Having upset Napoleon and left France to go to Switzerland then to the Kingdom of Saxony, Constant nonetheless sided with him during the Hundred Days and became politically active again during the French Restoration.

His autobiographical Le Cahier rouge (1807) gives an account of his love for Madame de Staël, whose protégé and collaborator he became, especially in the Coppet circle, and a successful novella, Adolphe (1816), are good examples of his work on this topic.

In those years European nobility, with their prerogatives, came under heavy attack from those, like Constant, who were influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality.

She acted as a maternal mentor to him until Constant's appointment to the court of Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel that required him to move north.

In 1799, after 18 Brumaire, Constant was reluctantly appointed, on the insistence of Abbe Sieyes, by Napoleon Bonaparte to the Tribunat, despite grave reservations on the latter's part.

Eventually, in 1802, the first consul confirmed in his doubts, forced Constant to withdraw because of the tenor of his speeches and his close connection with Mme de Staël.

[13] The lawyer James Mackintosh defended the French refugee Peltier against a libel suit instigated by Napoleon – then First Consul of France.

During the Hundred Days of Napoleon, who had become more liberal, Constant fled to the Vendée, but returned when he was invited several times to the Tuileries to set up changes for the Charter of 1815.

In 1817, the year when Madame de Staël died, he was back in Paris and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower legislative house of the Restoration-era government.

Whoever recollects what this excellent man accomplished in [later] years, and with what zeal he advanced without wavering along the path which, once chosen, was forever followed, realizes what noble aspirations, as yet undeveloped, were fermenting within him.

[16]A Freemason,[17] in 1830 King Louis Philippe I gave Constant a large sum of money to help him pay off his debts, and appointed him to the Conseil d'Etat.

[18] Former Former One of the first thinkers to go by the name of "liberal", Constant looked to Britain rather than to ancient Rome for a practical model of freedom in a large mercantile society.

Ancient Liberty was also limited to relatively small and homogenous male societies, in which they could be conveniently gathered together in one place to transact public affairs.

Direct participation would be limited: a necessary consequence of the size of modern states, and also the inevitable result of having created a mercantile society in which there were no slaves but almost everybody had to earn a living through work.

Constant's repeated denunciation of despotism pervaded his critique of French political philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Abbé de Mably.

[21] These writers, influential in the French Revolution, according to Constant, mistook authority for liberty and approved any means of extending the action of the state.

In François Furet's words, Constant's "entire political thought" revolved around this question, namely the problem of how to justify the Terror.

Thus, although often ignored in France, because of his Anglo-Saxon sympathies, Constant succeeded in contributing in a profound (albeit indirect) way to French constitutional traditions.

This was an advance on the prevailing theory in the English-speaking world, which, following the opinion of William Blackstone, the 18th-century English jurist, had regarded the King as head of the executive branch.

[citation needed] In Constant's scheme, the executive power would be entrusted to a Council of Ministers (or Cabinet) who, although appointed by the King, were ultimately accountable to Parliament.

Elsewhere (for example, the 1848 "Statuto albertino" of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which later became the basis of the Italian constitution from 1861) the executive power was notionally vested in the King, but was exercised only by the responsible ministers.

[24] Constant's other concerns included a "new type of federalism": a serious attempt to decentralize French government through the devolution of powers to elected municipal councils.

Constant was an opponent of imperialism and conquest, denouncing French colonial policy in the West Indies and elsewhere as racist, unjust, and a violation of basic principles of human equality.

His publications demonstrate his desire to grasp this social phenomenon inherent to human nature, which, in whatever forms it may present, is always a search for perfectibility.

Constant published only one novel during his lifetime, Adolphe (1816), the story of a young, indecisive man's disastrous love affair with an older mistress.

A first-person novel in the sentimentalist tradition, Adolphe examines the thoughts of the young man as he falls in and out of love with Ellenore, a woman of uncertain virtue.

She was Isabelle de Charrière, a Dutch woman of letters with whom he jointly wrote an epistolary novel, under the title, Les Lettres d'Arsillé fils, Sophie Durfé et autres.

[28] The importance of Constant's writings on the liberty of the ancients and of that of his time has dominated understanding of his work, as has his critique of the French Revolution.