Spontaneity and Moral Certainty in Benjamin Constant's Adolphe

Spontaneity and Moral Certainty in Benjamin Constant's
   Adolphe

   Melanie Conroy

   Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 40, Number 3 & 4, Spring-Summer
   2012, pp. 222-238 (Article)

   Published by University of Nebraska Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2012.0012

        For additional information about this article
        https://muse.jhu.edu/article/477672

[ Access provided at 16 Apr 2020 12:28 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

Spontaneity and Moral Certainty in
   Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe
                                                        melanie conroy

   ethical uncertainty at the end of tradition
For almost all of its two-hundred-year existence, Benjamin Constant’s Adol-
phe has been read as a roman à clef, the disguised story of the author’s unfor-
tunate affair with Germaine de Staël, Charlotte de Hardenberg, Anna Lind-
say, or some combination of the three (Wood 175–76).1 Literary critics, and
even political philosophers, have been all too ready to agree with Sainte-Beuve
that the writer’s realistic portrayal of “les impressions intérieures les plus fu-
gitives et les plus contradictoires” (1048) proved that Constant himself was
abnormally hesitant.2 Even Constant’s career under the Directory and dur-
ing the Hundred Days has been cause for suspicion that he—like his char-
acter—hesitated unnecessarily: Villefosse and Bouissounousse insisted as late
as 1969 that Constant’s character was inferior to his thought (324). It was not
just in France that Constant was known as a real-life Adolphe. In a footnote
on Constant’s correspondence in The Varieties of Religious Experience, written
seventy years after Constant’s death, William James claims that the author of
Adolphe had such a poor character that he could not “get mad” at any of his
choices, and thus floated, Adolphe-like, through his own life, acting spontane-
ously, without making good use of his considerable intellect (375).
    Benjamin Constant was careful in all three editions of the novel to distin-
guish between his own character and Adolphe’s. In the “Avis de l’éditeur” pub-
lished in the first edition, an unnamed editor professes to have found the “an-
ecdote” in Strongoli, Catanzaro; he also declares that he published the papers
without changing “un mot à l’original” (107). In the second and third prefaces,
Constant admits that he is the author of Adolphe, but insists on its fictional
nature (99–100).3 Constant and his fictional editor seek to place the maxi-
mum distance possible between the character of Adolphe and Constant’s real
life, and to make Adolphe’s character flaws into societal faults, more than per-
sonal ones. In the third preface, Constant restates the question of why Adol-

222   Melanie Conroy

phe is so hesitant in socio-historical terms: “A distance, l’image de la douleur
qu’on impose paraît vague et confuse, telle qu’un nuage facile à traverser; on
est encouragé par l’approbation d’une société toute factice, qui supplée aux
principes par les règles et aux émotions par les convenances” (103). In other
words, Adolphe is typical for a sincere young man living in an immoral epoch.
    In the last sixty years, critics like Pierre Deguise and Alison Fairlie have
largely sorted out the melancholic yet efficacious Constant from his philo-
sophical interest in indecision.4 More dramatically, political theorists—in-
cluding K. Steven Vincent, Stephen Holmes, and Biancamaria Fontana—have
reinvented Constant as a father of liberalism, praising his tolerance in an era
of fundamentalism.5 Critics, such as Tzvetan Todorov and Elena Russo, have
adapted their analyses to Constant’s enhanced philosophical reputation.6 But
considering Constant as a liberal forefather has often meant pushing his liter-
ary work to the side. This is a pity, since Constant considered his literary and
political works to be linked enough that, as Patrick Coleman observes, one
of his last acts was to republish them together in Mélanges de littérature et de
politique (225).7 How, then, can we resolve Constant’s liberal beliefs with the
moral paralysis we find in his novel? With its classic statement of post-revo-
lutionary paralysis, Adolphe fits awkwardly into an œuvre which argues con-
sistently for more freedom regardless of the consequences. Yet it is precisely
because it exposes the dangers of unlimited freedom that Adolphe should be
studied together with Constant’s apologias for liberty. The answer, I think, is
by examining the moral conundrum at the heart of his work.
    Constant frequently sought to connect his observations in moral psychol-
ogy to his political philosophy. As K. Steven Vincent argues, the author be-
lieved that character contributed to everyone’s ethical and political stance:
“Character, in Constant’s view, was important not just for the analysis of inti-
mate relations [. . .] but also for understanding political culture, social stabil-
ity, and the viability of political institutions” (6–7). According to the young
liberal, the Revolution posed autonomy as the ultimate norm: there was little
middle ground between those who argued for the Revolution and those who
remained in favor of religion and tradition; as he declared in one 1796 politi-
cal pamphlet, “L’ordre & la liberté sont d’un côté, l’Anarchie & le despotisme,
de l’autre” (327).8 But Constant was always a political moderate who believed
that there were limits on how much the Revolution could transform individu-
als and institutions. He realized early on that individuals could not be made
into purely rational beings and that complete moral autonomy, the freedom
to create one’s own values and to judge one’s own actions, was a necessary
part of freedom but would also lay an enormous burden on individuals and
make all social cooperation impossible.9
    Constant wrote the first draft of Adolphe in 1806 and rewrote the novel

