Duff Cooper, "Talleyrand"

Talleyrand as the Man with Six Heads, 1815

Back when I was in my Napoleon phase I looked up lists of the best books about Napoleon and his era, and this 1932 biography was on most of them. So I ordered a copy. It is elegantly written, judicious, and compresses an extremely eventful life into 300 pages, so if you have any interest in this era I recommend it highly.

But what is one to make of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord?

He was born (in 1754) into one of France's oldest noble families, but a childhood injury left him with a maimed foot and a pronounced limp. Since he was not fit for the army, his parents naturally assigned him to the church. Over his vociferous objections he was sent to France's top seminary and his family then arranged for him to become the Bishop of Autun. Cooper has some excellent paragraphs about the (to us) shocking lack of emotion in Ancien Regime family life, and he finds several other nobles besides Talleyrand who recorded being treated by their parents as nothing more than future agents of their families' aggrandizement. If they received any tenderness as children it was from someone other than their parents, perhaps a grandmother or a nurse.

Already in his 20s Talleyrand was causing scandal. He had no interest in the church and did not bother trying to hide it. He spent all his time in Paris, attending salons where he honed his famous conversational skills, seducing women, and gambling at the card tables and on the stock exchange.

Then came the Revolution. When the Estates General were summoned Talleyrand went back to his bishopric to campaign for a seat in the assembly of the clergy, which he did by publishing a manifesto laying out a reform plan for the French church. The manifesto was well received and between that and his family name he was elected easily. Here we see one of the themes of Talleyrand's life: his desire to always be where the action was. In 1789 the Estates General was the place to be, so he arranged to be there.

In the Estates Talleyrand quickly understood that this was a revolutionary moment. He was not by nature a revolutionary, but although he would have preferred gradual reform he sensed the direction of the wind and joined the revolutionaries by renouncing his clerical privileges in a dramatic speech. He became a leader of the liberal faction in two successive assemblies, and he presided over some of the newfangled rituals the revoutionaries dreamed up to celebrate their new "natural" calendar. But he could never take their enthusiasm seriously; the story goes that while processing across the Champ de Mars for one Revolutionary festival, dressed in red, white, and blue, he turned to the Marquis de Lafayette and said, "Please don't make me laugh."

In those early years of the Revolution Talleyrand formed a philosophy of government that guided him for the rest of his life. He wanted popular participation, but not democracy; he wanted a king to stabilize the system and provide a focus of loyalty; he thought the elite should be recognized. He often argued for a system like the British in having a monarch and two houses of Parliament, the upper house including the "natural leaders" of the realm, but like the American in having a written constituion that would enshrine key liberties such as freedom of speech and assembly. As a man who was most famous for the power of his conversation, which was often radical and scandalous, he always put freedom of speech at the center of his concerns. He was also a proponent of education, authoring a 216 page report laying out a national system which influenced the one put into place by Napoleon.

When the Terror came, Talleyrand fled into exile with many others. In London he found himself in a position he would occupy for the rest of his life: mistrusted by the royalists becaue of his part in the revolution but hated by the revolutionaries because they knew he despised their radicalism, and suspected by everyone of being a spy. He spent some time in America where his gambler's instincts led him to try his hand at land speculation.

After the Terror burned itself out France stumbled into a government called the Directory, which Cooper dismisses by saying "it had only one aim, to insure that those who had gotten rich off the Revolution could keep their profits." Talleyrand joined a group of men conspiring to overthrow it. They considered themselves capable of handling the political side, but they needed a military hero to serve as their front man. And wouldn't you know it, at just the right moment Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Paris from a string of stunning victories in Italy and a glorious defeat in Egypt, desperately eager for more power. With the help of one of his regiments, they arrested the leaders of all the other factions and proclaimed a government called the consulship, with Napoleon as First Consul. In those early days Napoleon still thought he might need advice from others, and he made Talleyrand his foreign minister.

