CONSTANT DE REBECQUE, HENRI BENJAMIN French writer and politician, was born in Lausanne on Oct. 25, 1767, the son of Juste Arnold de Constant, who commanded a regiment in the Dutch service. After a good pri vate education at Brussels he was sent to Oxford, Erlangen and then to Edinburgh, where he came into contact with prominent Whigs. He returned to Switzerland in 1786, and in the next year visited Paris, where he met Madame de Charriere, who, although 27 years older than Constant, became his mistress, and the liaison, an affair possibly more of the intellect than of the heart, lasted until 1796, when Constant became intimate with Madame de Stael. He became chamberlain at the court of Charles William, duke of Brunswick, and in 1789 he married one of the ladies-in-waiting, Wilhelmina, Baroness Chramm. On the dissolution of his marriage in 1794 he resigned a post which his republican opinions made distasteful.
Constant, who had met Madame de Stael at Lausanne in followed her in the next year to Paris; by 1796 he had established with her intimate relations, which, in spite of many storms, endured for ten years. In 1796 he published two pamphlets in defence of the Directory and against the counter-revolution, and he supported Barras in 1797 and 1799 in the coups d'etat of 18 Fructidor, and of 18 Brumaire. In Dec. 1799 he was nominated a member of the Tribunate, where he showed from the outset an independence quite unacceptable to Napoleon, by whom he was removed in the "creaming" of that assembly in 1802. The salon of Madame de Stael was a centre for those disaffected from the Napoleonic regime, and in 1803 he followed her into exile. Much of Constant's time was spent with her at Coppet ; but he also made long sojourns at Weimar, where he mixed in the Goethe Schiller circle, and accumulated material for the work on religion which he had oegun, so far back as 1787, at Colombier. His relations with Madame de Stael became more and more diffi cult, and in 1808 he secretly married Charlotte von Hardenberg, whom he had known at Brunswick, and whose divorce from her second husband, General Dutertre, he had secured.
The Napoleonic reverses of 1813 brought him back to politics, and in November he published at Hanover his De l'esprit de conquete et de l'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civili sation europeenne, directed against Napoleon. He also entered into relations with the crown prince of Sweden (Bernadotte) . On his return to Paris, during its occupation by the allied sov ereigns, he was well received by the emperor Alexander I. of Russia, and resumed his old place in the Liberal salon of Madame de Stael. In a series of pamphlets he advocated the principles of a Liberal monarchy and the freedom of the press. At this point began the second great attachment of his life, his infatuation for Madame Recamier, under whose influence he committed the worst blunder of his political career, for, after an interview with Napo leon on April io, he became a supporter of his Government and drew up the Acte constitutionnel. The return of Louis XVIII. drove him into exile.
In London in 1815 he published Adolphe, one of the earlier examples of the psychological, autobiographical novel. In 1816 he was again in Paris, advocating Liberal constitutional principles. He founded in 1818 with other Liberal journalists the Minerve francaise and in 182o La Renommee. In 1819 he was returned to the Chamber of Deputies. Perhaps the greatest service he ren dered to his party was his consistent advocacy of the freedom of the press. At the outbreak of the revolution of 183o he was absent from Paris, but he returned at the request of Lafayette to take his share in the elevation of Louis Philippe to the throne. On Aug. 27 he was made president of the council of State. He died on Dec. 8 of the same year. During his later years he had been a cripple in consequence of a fall in the Chamber of Deputies, and he fought the last of his many duels sitting in a chair. After the death, in 1817, of Madame de Stael, whom he continued to visit daily until the end, he had ceased to go into society, giving himself up to his passion for play.
In the most important of his writings, De la religion consideree dans sa source, ses formes, et ses developpements (5 vols., 182 Constant traces the successive transformations of the ious sentiment imperishable under its varying forms. Besides Adolphe, in its way as important as Chateaubriand's Rene, he left two other sketches of novels in ms., which are apparently lost. His political tracts were collected by himself as, Collection com plete des ouvrages publies sur . . . la France, formant une espece de tours de politique constitutionnelle (4 vols., 1818-2o), as were his Discours a la Chambre des Deputes (2 vols., 1827).