 1789 les comparaisons, juxtapositions et analogies entre la France révolutionnaire et post-révolutionnaire et l'histoire de l'Angleterre entre la révolution, guerre civile, restauration et glorieuse révolution de 1688, servirent communément d'arguments et de controverses dans le discours politique français. Cet article se penche sur cette dimension post-révolutionnaire du débat en considérant le rôle de l'histoire anglaise du dix-septième siècle dans l'œuvre publiée et manuscrite de Benjamin Constant des années 1790 à sa mort en 1830.Cette analyse révèle des retournements et des hésitations dans ses lectures historiques mais aussi des continuités dans sa pensée politique. Le cas exemplaire de l'Angleterre est, pour Constant, moins dans un modèle constitutionnel donné que dans le spectacle d'une nation tâtonnant vers la liberté et le spectacle de ce tâtonnement révèle à la fois un destin progressif et des leçons salutaires quant à la stérilité de la restauration brutale des Stuart.

Notes

 [1] Constant in Journal des débats, 21 April 1814 (“Des Révolutions de 1660 et de 1688 en Angleterre, et de celle de 1814 en France”), reprinted in Constant, Recueil d'articles 1795–1817, 142.

 [2] Constant in La Minerve française, 24 July 1819, reprinted in Constant, Recueil d'articles: Le Mercure, La Minerve et La Renommée, I, 875.

 [3] For broader discussions of the French political uses of such comparisons and juxtapositions, see Cubitt, “Making Historical Connections”; Salmon, “The French Romantics”. Also relevant are Bongie, David Hume; Ross, “Anglo-French Encounters”; Lutaud, Des Révolutions d'Angleterre à la Révolution française, esp. 255–62, 347–61; Mansel, “The Influence of the Later Stuarts”; Theis, “Les libéraux français et la révolution anglaise”.

 [4] On references to Stuart and Cromwellian history during the Revolutionary period, see Barny, “L'image de Cromwell”; Lutaud, Des Révolutions d'Angleterre à la Révolution française, 225–27; Bongie, David Hume, Chaps 2–5; Ross, “Anglo-French Encounters”, Chaps 1–2.

 [5] See Jennings, “Conceptions of England”.

 [6] Bongie, David Hume.

 [7] See Ross, “Anglo-French Encounters”; Lutaud, “Guizot historien”; Raynaud, “La révolution anglaise”; Theis, “Présentation de l'Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre”; Theis, “Les libéraux français et la révolution anglaise”.

 [8] Wright, Painting and History, 77–81, 92–113; Wright, “An Image for Imagining the Past”; Wright, “Implacable Fathers”; Russcol, “Images of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria”; Bann, Paul Delaroche, 107–15, 146–54.

 [9] See, among others, Bastid, Benjamin Constant; Hofmann, Les “Principes de politique” de Benjamin Constant; Dodge, Benjamin Constant's Philosophy of Liberalism; Holmes, Benjamin Constant; Fontana, Benjamin Constant; Jaume, L'Individu effacé, 63–117; Gauchet, “Préface”; Todorov, A Passion For Democracy; Travers, Benjamin Constant.

[10] Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 182; Travers, Benjamin Constant, 518.

[11] For these and other aspects of Constant's historical thinking, see for example Travers, Benjamin Constant, esp. Chap. IV: “La philosophie de l'histoire”; Hofmann, “Histoire, politique et religion,” 397–418; Gauchet, “Préface,” 36–45; Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 181–206. The progressive conception of history is mapped out in texts like Constant, “Du moment actuel” and “De la perfectibilité de l'espèce humaine”. For the distinction between ancient and modern liberty, see Constant, De la liberté des anciens.

[12] See, explicitly, Constant, Recueil d'articles: le Mercure, la Minerve et la Renommée, II, 1200 (Minerve française, 9 March 1820: “De la contre-révolution et du ministère”): an ordeal like that of the Stuart Restoration may be a passing moment in the life of a nation, but ‘pour les individus, c'est plus sérieux’.

[13] Such a tension is implied by Constant himself in “Du moment actuel”, 309 (probably written c.1799), where he criticizes others for a narrowness of historical vision in their use of England's history of 1649–1688 as a vehicle for commenting on France's present situation: ‘Cette période offre sans doute aux Rois et aux peoples d'utiles & de sévères leçons. Mais elle ne compose qu'un court episode. Les agitations et les combats qu'elle nous retrace n'étoient que des effets. Il faut remonter aux causes.’ For further critical discussion of Constant's use of historical exempla, and of his efforts to combine a recognition of history's ‘circumstantial’ aspects with a general ‘perfectibilist’ vision, see Benrekassa, “L'anachronique et le circonstanciel,” 73–85.

[14] Mellon, The Political Uses of History.

[15] Rudler, La Jeunesse de Benjamin Constant, 166. Constant acted as teller for the ‘ayes’, but the ‘noes’ carried the day by ten votes to eight.

[16] Constant, De la force du gouvernement actuel, 338 [21]. (In references to this and other works cited from the Niemeyer edition of Constant's Oeuvres complètes, unbracketed page numbers refer to the pagination of the Niemeyer edition, pages in square brackets to the page(s) in the original edition of a text.)