Talleyrand held that post from 1799 to 1808. He respected Napoleon – really, it is hard not to respect Napoleon – but never liked or trusted him. Talleyrand always worked for peace, which to him meant discovering and respecting the essential interests of all the European powers. He took the lead in negotiating the Peace of Amiens in 1802, and tried his best to keep it from breaking down. But Napoleon would not accept Talleyrand's pacific advice and went on the warpath again, destroying the armies of Austria and Russia at Auschwitz (1805) and then those of Prussia at Jena and Auerstadt (1806). After each victory Talleyrand tried to persuade Napoleon to make a generous peace, but Napoleon would not listen and instead imposed punitive terms. After the "peace" imposed on Prussia Talleyrand no longer even tried to work with Napoleon but actively began conpiring against him, while still holding the post of France's foreign minister.

Thus, when the allies finally defeated Napoleon's armies and marched into Paris, Talleyrand was the one man in France they trusted to help them reach a settlement. They had no policy beyond overthrowing Napoleon, no agreement over what kind of government would replace him. Talleyrand, of course, had a plan ready, and he persuaded the allies to accept it: restore the Bourbon dynasty to the throne, but with a written constitution and a powerful assembly elected by universal male sufferage. At first the allied leaders were puzzled; would France really consent to be ruled by a fat, useless old king after the dynamic Napoleon? Yes, Talleyrand answered. And he turned out to be correct; when the first elections were held they returned a solid majority of royalists, who won almost every jurisdiction outside Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon.

Talleyrand's constitution of course included an upper house as well, but France no longer had a nobility. The king would therefore have to create one. He turned to Talleyrand, who drew up a list of sixty names, including both his leading friends and those of his enemies he thought were worth dealing with. (Now there's a great thought experiment: you, like Talleyrand, have somehow ended up having to draw up a list for a new American nobility that would replace the Senate. Who would you choose? And who would you choose from the opposition, as being the people you want to deal with?)

Meanwhile the powers were meeting in the Congress of Vienna to redraw the map of Europe. Talleyrand of course represented France. When he arrived he discovered that the four major allies (Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain) had set things up so they alone would negotiate the terms of the treaty, which would be presented to all the other nations for their approval. Talleyrand roused up all the smaller nations to fury over this and got the allies to admit himself and the Spanish ambassador to their inner circle. From there Talleyrand persuaded the British and Austrian ambassadors that rising Russian and Prussian power threatened their interests, so they needed a strong France to support them; those three nations actually signed a secret defense pact, and as a result France emerged with remarkably lenient terms.

Unfortunately Napoleon undid much of the goodwill Talleyrand had achieved with his return from exile and 100 Days' campaign, and after his defeat France lost Belgium and also much of the art Napoleon had looted across Europe. But Talleyrand had insured that the alliance of all the powers against France would not endure.

Talleyrand was a private citizen for the next 14 years. Toward the end of the 1820s he sensed that the French were getting tired of the increasingly reactionary Bourbon government, and he saw an opening to move France away from monarchical reaction and back toward mixed government. He funded a newspaper that took an anti-Bourbon line and was one of the leading planners of the July Revolution of 1830, which put Louis-Phillipe on the throne with a more liberal constitution.

Just from that career summary you can probably understand why Talleyrand had been so controversial. When he turned against Napoleon, wasn't it his duty to resign his office, rather than remaining in it for two years while he conspired against the government he was part of? It's just one example of the duplicity that his critics hate: he remained bishop while carrying on love affairs and helping to seize all the property of the French church for the government; he presided over Revolutionary ceremonies he thought were ridiculous; he joined governments he despised, so as to undermine them from within; he enriched himself with bribes and insider trading; he was always for peace, but that sometimes meant telling the Poles or the Italians that they would have to wait for their freedom. He put the Bourbons back on the throne and then helped overthrow them.

But from another point of view he was remarkably consistent: always for peace, always for moderation and a mixed constitution, always for free speech and a free press, and also always for his own enrichment and his own amusement.

How does one judge such a person, and such a life?