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3 & 4 spring–summer 2012   223

before its 1816 publication—that is, well after the publication of some of his
most important political pamphlets and essays, including Des réactions poli-
tiques (1796), which contains many of his key insights into moral psychology.
Adolphe was Constant’s most important attempt to bridge the gap between
these insights and the crisis brought on by the end of traditional mores. It is a
deliberate exercise in ethical thinking gone wrong. In the novel, Constant re-
veals how the inability to justify all of one’s decisions could become an excuse
for justifying none of them, or for doing nothing.10 In the absence of conven-
tions, acting “freely”—that is, without the “irrational” influence of tradition
or set principles—presents enormous practical difficulties: as he writes in Des
réactions politiques: “Le principe moral, par exemple, que dire la vérité est un
devoir, s’il étoit pris d’une manière absolue et isolée, rendroit toute société
impossible” (493).11
    Adolphe rejects social norms when they do not accord with his vaguely
articulated value system. Rather than achieving autonomy, he finds himself
caught between absolute forms of moral judgment and disregarding moral-
ity entirely. In Constant’s terms, Adolphe lacks intermediary principles and
this is why he cannot make up his mind about how to act. What results is
a stultifying sense of inefficacity: for Adolphe, “le sentiment de l’inutilité de
l’effort est tel,” as Georges Poulet writes, “que celui qui en est le sujet se lais-
serait mourir” (36). The character tries to be utterly modern: he attempts to
live outside of convention and rejects every known framework (Christianity,
Kantian universalism, even his father’s libertinism). Since he can accept noth-
ing less than perfection, he demands complete authenticity and perfect fair-
ness from himself; in the end, he gets neither. His troubles reveal how difficult
it would be to plot out a justified trajectory for one’s life, were we to dispense
entirely with shared norms and traditional mores.
    It may seem easy to live according to general principles and avoid acting
unfairly, for example, by never harming others. All we would have to do is set
down a few ground rules and obey them: do not kill, do not steal, do not lie,
and so forth. But if we want to be responsible for the consequences of our ac-
tions, too, then some flexibility must be built into the system. What happens,
for instance, if we are asked to tell a murderer how to kill a third person? In
that case, we must effectively choose between killing indirectly and lying. Do
we look at the probable outcome and decide not to help the murderer? Or
do we consider only our own part in the murder and tell the truth? This is
exactly the subject of a very famous debate between Constant and Immanuel
Kant, in which Kant claims that, whatever we do, we are still wrong to lie, and
Constant argues that it is acceptable to lie given that the consequence of tell-
ing the truth would be the death of an innocent person.12 The viciousness of
each extreme is shown in the debate itself, where Kant urges the reader to let

224   Melanie Conroy

his friend be murdered to save truth and Constant declares that one should lie
to anyone suspected of not having “un droit à la vérité.”13
   Kant and Constant represent the two poles of modern ethical philosophy:
belief in fixed laws and concern for the consequences of actions. If we are to
live outside of convention and invent our own way of deciding what is right,
we can either follow Kant or follow Constant, but it is difficult indeed to oc-
cupy the middle ground where we save the innocent man and tell the truth.
Adolphe lives between these two poles. He wants the spontaneity of making
decisions on a case-by-case basis and the certainty of fixed moral laws. In ef-
fect, he wants to be right all the time, according to both systems. Adolphe fails
to live innocently because this is all but impossible.14 We can do both partially,
or do one quite well, but to be both consistent and harmless would require
mental capacities which few people—certainly not Adolphe—possess.
   To live both spontaneously and fairly, we would have to make a full ac-
count of the effects of our actions and generate the principles (or laws) used
to judge those actions. Further, we would need to be able to guess the future
(to know whether the man dies), which would require predictive narratives.
As Adolphe shows, predicting the consequences of our actions is harder than
it might sound. Constant’s political essays make clear how tough such thor-
ough accounting would be, given the near impossibility of balancing predic-
tive (narrative) thinking and synchronic moral judgment; that is the reason
that one needs both abstract and intermediary principles: to decide what is
right and to know when each principle has precedence. One simply cannot
personally review all of one’s decisions and all of the possible consequences,
so shortcuts must be made—either we try to avoid undesirable consequences
or we follow principles which may turn out to be flawed. This ethical impasse
has been considered to be unique to Adolphe’s character, yet it can more pro-
ductively be seen as the effect of his situation: we should, as Blanchot urges,
cease to see in Adolphe “la tragédie d’un certain sentiment, d’un certain carac-
tère, puisque c’est un drame propre à notre condition, où n’importe quel sen-
timent et n’importe quel caractère sont voués à la même fatalité” (493).