[17] For further discussion, see Starobinski, “Benjamin Constant: la pensée du progrès et l'analyse des reactions”. For more general discussion of Constant's political thinking at this stage in his career, see Vincent, “Benjamin Constant, the French Revolution, and the Origins of French Romantic Liberalism”.

[18] Constant, Des réactions politiques (1797), 457–58 [1–2].

[19] Ibid., 458 [4–5].

[20] Ibid., 457–58 [2–3].

[21] See also Constant, Discours prononcé au Cercle constitutionnel, 560–1 [22, 26], in which Constant contested the royalist comparison of the Directorial coup of 18 fructidor to Cromwell's dictatorial dissolution of the Long Parliament, ‘ce jour funeste qui prépara la restauration de Charles II’: ‘Ce n'est point Cromwell, cassant un parlement rebelle à ses volontés, c'est le génie de la République, repoussant du pouvoir, des mandataires égarés ou infidelles’.

[22] Constant, Des suites, 675–79 [80–94].

[23] Ibid., 647 [ix–x].

[24] Boulay de la Meurthe, Essai sur les causes.

[25] Constant, Des suites, 645 [iii–v].

[26] Maistre, Considérations sur la France, 184.

[27] Ibid., 183.

[28] Ibid., 185–200.

[29] Constant, Des suites, 651 [17].

[30] Ibid., 673 [75].

[31] Ibid., 672 [72].

[32] Ibid., 672–73 [72–5].

[33] Ibid., 646 [vi–viii].

[34] Ibid., 652–58, 671–72 [19–35, 71–72]. While Constant distances himself from the regicidal sentence passed in 1649, the figures of men like Harrison and Scott, barely liberated from Cromwell's prisons, facing death for their role in that judgement, the purity of their Republican convictions contrasting with the baseness of the turncoats appointed to condemn them, filled him with admiration: ‘jamais un courage plus calme, une sérénité plus entière, des signes plus irrécusables de l'amour le plus vrai de la liberté, n'accompagnèrent des accusés au milieu des gardes, dans les fers et sur l'échafaud.’

[35] Ibid, 674 [77–79].

[36] Ibid., 675 [80].

[37] On the Cromwell–Napoleon comparison in general, see Lutaud, Des Révolutions d'Angleterre à la Révolution française, 241–62.

[38] Constant, Fragments d'un ouvrage abandonné, 305. According to Grange, “Introduction”, 27–28, the composition of this text, begun under the Directory, continued until around 1807.

[39] Constant, Fragments d'un essai sur la littérature, 517. On the likely dating of this text, see Kloocke, “Une étude littéraire inachevée”. Constant would later explicitly articulate the comparison between the Tribunat and the English parliament under Cromwell, in his “Du parlement anglais sous Cromwel, et du tribunat”.

[40] Constant, Fragments d'un essai sur la littérature, 517.

[41] Constant, Principes de politique …(version de 1806–1810), 293–94.

[42] Constant, Fragments d'un essai sur la littérature, 509.

[43] Constant, Principes de politique …(version de 1806–1810), 424.

[44] Such an argument was developed in a Republican sense in Constant's review of Mme de Staël's De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations in Moniteur universel, 26 October 1796, reproduced in Constant, Recueil d'articles 1795–1817, 45, and subsequently in a liberal monarchist sense in his “De madame de Staël,” 199–201.

[45] Constant, Fragments d'un ouvrage abandonné, 189–90.

[46] Ibid., 190–93.

[47] Constant, Fragments d'un essai sur la littérature, 517; also 498.

[48] Constant, Principes de politique …(version de 1806–1810), 427. Slightly paradoxically, Constant was capable elsewhere in the text (408) of drawing a somewhat similar kind of encouragement from the spectacle of the collapse of the Republican regime in 1660: here the implied comfort for opponents of Napoleon lay in the revelation of how a regime seemingly in control of the institutional bases of power could be brought to disintegration through the silent influence of public opinion.

[49] Constant, De l'esprit de conquête, 159.

[50] Ibid., 158–61.

[51] Letter of Mme de Staël to Constant, 23 January 1814, in Kloocke, ed., Correspondance, 201.

[52] Constant, De l'esprit de conquête, p. 160. For Constant's relations with Bernadotte, see Hasselrot, “Introduction”.

[53] Memorandum (probably written on 22 March 1814 and forwarded to the Austrians by Mme de Staël) reproduced in Norman King, “Trois mémoires de Constant,” 27. A similar passage appears in a further memorandum, written in English and probably dating from 29–30 March (ibid., 30).

[54] See Harpaz's note to his edition of Constant, De l'esprit de conquête, 158, n. 1.

[55] Constant, in Journal des débats, 21 April 1814 (“Des Révolutions de 1660 et de 1688 en Angleterre, et de celle de 1814 en France”), reprinted in Constant, Recueil d'articles 1795–1817, 142–43.

