A life that has false airs of that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
This is what, in a curious way, comes to mind when reading the first chapter of this renewed biography of Benjamin Constant.
The author, the historian Léonard Burnand, indeed devotes moving pages to the mother of the latter, who died in childbirth at birth and whom he emerges from an oblivion which could have been definitive, if he had not unearthed unpublished archives.
Like the wandering Genevan, Constant was born into a Swiss and Protestant family (in Lausanne).
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Like him, the loss of his mother, who died while he lived, complicated the relationship with women (seducer with Constant, inhibited with Rousseau).
Like him, he knows in France the celebrity of a political thinker coupled with a man of letters.
Like him, in fact, he also passed down to posterity as a writer of the intimate, the inspiration of romanticism: we still read his
Adolphe
, an unhappy love story, as we still read Rousseau's
Confessions
, canon of the self-fiction…
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