   après le déluge
The novel opens with the simple negation of a narrative: the young man re-
jects the staid life of a minister that his father offers him in favor of an un-
known future.15 Rather than enjoy a period of relative freedom and youth-
ful pleasures, which would only later be inscribed into the life-narrative of a
career, Adolphe sets out in search of another narrative for his life. But he is
paralyzed immediately—not only by the abundance of possibilities, but also
by the profusion of ways of deciding between them. Should he expect suc-

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3 & 4 spring–summer 2012   225

cess in life? Is he worthy of his father’s esteem? Is a love affair essential? What
sort of woman should he take up with? Many of these sources of uncertain-
ty appear from the first page of the novel when the narrator opines, “J’avais
obtenu, par un travail assez opiniâtre, au milieu d’une vie très dissipée, des
succès qui m’avaient distingué de mes compagnes d’étude, et qui avaient fait
concevoir à mon père sur moi des espérances probablement fort exagérées”
(108). Adolphe considers his father’s opinion of him too generous. He sus-
pects that his previous successes tell him nothing about his future, neither
about his chances for advancement nor the type of future he would prefer.
And yet he is not even certain that his father’s hopes for him are exaggerated;
they are only “probablement fort exagérées.” He does not even know whether
he knows what to expect. This pattern continues throughout the novel, until
the final scene in which Ellénore’s death convinces him of his mistake. Until
this point, Adolphe is the perfect agnostic: he is capable of infinite doubt and
lacks any ability to decide questions once and for all, no matter how minor.
   Constant’s greatest innovation is not what his character thinks about, but
how the character thinks. In his moments of intense reflection, Adolphe pur-
sues every logical possibility (Ellénore loves him; she does not love him and
never has; she did but no longer does; etc.). But Adolphe’s reflection is incon-
clusive—even when it leads to a judgment—because he never fails to turn
back upon himself and question what he has decided. Especially in moments
of crisis, the young Adolphe (unlike the older narrator) cycles through the
same worries without putting any of them to rest. He does not know how
he feels, or how others feel. He does not know what to do about his uncer-
tain feelings; he even wonders how to decide what to do and feel. To illustrate
the extent of this paralysis, I will look at two celebrated moments of crisis, in
which the character makes a major decision, although both of these decisions
are later revisited. In the first, Adolphe is convinced to leave his mistress Ellé-
nore by the baron de T***, a family friend who worries about the young man’s
reputation. In the second, he steels himself to stay with her, despite what it
will cost him in standing.16

   imagining the results: adolphe’s
   “rêverie” of the ideal woman
Adolphe has no fixed narrative to put in place of his father’s duty-bound story,
nor can he even decide whether he needs a narrative at all. But he often con-
structs imaginary narratives for his life that allow him to make a decision—at
least a temporary one. For instance, in his “rêverie” of a perfect woman, in-
duced by the baron de T**’s questioning of Ellénore’s faithfulness, Adolphe
touches upon all the main sources of his existential worry in rapid succession:

226   Melanie Conroy

Mon âme, fatiguée de ces sentiments amers, chercha tout à coup un re-
  fuge dans des sentiments contraires. Quelques mots, prononcés au ha-
  sard par le baron de T** sur la possibilité d’une alliance douce et pai-
  sible, me servirent à me créer l’idéal d’une compagnonne. Je réfléchis
  au repos, à la considération, à l’indépendance même que m’offrirait un
  sort pareil; car les liens que je traînais depuis si longtemps me rendaient
  plus dépendant mille fois que n’aurait pu le faire une union reconnue
  et constatée. J’imaginais la joie de mon père; j’éprouvais un désir im-
  patient de reprendre dans ma patrie et dans la société de mes égaux la
  place qui m’était due; je me représentais opposant une conduite austère
  et irréprochable à tous les jugements qu’une malignité froide et frivole
  avait prononcés contre moi, à tous les reproches dont m’accablait Ellé-
  nore. (155–56)
In passages such as this one, we are presented with Adolphe’s thoughts, feel-
ings and imaginings one at a time, in clear though slightly overwrought prose.
Even when he resolves himself to a course of action (as he does here, elect-
ing to leave Ellénore), the painful weight of his hesitation stays with us. How
Adolphe decides is more important to the impact of the novel than what he
decides because he passes most of his time deciding and not living with his
decisions.
   The emotional power of such paragraphs derives from the cascading syn-
tax, which adds one contradictory thought to the last without working them
through rationally. First Adolphe thinks of his current emotions, then “les
sentiments contraires”: he quickly moves from his future to his father’s po-
tential feelings to what would become of his place in society, ending with the
decision to leave Ellénore, a decision which he soon regrets. These judgments
appear as conventional as could be, as do his reasons for preferring the “ideal”
woman. The rapidity with which he cycles through judgments suggests that
he is simply calling them to mind rather than mulling over each possibility.
In this case, the alternative life that he imagines for himself with this ideal
woman is a return to an earlier desire, his desire to win his father’s approval
by finding a suitable companion. He is reviewing the same territory without
making any progress, rather than weighing alternatives.
   Adolphe’s language follows his mercurial emotions. Even when it builds
to a crescendo, another shift in perspective cannot be far off. More worry-
ingly still, it embeds multiple points of view without synthesizing them. He
explains himself sentimentally, giving emotional motivations for the shifts
of perspective: “Mon âme, fatiguée de ces sentiments amers, chercha tout à
coup un refuge dans des sentiments contraires”; “Je réfléchis au repos, à la
considération, à l’indépendance même . . . ”; “J’imaginais la joie de mon père”;

