Politician and writer Resulting from an old French Protestant family taken refuge in Switzerland since the beginning of the XVIIe century, Benjamin Constant lost her mother very early and was raised by tutors. He testifies to an extreme precocity, but, as of adolescence, proclamation an instability and an anguish, of which he will only separate himself extremely late. The many connections which it ties as from 1787, in Paris, reveal its emotional immaturity. But it is the strange subjection which binds it to Mrs. de Staël, met in 1794, who illustrates best the ambivalence of her control: he suffers from the influence of this woman on him, wishes to leave it, but, as soon as she moves away, continues it. During fourteen years, there remains to him attached, Marie without her knowledge in 1808, and carries out during two years a double union.
Very early, it starts to write its great work, Of the religion considered in its source, its forms and its development (1824-1830), but the passion of the play constantly makes him forsake its work; this heavy treaty, which was to ensure its immortality, is forgotten today with the profit of a short novel, Adolphe (1816), to which it did not attach importance.
Its political career shows, like its love affairs, of serious fluctuations: via Mrs. de Staël, it obtains from Bonaparte an important station, then refuses it. After the fall of the Empire, it multiplies the lampoons antibonapartists and forges a reputation of liberal; then, by love for Mrs. Récamier, it is done royalist (1814), which does not prevent it, when Napoleon returns from the isle of Elba, from accepting of him the title of State Counsellor, to write the additional Act with the constitutions of the Empire, to become again, after Waterloo, an enthusiastic liberal (Course of constitutional policy, 1818-1820; Mixtures of literature and policy, 1829). Appointed elected official of the Sarthe in 1819, then of Paris in 1824, it devotes his last years to the focusing of his great treaty Of the Roman polytheism considered in his relationship with Greek philosophy and the Christian religion (1833).
At the bottom, the variations, even the palinodes of its private and political existence, are the counter-proof of the only interest of its life: its me, and to which testify, in addition to the red Book (1807), the account of Cecile (published in 1951) and her Diary (1952).