During his lifetime, Benjamin Constant was known as a political theorist, a courageous defender of liberal causes and a notable historian of the religious experience of mankind. Through his journals, autobiographical works and correspondence--documents mostly unknown by his contemporaries--subsequent generations have discoverd in Constant a fascinating and highly complex personality. In recent decades, a number of private archives have become accessible to scholars for the first time, and this has brought to light important documents by and about Constant.
Drawing on these sources, many unpublished, Dennis Wood offers a fresh assessment of the writer and the man. He closely relates the development of Constant's political thought and passionate interest in the history of religion to his work as a novelist and self-analyst. "Benjamin Constant" draws together the considerable findings of modern scholarship, presenting a lively and sympathetic portrait of the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy' (Sir Isaiah Berlin).

'For forty years I have defended the same principle: freedom in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics - and by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual.' Constant thus summarized his beliefs at the end of his life. A political theorist and a passionate defender of individual liberty, he was also the author of one of the greatest French novels of psychological insight, Adolphe. In a major new biography Dennis Wood traces the development of Constant as a writer centrally preoccupied with the problematics of freedom, not only in the fields of politics and religious belief but also in his own troubled relationship with several women.

This second volume of the "Correspondance gA(c)nA(c)rale," which covers the years 1793 and 1794, is composed mainly of the continuation of the brilliant series of letters which Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), now a courtier at Brunswick, had begun to exchange with Isabelle de CharriA]re in Switzerland in 1787. These letters, along with those addressed by Constant to other correspondents, particularly to several members of his family and friends in Brunswick, enable us to follow the events of his intellectual and emotional life at this time, including his friendship with the publicist Jakob Mauvillon, his role in the court-martial affair of his father, his divorce from his first wife Minna von Cramm, his friendship with Charlotte von Hardenberg (later his second wife), his break with the Court of Brunswick, his return to Switzerland and the beginning of his long liaison with Germaine de StaAl.

This fourth volume of the ACorrespondance generaleA contains 368 letters written during the period of the Consulat when, as a member of the Tribunat until January 1802, Constant acquired a reputation as a brilliant orator and outspoken opponent of Bonaparte. It was also a period when he produced a number of manuscripts on politics and religion on which he would base works published between 1814 and 1830. The correspondence also contains letters of compelling human interest to and from Julie Talma and an extraordinary epistolary exchange with Anna Lindsay, with whom Constant fell in love in 1800.

The first volume of the "Correspondance gA(c)nA(c)rale de Benjamin Constant" covers the period from 1774 to 1792 and contains the letters written by the child, from a very young age, to members of his family, those of the student who had been sent by his father to the Universities of Erlangen and Edinburgh, those of the young man in flight towards England and Scotland sent to Mme de CharriA]re, and, finally, those of the bored chamberlain at the court of Brunswick, where Constant contracted an unhappy marriage. The volume was edited by the General Editor of the "Correspondance gA(c)nA(c)rale," Cecil P. Courtney of the University of Cambridge, assisted by Dennis Wood of Birmingham University.

The 285 letters contained in this volume of the "Correspondance gA(c)nA(c)rale" date from the years following Constant's exclusion from the Tribunal. They reflect his work on religious issues, his dreams of literary success, and his travels in France, Germany, and Switzerland. In addition, they provide an impression of political life at the beginning of the Napoleonic empire and the emotional vicissitudes undergone by their author: his unsuccessful attempts to break with Germaine de StaAl, his desire to marry (but whom?), his presence at the deaths of Julie Talma and Isabelle de CharriA]re, and his initial lack of enthusiasm after renewing his acquaintance with Charlotte von Hardenberg.

The third volume of ACorrespondance gA(c)nA(c)raleA contains the text of 279 letters written by or addressed to Benjamin Constant from the period preceding the beginning of his career as journalist and publicist in Paris in May - June 1795 until his nomination to the Tribunat in December 1799. This volume is a valuable document on the intellectual and political life of the period; at the same time it allows the reader to see at close range Constant's relations his family and friends, including Isabelle de CharriA]re and Germaine de StaAl; the reader will also find here the earliest letters of his correspondence with Julie Talma.

This tenth volume of the Correspondance generale, which covers the years 1816 1818, is a valuable document on the intellectual life of the period as well as on the relations of Benjamin Constant with his friends and family, on his literary activities (particularly, during a sojourn in England, the publication of Adolphe) and on his career as publicist and champion of political and civil liberties, after his return to Paris in September 1816."

Dr Wood traces in detail the frequently paradoxical development of themes and situations introduced in the opening chapters of Adolphe and lays stress on the novel's intricate writing. He places the book in its historical, intellectual and biographical context and examines its reception by writers as various as Stendhal, George Eliot, and Tolstoy.