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3 & 4 spring–summer 2012   227

“j’éprouvais un désir impatient de reprendre dans ma patrie. . . .” The decision
which Adolphe makes to leave Ellénore begins with the suggestion of the bar-
on de T***, but it quickly develops along totally autonomous lines. His ability
to conform to his father’s desires and forget about his feelings for Ellénore de-
pends upon his belief in the possibility of “une union reconnue et constatée,”
with a companion who would approach the ideal which he attributes to his
father and to good society.
    This ideal companion only exists in Adolphe’s mind, and then only to un-
dermine Ellénore’s very real claims upon him. She has an essentially logical
function, as the ultimate counter-example to Ellénore, the personification
of everything that Ellénore is not. The reverie’s function is to suggest a new
course of action (finding a woman who pleases him and his father), which
may or may not be realistic and which makes leaving Ellénore a means to an
end.17 This imaginary course of action located in the past pushes the plot for-
ward as though it were out of his control and without resolving the question
of Ellénore’s character and how he should evaluate it. It also lets Adolphe put
off the question of his feelings for Ellénore yet again. When staying with her
seems too hard or potentially embarrassing, he creates other possible realities.
Here he imagines a past reality, an alternate history whose logical function is
to efface the commitments that he has made in the present.
    This pattern is typical of Adolphe’s reasoning when he sets out to resolve
a problem by imagining consequences. Like anyone else, he needs to imag-
ine other lives for himself to decide which would most appeal (with Ellénore,
with another women, or alone). Since he does not work out a way of dis-
criminating between these possible lives, he merely moves from one alternate
reality to the next, usually choosing the one that lets him avoid a more conse-
quential decision. He bets everything on the end result of his actions: if only
he finds the right woman, his father and his community will respect him; he
will be successful; he will at last feel perfectly at ease and contented. But rather
than making a good faith attempt to imagine his life as it really will be, Adol-
phe uses an idealized version of events to justify a potentially immoral act in
the present. In short, he uses the multiple possibilities to avoid committing to
any one course of action.18

   proceeding from abstract principles:
   adolphe on ellénore
Adolphe’s method of rumination does not allow him to come to any firm con-
clusions about himself and his own thoughts. But his inconsistency in judg-
ing others adds another layer to his uncertainty, which is especially apparent
when Adolphe is confronted with new information or a new perspective. After

228   Melanie Conroy

Ellénore’s separation from the comte de P***, her protector and his main rival
for her affections, he questions her motives and her character, tossing out ar-
bitrary judgments, sometimes in her favor, sometimes not. He begins with le
public’s almost universally negative opinion:
   La séparation d’Ellénore et du comte de P*** produisit dans le public
   un effet qu’il n’était pas difficile de prévoir. Ellénore perdit en un instant
   le fruit de dix années de dévouement et de constance: on la confondit
   avec toutes les femmes de sa classe qui se livrent sans scrupule à mille
   inclinations successives. L’abandon de ses enfants la fit regarder comme
   une mère dénaturée, et les femmes d’une réputation irréprochable répé-
   tèrent avec satisfaction que l’oubli de la vertu la plus essentielle à leur
   sexe s’étendait bientôt sur toutes les autres. (138)
All of his opinions are dependent upon what he imagines to be the reactions
of others, the social consequences of her act (not, one might add, the moral
consequences for her children, but nevertheless the consequences), but Adol-
phe refuses to submit to the nearly unanimous verdict, that Ellénore and
Adolphe have transgressed the laws of hospitality and deprived the children
of their mother:
   On vit dans ma conduite celle d’un séducteur, d’un ingrat qui avait vio-
   lé l’hospitalité, et sacrifié, pour contenter une fantaisie momentanée, le
   repos de deux personnes, dont il aurait dû respecter l’une et ménager
   l’autre. Quelques amis de mon père m’adressèrent des représentations
   sérieuses; d’autres, moins libres avec moi, me firent sentir leur désap-
   probation par des insinuations détournées. (138)
We might quibble on moral grounds with Adolphe’s vain attention to what
others think, but this vanity is not the cause of his confusion. Rather, it is his
incessant need to examine every issue from at least two sides that makes the
act inscrutable.
   The “effet qu’il n’était pas difficile de prévoir” becomes very unpredictable
indeed when considered from contrary points of view, each of which Adolphe
cannot help but agree with, at least in part:
   Les jeunes gens, au contraire, se montrèrent enchantés de l’adresse avec
   laquelle j’avais supplanté le comte; et, par mille plaisanteries que je vou-
   lais en vain réprimer, ils me félicitèrent de ma conquête et me promirent
   de m’imiter. (138)
Le public and les jeunes gens may have real corollaries in the world of the novel,
but the fact that Adolphe always finds opposed parties suggests that he seeks
them out. The opinions of les jeunes gens and le public are presented as per-

