Revolution and the Republic
Page 34
made. Parliamentary dissidents and the press found themselves muzzled. After the
proclamation of the Empire the regime moved ineluctably towards a personaliza-
tion of power and the restoration of monarchical practices. If individual liberties
were repeatedly sacrificed in the name of order, the propagation of a culte impérial
glorified the achievements of both the Empire (replete with Roman trappings) and
the emperor himself. The luxurious splendour of the royal court was re-established
and, in 1808, a new nobility of the Empire was created, Napoleon ennobling as
many as 3,600 hereditary chevaliers, barons, and comtes. Three of his brothers
became kings whilst many of his victorious marshals were made princes and
dukes. Much of what remained of the old aristocracy came back to France and
with this homecoming also came a revival of the sumptuous entertainments of the
past, regicides and the illustrious families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain dancing
side by side. It was, as Isser Woloch has commented, ‘monarchy in a new key’.47 As
dissatisfaction mounted, the press found itself under strict censorship, the vast
majority of newspapers being forcibly closed. Only four Parisian titles remained in
1814. The theatre was similarly silenced, the censors going to great lengths to
remove even the most indirect criticism of the imperial regime.48
Above all, the Empire came to be identified with the army and the activity of
war. Napoleon engaged in military campaigns of a previously unknown scale,
requiring the regular conscription of huge numbers of French males. The army
assembled to invade Russia was 450,000 strong (approximately only 20,000
returned)49 whilst around 2 million French citizens served in the Grande Armée
between 1800 and 1814. As conquest turned into defeat, France came increasingly
to resemble a militarized society, where the exercise of arbitrary power was the
norm.
In April 1814 Napoleon was forced to abdicate. Encircled by its foreign enemies,
domestic support for the Empire simply drained away. Eleven months later, he
46 See Louis Bergeron, L’Episode napoléonien, i. Aspects intérieurs 1799–1815 (1972) and Jacques-
Olivier Boudon, Le Consulat et l’Empire (1997).
47 See Isser Woloch, Napoleon and his Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship (New York,
2001), 105.
48 Ibid. 205–13.
49 See Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (London, 2004).
158
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
returned from exile in Elba, thus inaugurating his second reign of ‘A Hundred
Days’. In so doing, he had his erstwhile opponent, Benjamin Constant, write a new
constitution.50 In June 1815 defeat at Waterloo by Wellington brought this brief
episode, and the First Empire, finally to an end.
Several years later Benjamin Constant went to considerable lengths to explain
why he had rallied to a man he had ‘for so long attacked’ and why he had agreed to
pen the Acte additionnel aux constitutions de l’Empire.51 The context, he argued, was
not one of his own making. There had been no conspiracy to bring back Napoleon.
But he had had no desire to see France subject to foreign invasion or for her to fall
into the hands of the forces of ‘counter-revolution’. ‘Thus’, Constant wrote, ‘we
need to recognize that when Napoleon landed on the coast of France the result of
this event could have been military and absolute government, that it was the Acte
additionnel that placed an obstacle in the way of this outcome and that those who
participated in drawing it up played a role in saving France from the caprice of
despotism and the power of the sword.’52 Constant also argued that, although
‘imperfect’, his constitution was in no sense ‘inferior to any of those which seemed
destined to replace it’.53 On this, at least, he was probably right. The text itself was a
compromise between Napoleon and Constant and rested upon the pretext that the
former was turning his back upon his military ambitions in Europe.
Nevertheless, it set out clear principles of parliamentary and representative
government within the framework of the Empire. Most importantly, section VI
of the document virtually amounted to a declaration of rights, affirming equality
before the law; protection from arbitrary arrest; liberty of religious practice and of
the press; restrictions upon the proclamation of a ‘state of siege’; and the prohibi-
tion of both the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and of the reintroduction of
‘feudal and seigneurial rights’. As such, Constant believed, his actions had been in
line with the dominant preoccupation of his entire life: the desire ‘to see constitu-
tional liberty peaceably established among us’.54
On this occasion––as with so many others––Constant was to be thwarted in his
ambitions. The ‘Benjamine’, as his constitution came to be known, operated for a
mere two months, being jettisoned unceremoniously with the return to Paris of
Louis XVIII in June 1815. For Constant it was an embarrassing interlude and one
of the more curious episodes of a life rich in incident and surprise. A lack of strategic
judgement, if not of principle, had dangerously undermined his status as the most
eloquent and forceful critic of the Empire. It is, however, the views expressed by
Constant in this role that most merit our attention.
50 See Jacques Godechot, Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (1995), 225–39. In the words
of André Jardin, it was ‘the most elegant in its form of all our constitutional texts’: Jardin, Histoire du
Libéralisme politique: De la crise de l’absolutisme à la constitution de 1875 (1985), 223.
