Constant de Rebecque

Constant de Rebecque, HENRI BENJAMIN, author and politician, was born of French Huguenot ancestry at Lausanne, 23d October 1767. He was educated at Oxford, Erlangen, and Edinburgh, where he became acquainted with Mackintosh and Erskine. In 1795, settling in Paris, he quickly gained reputation as a publicist. He entered the Tribune in 1799, but was banished from France in 1802, for having denounced the despotic acts of Napoleon. After travelling over Germany and Italy, in company with Madame de Staël, he lived for a number of years in Göttingen. On Napoleon's fall in 1814 he returned to Paris, and issued several pamphlets advocating constitutional liberty; during the Hundred Days he became one of Napoleon's Councillors of State, though previously he had styled Napoleon a Genghis Khan, and his government a government of Mamelukes. After the second restoration of the Bourbons, Constant wrote and spoke consistently in favour of constitutional freedom. He was returned to the Chamber of Deputies in 1819, and became the leader of the Opposition. He was the ablest controversialist among the Doctrinaires, the French Whigs. The greater number of his very able political pamphlets were collected under the title of Cours de Politique Constitutionnelle (4 vols. 1817-20); his Discours were published in 1828. He died 8th December 1830. His powerful intellect had many sides. In De la Religion (5 vols. 1824-31) he maintained that the spirit of religion, as it grows loftier and purer, casts off the various forms in which it has been embodied, and which obstruct its expansion. He was likewise the author of a remarkable novel, Adolphe (1816), a short story of love and disillusion, in which Constant forestalls the method of the modern school of analytic novelists. His Correspondence appeared in 1844, his Œuvres Politiques in 1875, his Letters to Madame Récamier in 1881, and his Journal Intime in 1894.