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3 & 4 spring–summer 2012   229

sonifications of logical possibilities, as links in a dialectical chain of opinions,
which largely cancel each other out. It is this dialectical manner of thinking
which assures that he will never resolve the perspectives into a coherent whole.
How should Adolphe see himself? How should he see Ellénore? The opinions
of others—much like traits of the imaginary woman—are selected and ar-
ranged as a series of arguments and counterarguments which recur in the same
scene and throughout the novel, creating the torpor that makes Adolphe’s way
of thinking so singularly exasperating. The source of his weakness and uncer-
tainty is his inability to choose between or synthesize these opposites. Both this
and logic assure that Adolphe will never arrive at a stable judgment.
   Throughout this scene, Adolphe betrays the casuistry with which he applies
general principles to particular situations. He has previously accused Ellénore
of a need for social stability, claiming that her fickleness derived from her pre-
carious social position: the gap between her ideas and her role as the lover of
the comte de P*** “avait rendu son humeur fort inégale” (117). In the previ-
ous scene, he has, likewise, shown her to be a liar, albeit an incompetent one
who is forced into the act. After Ellénore decides to leave the comte and give
up what little social standing she had, he says “Elle chercha de mille manières
à me persuader qu’elle serait heureuse” but “Il était visible qu’elle se faisait un
grand effort, et qu’elle ne croyait qu’à moitié ce qu’elle me disait” (137).19 Now,
he decries public speculation apropos of his affair with Ellénore, complain-
ing that she “perdit en un instant le fruit de dix années de dévouement et de
constance” (138). The suddenness of this reversal of fortunes sets off a chain
of self-contradictory comments. In the same vein as his earlier lamentation
that “on la [Ellénore] confondit avec toutes les femmes de sa classe,” Adolphe
complains that “L’abandon de ses enfants la fit regarder comme une mère dé-
naturée” (138). Adolphe has trouble deciding when dishonesty hides a deeper
honesty and when it is just dishonesty. Both complaints reveal his doubt that
abstract principles apply not to particular situations in general, but to this
particular situation, in which his feelings tell him otherwise.
   Even when he has full knowledge of Ellénore’s actions, Adolphe avoids the
most obvious interpretation, which is that her actions are like those of the
other “femmes ruinées” of her class. Adolphe that Ellénore is not one of them,
but does not, however, question the existence of abstract principles applicable
in other situations.20 He continues to imply that there are certain context-in-
dependent rules, such as “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and “Thou shalt
not abandon thy offspring,” which should be respected. Some of society’s
rules are just, and there are women “de sa classe” who should be condemned
for cheating on their husbands or leaving their children. In this scene in par-
ticular, Adolphe remains stuck in a moralistic framework which refers to ab-
solutes that are not really operative in his judgments. He has no principles

230   Melanie Conroy

which would tell him when a woman has abandoned her children unjustly
and when she could not have done otherwise.

   retrospection and self-justification
These two examples show that Adolphe errs whether he uses predictive sto-
ries or moral rules to judge his situation and decide upon a future course of
action. In both cases, he refuses to accept the obvious: that what he and Ellé-
nore are doing does not fit with his moral thinking. In the case of his persis-
tent fantasy of finding a companion who would please his father, the fantasy
seems to offer him the potential to transform himself and his interpretation
of his own actions, to make peace with his father and become the successful
libertine that his father wanted him to be. This imagined possibility would
allow for a moral transformation, a new life just beyond the horizon of his
“dissipated” existence, which would not require him to resolve his current di-
lemma. The mirage of the ideal woman tempts him with its suggestion of a
comfortable, easy future, which would be seamlessly tied to his past, including
his childhood. But how he uses this fantasy is problematic. The image of the
ideal companion stirs up hitherto non-existent feelings of nostalgia and a de-
sire for social propriety. It also reassures him as he betrays his true attachment
to Ellénore. At no point does he need to re-examine the ethical underpinnings
of the decision: his ability to imagine a new life for himself is all that he needs
to steel himself against Ellénore’s demands.
   Adolphe’s fantasy of marrying a more appropriate woman reshapes his
previous life effortlessly to fit the happy ending, making his relationship with
Ellénore of merely passing interest, just as his father had wanted. It covers
over his hypocrisy in judging Ellénore for “crimes” in which he was complicit
and makes his leaving her a foregone conclusion. This is where Adolphe’s ju-
ridical reasoning—his tendency to see both sides of an argument—becomes
truly dangerous. Since he can see Ellénore as a fallen woman or the victim of
society, he appeals first to one judgment and then another: she is innocent
when she leaves the comte de P*** for him, but guilty after he tires of her.
Since Adolphe has no means of deciding in situ whether his actions are moral
or immoral, he judges Ellénore according to changing moral laws. Without
reexamining the rules that he believes women should live by, he arbitrarily
absolves her for leaving the comte de P***, condemns her later, and then ab-
solves her again when she becomes ill.
   As a novel, Adolphe gives the reader a similar advantage vis-à-vis the char-
acter. We have a view of the whole, which differs markedly from the young
Adolphe’s limited perspective. The retrospective character of narration per-
mits closure and certainty about past actions, but this closure is only possible

