Benjamin Constant on the dangers to liberty posed by the military spirit (1815)

Constant wrote several versions of The Principles of Politics (in 1810, 1815) and it has never been given the attention it deserves. He was writing the second version when Napoleon returned from defeat and asked him to draw up a new constitution, so he was very concerned with the practical political problem of how to reform a society which had been dominated by the military for nearly two decades. One of the biggest problems lay in the minds of men who had experienced military discipline first hand, were accustomed to obeying orders without question, and who regarded independent thinking as “incipient indiscipline”. The respect for individual liberty had to be relearned by the citizen soldiers who had served Napoleon for so long that they had adopted “a mechanistic subordination” which made them “passive, unreflective, and docile agents” of power. Thus, part of Constant’s political agenda was to try to rekindle the love of liberty in the minds of Frenchmen both within the Chamber (in which he served until his death in 1830) and in a series of major books he published during the 1820s.