51 Benjamin Constant, Mémoires sur les Cent-Jours (1829). The text was originally published in two
parts between 1820 and 1822. Only a few weeks earlier, Constant had compared Napoleon to Genghis
Khan and Attila. See ‘Journal de Paris, 19 mars 1815’, in Ephraïm Harpaz (ed.) Benjamin Constant:
Receuil d’articles 1795–1817 (1978), 149–52.
52 Constant, Mémoires, part 2, 70.
53 Ibid. 64.
54 Constant, Mémoires, part 1, 9.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
159
We know relatively little of Constant’s initial reaction to the Revolution, in part
because between 1787 and 1794 he was employed as a Gentleman of the Chamber
in the provincial German court of Brunswick. All the same, it appears that
Constant saw himself as a supporter of the Revolution, and so much so that he
voiced approval for Robespierre in private correspondence.55 Upon his return to his
native Switzerland he met Germaine de Staël, daughter of Jacques Necker, and wife
of the Swedish ambassador to Paris.56 Not long afterwards, they were to become
lovers and, although often tempestuous, their friendship survived until Madame
de Staël’s death in 1817.57 The two of them arrived in Paris in May 1795 and in
the next two years Constant commenced the publication of the set of brilliant
pamphlets––De la Force du Gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s’y
rallier, Des Réactions politiques and Des Effets de la Terreur––which served to define
his pro-republican but anti-Jacobin sta
nce.
Interestingly, it was at this early stage that Constant dismissed the argument that
republics were only appropriate to small states.58 Constant, therefore, supported
the Directory as the regime most likely to ‘terminate’ the Revolution and to
‘strengthen’ the Republic, and did so to the extent of not opposing the removal
from the legislative assembly of right-wing deputies in the coup of 18 Fructidor.59
With the advent of the Consulate, Sieyès facilitated Constant’s election to the
Tribunate, one of the three chambers that operated under the constitution of the
year VIII. As early as January 1800––and to Bonaparte’s intense displeasure––
Constant opposed plans to reduce the Tribunate’s opportunities to discuss legisla-
tive proposals and again the following year denounced the introduction of special
legal tribunals which, in his view, were in breach of the constitution. A project
supposedly ‘directed against a few brigands’, Constant announced, ‘would threaten
all citizens’ with arbitrary power. In 1802 Napoleon had Constant––along with
Jean-Baptiste Say, Daunou, and others––expelled from the Tribunate. With this
Constant commenced a decade and more of itinerant exile.
There is general agreement that Constant’s political writings reached their full
maturity around 1806, the year in which he began writing his Principes de politiques
applicables à tous les gouvernements, the first version of which was published only in
1815. For our immediate purposes we should first focus on his most powerful
diatribe against Napoleon Bonaparte: De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation.60
55 See K. Steven Vincent, ‘Benjamin Constant, the French Revolution, and the Origins of French
Romantic Liberalism’, French Historical Studies, 23 (2000), 607–37. See also Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin
Constant: Une biographie intellectuelle (Geneva, 1984); Dennis Wood, Benjamin Constant: A Biography
(London, 1993) and Helena Rosenblatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Constant (Cambridge, 2009).
56 See Renee Winegarten, Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography (New
Haven, Conn., 2008).
57 For Constant’s assessment of her personality and intellectual achievements see ‘De Madame de
Staël et des ses ouvrages’, in Benjamin Constant, Portraits, Mémoires, Souvenirs (1992), 212–54.
58 See De la Force du Gouvernement. See also Constant, Fragments d’un ouvrage abandonné sur la
possibilité d’une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays (1991).
59 The elections of April 1797 were a crushing defeat for the Directory, leading to a fear of a possible
monarchical restoration. The response of the Directory was to annul the greater number of these
elections.
60 Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes (1980), 103–261.