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3 & 4 spring–summer 2012   231

through narration. Ellénore’s tragic death gives the reader an essential bit of
information which reshapes the whole: she is dead and proven to have really
loved Adolphe, whose uncertainty was, therefore, in vain. The reader is there-
by free to judge the young Adolphe based on the outcome of his actions. But
there is no indication that he has enhanced his decision-making capacities in
the course of the story or his reflection on it.
   As readers, we can watch Adolphe as he struggles through his disastrous
affair, and then judge him based on the conclusion, as if it were implicit in
the beginning. Yet if we read Adolphe with sympathy as well as with critical
distance, we see that there is no way for the young Adolphe to know what the
consequences of his actions will be. Moral laws are difficult to apply, as he
demonstrates in his condemnations and absolutions of Ellénore. The prob-
lems raised by the novel are only partially resolved. Whatever aesthetic closure
her death provides, the moral rules that we have learned will be useless in fu-
ture situations unless our judgment is a great deal more confident and careful
than his. Despite his relative confidence, the older Adolphe cannot tell us how
to make decisions in the future, as he has achieved moral autonomy only by
claiming powers of judgment which are all but useless in everyday life.

  conclusion
Adolphe immerses the reader in the problem of ethical decision-making out-
side of a guiding tradition. The young Adolphe cannot live the life of the en-
titled minister that his father has planned for him. Once he has begun the
affair with Ellénore, he cannot easily end it. In both cases, his moral compass
tells him what not to do, but it does not tell him what he should do. In the
two scenes that this article has examined most closely, Adolphe cycles through
worries about his moral propriety, Ellénore’s faithfulness, and even his own
thought process. The retrospective nature of the narration allows him to im-
pose a certain degree of clarity on his decisions. But we are given no indi-
cation that he has gained in decision-making capacities. It is only through
hindsight that he can see how his hesitation led to Ellénore’s death. The time-
bound and retrospective character of narration allows, therefore, for closure
and certainty about past actions, but this remains a fictive closure insofar as
it is only possible through narration. Adolphe has achieved moral autonomy
only by claiming powers of judgment which are all but useless in everyday life.
    What then does Adolphe have to do with Constant’s philosophical preoc-
cupations? Why did Constant opt to write a novel exploring his worries about
moral reasoning rather than a treatise? The novel is an ideal form for explor-
ing the psychological effects of what Constant considered to be cold, abstract
logic. As the author wrote in a letter of December 23rd, 1794 to Isabelle de

232   Melanie Conroy

Charrière, “Le devoir ou le bien moral doit être absolument étranger aux cir-
constances et aux calculs [. . .]. Mais une idée abstraite, isolée, indépendante,
inflexible et immuable est-elle propre à être mise en usage parmi les hommes?
Ceci ne fait rien contre l’idée mais beaucoup contre les hommes” (511). Adol-
phe, like most of us, is not savvy enough to make use of the “principes inter-
médiaires” that Constant found to be philosophically necessary to bridge the
gap between abstract logic and everyday life. Nor can he can jettison abstract
principles and embrace spontaneity entirely. Constant’s debate with Kant
shows that Adolphe’s hesitation is rational, even if it is not productive.
   For all his weaknesses, Adolphe is not guilty of acting without reflection.
Indeed, the young Adolphe reflects too much and in a disorganized way: he
tries to imagine and evaluate the consequences of all his actions before he
executes them. His hesitation is, for Constant, the inevitable effect of trying
to apply Kant’s philosophy to everyday life without the intermediary prin-
ciples which would tell us how to apply absolute moral laws. At the start of the
novel, the moral norms which usually assure that a young person knows how
to act in a traditional society have broken down. When Adolphe rejects his
father’s guidance, he is forced to choose between embracing spontaneity and
trying to live morally. For Adolphe, living morally means being consistent and
avoiding harming others. In order to do both, he would have to come up with
rules to regulate his own behavior and predict the consequences of his actions.
Of course, Adolphe never makes this choice between spontaneity and moral
behavior, or there would be no novel. Instead, he oscillates between hesitat-
ing and condemning his hesitation as morally suspect. Adolphe’s reluctance
to apply either of these moral frameworks can be seen as a sign of intellectual
weakness, to be sure, but it is also a sign of his desire to live authentically.

