Critical interest in Benjamin Constant has in recent decades tended to focus on three principal areas: his life, including his dilemmas and personal difficulties with women; his novel Adolphe (1816: translated as Adolphe, 1816), which continues to fascinate the general reading public and to attract and perplex literary critics of very different persuasions; and his views on politics and religion. The bicentennial of his birth (1967) and the sesquicentennial of his death (1980) were the occasions for important publications and exhibitions, the latter anniversary giving the impetus to the founding of the Institut Benjamin Constant in Lausanne, Switzerland, and of the journal Annales Benjamin Constant. No edition yet exists of Constant's complete works, but an editorial board was set up in 1980 with the aim of publishing Constant's full ouvre and correspondence.

Constant's life is intriguing to biographers, and though much is known about it, a great deal remains mysterious and open to...