160
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
‘We have finally reached’, Constant announced at the beginning of the text, ‘the
age of commerce, an age which necessarily replaces that of war.’61 This familiar
argument led him next to suggest that, for modern nations, war had lost both its
attraction and its utility. From this it followed that ‘any government wishing to
drive a European people to war and conquest would commit a gross and disastrous
anachronism’.62 What form would this take? Constant first offered a description
of what he termed ‘a military race acting only out of self-interest’. ‘Four hundred
thousand well-trained, well-armed egoists’, Constant wrote, ‘would know that their
destiny was either to inflict or to suffer death.’63 Once in place, this army would
have to be kept at work and new enemies would have to be found for it to fight. The
system of conquest was thus self-perpetuating. Moreover, of necessity it would
spread to the civilian population. Opposition would be seen as disorder, reasoning
as a form of rebellion. And so ‘the rest of the nation’ would find itself called upon to
display ‘passive obedience’.64 The result would be moral degradation and an ever-
growing ignorance. As for the conquered peoples themselves, they would be forced
to suffer a fate never inflicted upon the vanquished in times of antiquity: the
imposition of a uniformity which touched ‘the most intimate aspects of their
existence’. ‘Today’, Constant wrote, ‘the admiration for uniformity . . . is received
as a religious dogma’: it was ‘the immediate and inseparable consequence of the
spirit of conquest’.65
Constant reached a similar conclusion with regard to usurpation. It was impos-
sible, he announced, for usurpation to endure, so removed was it from the spirit
of the modern age. Not even force––‘the last resort’ of regular governments but
the ‘norm to usurpers’––could keep it in place indefinitely. One battle lost––the
reference was to Napoleon’s crushing defeat at Leipzig in 1813––had been suffi-
cient to put it to flight across Europe. Nevertheless, it was to this condition that
France had been reduced under Bonaparte. Usurpation too, as Constant made
clear, was an anachronism. But he was also aware that he was describing something
that was new.66 Usurpation was but a novel form of government displaying its own
destructive pathologies. To further make the point, Constant provided a sustained
comparison between monarchy and usurpation, two forms of government in which
power was in the hands of one man, but which were, in his opinion, very different
from each other despite the ‘deceptive resemblance’.
The example of monarchy chosen by Constant was that of England. There, he
wrote, it can be seen that ‘the rights of all citizens are safe from attack; that popular
elections keep the body politic alive. . . . that freedom of the press is respected; that
talent is assured of its triumph; and that, in individuals of all classes, there is the
proud, calm security of the man embraced by the law of his country’.67 This, by
contrast, was Constant’s vivid account of what was to be expected under the regime
61 Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes (1980), 118.
62 Ibid. 120.
63 Ibid. 123.
64 Ibid. 133.
65 Ibid. 148.
66 Richter, ‘Towards a Concept of Political Legitimacy’, 188, makes the point that usurpation had
been ‘a common word in the moral and political discourse of the old regime’. After 1789 it was used by
royalist writers against the republic.
67 Constant, De la liberté, 163.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
161
of a usurper.68 Usurpation was a system which nothing could modify or soften and
which had ‘the individuality of the usurper’ stamped upon it. From all persons it
exacted ‘an immediate abdication in favour of a single individual’. Obliged always
to justify his elevation, the usurper could never lapse into inaction and was
routinely required to resort to treachery, violence, and perjury. Principles were
invoked, only for them to be trampled upon. Greed was awakened and injustice
emboldened. Illegality, Constant went on, haunted the usurper ‘like a ghost’, and
so ‘in vain’ he sought refuge in ‘ostentation and in victory’. For want of legitimacy,
he surrounded himself with guards, engaged i
n ‘incessant warfare’ and was forced to
‘abase’ and ‘insult’ all those around him.
Constant ended his description by drawing attention to what, in his opinion, was
the most decisive innovation introduced by usurpation, an innovation that not only
served to differentiate it from earlier forms of despotism, but that made the latter
preferable to the former.69 Usurpation, Constant wrote, parodied and counter-
feited liberty. It demanded the assent and approbation of its subjects and, through
persecution, exacted signs of consent. Despotism, he explained, ‘rules by means of
silence, and leaves man with the right to be silent; usurpation condemns him to
speak; it pursues him to the intimate sanctuary of his thoughts and, forcing him to
lie to his own conscience, denies him the last consolation of the oppressed’.70
How had it been possible for this descent into a new, and more extensive, form
of arbitrary government to occur? It arose, Constant stated unequivocally, as a
consequence of a revolution that had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of
liberty in modern commercial society. This was how Constant phrased the argu-
ment for which he was later to be best known.71 ‘The liberty which was offered to
men at the end of the last century’, he wrote, ‘was borrowed from the ancient
republics.’72 That conception of liberty, Constant continued, consisted ‘in active
participation in the collective power rather than in the peaceful enjoyment of
individual independence’. The ancients, in brief, gained their greatest enjoyment
from public life and found little pleasure in their private existence; consequently
they had been prepared to sacrifice ‘individual liberty to political liberty’. By
contrast, Constant affirmed, ‘almost all the pleasures of the moderns lie in their
private life’. Public matters were of only passing interest. Individuals wished to be
left in ‘perfect independence in all that concerns their occupations, their under-
takings, their sphere of activity, their fantasies’. This, he concluded, was a form of
civil liberty virtually unknown to the ancients.
The move from one form of liberty to the other, in Constant’s view, had not
been without its losses. Our pleasures were less vivid and immediate. We were