   Department of French and Italian
   Stanford University

   notes
   1. According to Dennis Wood, many critics have followed Sainte-Beuve’s suggestion
and seen Ellénore as a composite of two or more of these women (157–79). Other early
candidates for the role of Ellénore include Isabelle de Charrière, a longtime friend—
but probably not lover—of Constant (86–87). Wood sees the most likely single model
as Anna Lindsay, the Irish royalist and mistress of Auguste de Lamoignon (173).
   2. For Sainte-Beuve, Constant was an “esprit aiguisé, blasé, singulièrement flétri de
bonne heure” (1047), and Adolphe is a “petit chef-d’œuvre” which brings together “art
et vérité” (1052). Constant mocked himself and others with “une sorte d’ironie fine,
continuelle, insaisissable, qui allait à dessécher les sentiments et les affections en lui et

           Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3 & 4 spring–summer 2012           233

autour de lui” (1047–48); and as an “[i]ntelligence supérieure,” he managed to portray
“les impressions intérieures les plus fugitives et les plus contradictoires” (1048).
    3. In the third preface, Constant insists that he wrote the novel to convince “deux
ou trois amis réunis à la campagne de la possibilité de donner une sorte d’intérêt à un
roman dont les personnages se réduisaient à deux, et dont la situation serait toujours
la même” (103).
    4. Although Pierre Deguise’s Constant méconnu was the turning point for the
Constant revival in the Francophone world, Alison Fairlie’s work, especially her 1967
essay “The Art of Constant’s Adolphe: The Stylization of Experience,” was more deci-
sive in the English-speaking academy. Contrasting similar passages, Fairlie demons-
trated the stylistic differences between Adolphe and Constant’s Journaux intimes to
show that Adolphe was indeed more a conscious literary creation than an anecdote.
    5. For a detailed overview focusing on political philosophy and religious history,
see Rosenblatt.
    6. Todorov and Russo show that Adolphe is more the expression of a skeptical
mind than a tortured soul. Both posit a complex, highly abstract relationship between
Adolphe and Constant’s philosophy, abjuring the route of direct representation. To-
dorov argues that “Il y a quelque chose d’excessif et de singulier dans ce personnage
d’Adolphe, qui observe de lui-même ‘je n’étais soutenu par aucune impulsion qui par-
tît du cœur’ [. . .]; même Constant, un individu extrêmement susceptible, n’est pas
aussi absent qu’Adolphe” (121). Russo claims that Adolphe does not directly critique a
particular society (79), but rather the corrosive effect of a materialist understanding of
language upon society and socialization.
    7. Patrick Coleman writes, “That Constant saw a close relationship between his lite-
rary and his political writing is evident from the title of his Mélanges de littérature et de
politique, published in 1829, one year before his death. It is also evident from the way
Constant structured this collection, which became his intellectual testament” (225).
    8. This pamphlet, De la force du government actuel de la France et de la nécéssité de
s’y rallier, was Constant’s effort, as a moderate, to rally other moderates back to the
cause of the Republic after the end of the Terror.
    9. In Des réactions politiques (1796), Constant argues that chaos would result from
the application of absolute principles without any “principes intermédiares,” interme-
diary principles which would tell us how to decide between absolute laws that conflict
with one another. These primary principles would wreak havoc on society and on
individuals:
    [U]n principe premier, séparé de tous les principes intermédiaires qui le font
    descendre jusqu’à nous, et l’approprient à notre situation, l’on produit sans
    doute un grand désordre; car le principe arraché à tous ses entours, dénué de
    tous ses appuis, environné de choses qui lui sont contraires, détruit et boule-
    verse: mais ce n’est pas la faute du principe premier qui est adopté, c’est celle
    des principes intermédiaires qui sont inconnus: ce n’est pas son admission, c’est
    leur ignorance qui plonge tout dans le chaos. (491)

