Childhood and education

The author of a novel shot through with multiple skeins of irony and paradox, Benjamin Constant has seemed to many to be himself a tissue of paradoxes. Adolphe, a work firmly situated within a tradition of writing that stretches back through the eighteenth century to the age of high French Classicism, to the mid seventeenth century and to the rigorous psychological analyses of La Rochefoucauld, Pascal and La Princesse de Clèeves, is the supreme achievement of a man who was not himself French but a Swiss Protestant from Lausanne who took French citizenship only in his thirty-first year. In fact his education, both formal and that which he acquired by immense personal labour, was to a large extent English – or more properly Scottish – and German. Henri- Benjamin de Constant de Rebecque was born in Lausanne on 25 October 1767, the son of Juste de Constant de Rebecque, a Swiss aristocrat who was also a military officer in the service of Holland. Herein lies a further paradox: the writer who in literary manuals and histories generally finds himself set alongside Stendhal, Balzac and the other great novelists of nineteenth-century France, in fact lived over half his life in the eighteenth century and his experience of the Ancien Régime, Revolution and Directory shaped not only his political opinions but also his literary taste.