L'Expression du sentiment dans l'oeuvre de Benjamin Constant (review)

It is understandable that an overriding and unifying concept might be elusive in the works of those who lived and wrote during the period that straddles the French eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ancien régime, revolution, empire, restoration, a persistent protean polemicism inherent in Enlightenment letters, a neo-classicism not quite ready for romanticism, it is little wonder that a Chateaubriand, in the pen-ultimate chapter of Les Mémoires d'outre-tombe and elsewhere, should express the disorientation of being a writer and thinker as one era gave grudgingly way to the other in a series of shocks and jolts. This same plight must have befallen both Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant to an even greater extent, one might suppose, owing to their foreign extraction (both were of Swiss parentage) and their efforts to succeed within a socially antagonistic if culturally welcoming hierarchy. Indeed, such perception coupled with both political and biographical proclivities led inevitably to prolonged critical neglect of their respective opuses. Only in the last two decades have Mme de Staël's writings received just consideration. With the pub-lication of Victor Kocay's latest book one can hope that a similar rectification is taking place for a Constant long recognized principally as the author of Adolphe (1816).

It is Kocay's holistic approach, a first for Constant studies, that generates said optimism. Despite what appears to be an overwhelming diversity typical of the period, Constant's writings fall into three distinct categories: texts devoted to religion, texts prompted by circumstance - many of them political - and literary or aesthetic texts. Kocay views the whole from the perspective of the religious writings (published in seven volumes from 1824 to 1833), whose sheer number may explain the reluctance of some scholars. By privileging these works (De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements,and Du polythéisme romain), Kocay is able to discern an elemental notion common to the other writings and in terms of which the latter can be understood: le sentiment.

Kocay works his way through the treatises on religion ("Chapiter 1: Sentiment et religion") meticulously, insightfully, and carefully encodes the expansive dynamics of sentiment: the vagaries, the complexities, the nuances. Drawing on Kant for whom sentiment links the particular and the universal, Kocay sees in Constant's version an indefinable ever-present consciousness of shortfall or lack, a void to be filled that precludes fixity, that fuels a yearning and thereby nurtures religion on the one hand and freedom, independence, and progress on the other ("Chapter 2: Sentiment et politique").

In the literary texts, those that have been the most visited by scholars, it is the maxim that carries the torch of originality and cohesion, we are informed. Rather than constituting a holdover from the classical period or simply providing a vehicle for moralizing or chastising, Constant's aphorisms contrast with formal convention in such a way that they engender a philosophy of independence based on sentiment and a means of actualizing principle ("Chapter 3: Sentiment et esthétique").

Kocay realizes that positing an all-encompassing system of coherence for Constant's myriad works will be viewed skeptically by some. He is surely right, although he defends himself ably in the first part of the conclusion, "Le systéme du sentiment." The problem is that in order to counter his claims convincingly, detractors will have to do battle with the copious religious texts, no mean feat to be sure. It will be more difficult still to depreciate the scholarship Kocay brings to his project. The same can be said of the writing whose traits of engaging clarity and evenhandedness enhance credibility. Kocay is especially adept at calling upon queries to balance assertions and to reinforce judgments. Finally, the appendices containing various maxims and letters...