234    Melanie Conroy

10. Again, from Des réactions politiques: “Toutes les fois qu’un principe, démon-
tré vrai, paraît inapplicable, c’est que nous ignorons le principe intermédiaire qui
contient le moyen d’application” (493).
    11. This complete spontaneity, which Constant calls “l’arbitraire,” was historically
the birthright of sovereigns and tyrants, but was becoming a more general problem.
See Des réactions politiques, Chapitre IX, “De l’arbitraire”: “L’arbitraire, qui a des effets
très-positifs, est pourtant une chose négative: c’est l’absence des règles, des limites,
des définitions, en un mot, l’absence de tout ce qui est précis. [. . .] Or, comme les
règles, les limites, les définitions sont des choses incommodes et fatigantes, on peut
fort bien vouloir secouer leur joug, et tomber ainsi dans l’arbitraire, sans s’en douter”
(496). Constant develops this idea further in De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation
(604–16).
    12. In the debate with Kant, Constant takes issue with Kant’s rewriting of an Augus-
tinian moral dilemma, beginning with chapter VIII, “Des principes,” of Des réactions
politiques (490–93). In the classic problem, a man must decide whether to reveal the
whereabouts of a friend who is hiding in his house to a man who intends to kill that
friend. Kant, who thoroughly dissects the problem and provides numerous counter-
narratives, (somewhat implausibly) denies that we can predict what will occur; we are,
therefore, responsible only for own actions judged according to fixed laws. Constant,
on the other hand, assumes that the moralistic, Augustinian narrative will hold true
(that the murderer will kill the friend) and then alters his principles to fit that nar-
rative: one is right to lie because it saves one’s friend. Also see Kant’s On a Supposed
Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns (passim).
    13. In the passage of Des réactions politiques that Kant quotes, Constant writes “Dire
la vérité est un devoir. Qu’est-ce qu’un devoir? L’idée de devoir est inséperable de celle
de droits: un devoir est ce qui, dans un être, correspond aux droits d’un autre. Là où
il n’y a pas de droits, il n’y a pas de devoirs. Dire la vérité n’est donc pas un devoir
qu’envers ceux qui ont droit à la vérité. Or nul homme n’a droit à une vérité qui nuit à
autrui” (494). Kant, for his point, counters that “Truthfulness in statements that can-
not be avoided is the formal duty of man to everyone” (64). For further discussion of
this debate see Boituzat (passim), and Holmes (107–09).
    14. The split between consequentialists, often utilitarians like John Stuart Mill, and
deontologists like Kant is the most significant split in modern ethical theory. Although
Constant clearly sets himself on the consequentialist side in his debate with Kant,
which was conducted in writing, he has a premonition of later arguments against this
stance. The practical difficulties are much more fully elaborated in the twentieth cen-
tury by philosophers like G. E. M. Anscombe and Bernard Williams. For a thorough
critique of consequentialism, see Williams.
    15. Margaret Waller sees this rejection of libertinism as central to the plot of the
novel:
    Constant not only attacks libertinism as morally bankrupt, but also asserts that
    it is unworkable. Although a decadent society corrupts and represses men’s ten-

           Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3 & 4 spring–summer 2012           235

derness and empathy, Constant argues, when a man sees the consequences of his
    dissimulation on the face of the women he has seduced and plans to abandon,
    his natural sensibility is necessarily called to the surface. (96)
    Paul Delbouille, for his part, warns against reading too much into Adolphe’s dis-
course on liberty. Delbouille notes that there are many varied uses of the word “liber-
té” in the novel and that we should be wary of any attempt to find one concept, much
less a coherent theory of freedom or libertinism (220–21).
    16. I’ve chosen to treat these examples in reverse chronological order because the
second is more complex than the first and Adolphe’s logic evolves very little before the
final chapters.
    17. Adolphe later notices what the function of this ideal woman has been in his
imagination; she helps him recall the joys of his childhood in “l’antique château”
where he lived with his father: “elle rattachait ma vie actuelle à cette époque de ma
jeunesse où l’espérance ouvrait devant moi un si vaste avenir, époque dont Ellénore
m’avait séparé comme un abîme” (157).
    18. Adolphe recognizes the absurdity of his idealism, which confuses imagined pos-
sibilities with real ones, when he writes: “Ce n’était pas une seule carrière que je regret-
tais: comme je n’avais essayé d’aucune, je les regrettais toutes. N’ayant jamais employé
mes forces, je les imaginais sans bornes, et je les maudissais” (155).
    19. Even the older Adolphe, who narrates the story, is not free from this tendency
to bend his interpretations to suit the absurdities in the younger Adolphe’s thought.
His moral authority rests on the distance that he places between the younger version
of himself and his current self, yet his pithy maxims often fail to integrate what he
has supposedly learned at the end of the novel: that Ellénore loved him all along. In
this scene, we read that “Dès qu’il existe un secret entre deux cœurs qui s’aiment, dès
que l’un d’eux a pu se résoudre à cacher à l’autre une seule idée, le charme est rompu,
le bonheur est détruit” (139) and “L’emportement, l’injustice, la distraction même, se
réparent; mais la dissimulation jette dans l’amour un élément étranger qui le dénature
et le flétrit à ses propres yeux” (139). These declarations are colored by the emotional
state of the younger Adolphe. The older Adolphe knows that Ellénore is not guilty of
“la dissimulation,” and even the younger one knows (or at least thinks he knows) that
she is hiding nothing but her grief at the loss of her protector and status in society.
    20. Adolphe’s commitment to rules is apparent in his enduring tendency to com-
ment on his own experience in witty maxims. As Margaret Wallace writes, “The mal
du siècle hero’s antilibertine maxims are not, finally, very different from his father’s
(and the society’s) libertine pronouncements. Despite variations in content, they are
all dictated by self-interest (no matter how disguised) and share a similar politics of
form. Reducing complexity to the aphoristic expression of a universals law, these ge-
neralizations dramatize emotional paradoxes in a minimalist social environment de-
void of historical and material causes, consequences, and contexts” (103).

236    Melanie Conroy

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