[56] Additional material from fourth edition, reproduced in Harpaz's edition of De l'esprit de conquête, 258. Constant now emphasized that even when finally forced to dispossess the Stuarts, the English had taken care to replace them with a prince as close to the legitimate line of descent as possible: ‘la légitimité que l'hérédité consacre, est venue à l'appui de l'élection’ (256). His attention to this point in 1814 contrasts strikingly with the ridicule he would later heap on the royalist L'Étoile for its claim that the English had been careful to invest the new regime in 1688 with ‘toute l'apparence de la légitimité pure’: Courrier français, 1 April 1822, in Constant, Recueil d'articles 1820–1824, 124–26.

[57] Constant, “Observations sur le discours prononcé par S. E. le ministre de l'Intérieur,” 45–49.

[58] Constant, in Moniteur universel, 27 April 1815, in Constant, Recueil d'articles 1795–1817, 178–79.

[59] Constant, Principes de politique [1815 edition], 320.

[60] Entry for 8 July 1815, in Constant, Journaux intimes, 444.

[61] , “Mémoires sur le retour,” 437.

[62] Constant, Mémoires sur les Cent Jours, 213–14 [II, 28–9]. The first book edition of the Mémoires (the core of which had appeared as “Lettres sur les Cent Jours” in the Minerve française, September 1819 to March 1820) was dated 1820.

[63] Constant, De l'esprit de conquête, 160.

[64] Constant, Mémoires sur les Cent Jours, 214 [II, 29].

[65] Constant, Recueil d'articles: le Mercure, la Minerve et la Renommée, I, 114–16 (Mercure de France, 15 February 1817). For later references to English Restoration tyranny, in the context of debates on press legislation and censorship, see speeches in the Chambre des députés on 29 January and 16 February 1822, in Constant, Discours … à la Chambre des députés, II, 23, 94.

[66] Constant, Recueil d'articles: le Mercure, la Minerve et la Renommée, II, 700 (Minerve française, 14 February 1819).

[67] Ibid., II, 1173 (Minerve française, 21 February 1820).

[68] Ibid., II, 1233–34 (La Renommée, 15 June 1819: “De l'état constitutionnel de la France”).

[69] Constant, “Essai sur la contre révolution d'Angleterre en 1660” [i.e. revised version of Des suites], in Constant, Collection complète, III, 116. The same volume contained the revised text of Des réactions politiques.

[70] Constant, Recueil d'articles: le Mercure, la Minerve et la Renommée, II, 875–83 (Minerve française, 24 July 1819).

[71] Thus, for example, Constant spoke of how the emergence of a Cromwell or a Bonaparte could momentarily arrest but not ultimately alter the reactionary political movement that the operations of revolutionary tyranny had made inevitable: ‘Tel fut Cromwel, tel fut Bonaparte. Mais ces caractères extraordinaires ne changent pas la marche des choses; ils la suspendent, et quand ils disparaissent, les choses marchent comme auparavant’ (ibid., II, 879).

[72] Ibid., II, 877–78.

[73] Ibid., II, 882–83.

[74] Ibid., II, 1200 (Minerve française, 9 March 1820: “De la contre-révolution et du ministère”).

[75] Constant, Recueil d'articles 1820–1824, 62 (Courrier français, 26 June 1821, quoting passage from his 1821 work Du triomphe inévitable et prochain des principes constitutionnels). See also 41–43, for Constant's review of the memoirs of James II (Courrier français, 5 January 1821).

[76] Constant, Mémoires sur les Cent Jours, 69–70 [xxiv]. For an earlier argument along similar lines, see Constant's speech in the debate on the electoral law in the Chambre des députés, 23 May 1820, in his Discours … à la Chambre des députés, II, 364.

[77] Constant, “Réflexions sur la tragédie,” 147–48. The reactionary Don Miguel had seized power in Portugal in 1828.

[78] Constant, Recueil d'articles 1829–1830, 140 (Courrier français, 5 January 1830).

[79] Ibid., 284–86 (Courrier français, 25 March 1830); for accusations of ultraroyalists using conspiracy fabrications in the style of Titus Oates, see 437–38 (Courrier français, 9 June 1830).

[80] Ibid., 259–61 (Courrier français, 7 March 1830).

[81] Ibid., 239 (Courrier français, 17 February 1830); see also 242 (Courrier français, 21 February 1830). These passages were principally reacting to an article in Le Drapeau blanc on 16 February. For an earlier retort to the right's evocations of the fate of Charles I, see Constant's speech in the Chambre des députés, 6 April 1829, in Archives Parlementaires, 2nd series, LVIII, 193.

[82] Constant, Recueil d'articles 1829–1830, 438 (Courrier français, 9 June 1830); see also 140 (Courrier français, 5 January 1830).

[83] Ibid., 239–40 (Courrier français, 17 February 1830).

[84] Ibid., 289–90 (Le Temps, 26 March 1830).

[85] Ibid., 261 (Courrier français, 7 March 1830).

[86] The only parallel with Stuart history that Constant himself seems publicly to have drawn after July 1830 compared the dubious liberal protestations of previously anti-liberal ultraroyalists with the deceitfulness of those who had adopted extreme libertarian principles under Cromwell, only to jettison them at the return of Charles II: speech in Chambre des députés, 6 November 1830, Archives parlementaires, 2nd series, LXIV, 263.