Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

French diplomat

• Born: February 2, 1754
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 17, 1838
• Place of death: Paris, France

Talleyrand directed the foreign relations of France during a time of changing principles and changing regimes—the Directory, the Consulate, the empire, and the Restoration Monarchy—trying to adjust his French patriotism with the establishment of a stable balance of power that formed the basis of European relations for a century.

Early Life

Talleyrand’s family came from an old and highly distinguished line of sovereign counts, but at the time he was born the family had lost a considerable amount of its former importance. His parents were courtiers whose business, attending the offspring of Louis XV, gave them little time to spend with their most recent addition. Talleyrand was sent to a wet nurse, a poor woman who lived in the Saint-Jacques district. Although such surrogate mothering was a common practice, with Talleyrand it was excessive: The parents did not see their son for the next four years. While he had been in his nurse’s care for only several months, he fell from a chest of drawers, breaking his right foot. The injury did not receive proper medical attention and the bones knit badly, leaving him with a clubfoot. For the rest of his life he was unable to walk without a cane or a brace.

When Talleyrand was three, his older brother died, leaving him heir to the family title and estates. He would have become a soldier, but his injury made this impossible. The family therefore decided to have him forfeit his rights in favor of his younger brother, Archambaud, and become a churchman. After elementary school, he attended the seminary of Saint Sulpice. From there, he went to the Sorbonne, receiving, in 1774, a degree in theology. He took his first vows in April, 1775. Several months later, as the Abbé de Périgord, he attended the royal coronation of Louis XVI at the Cathedral of Rheims.

Talleyrand’s noble lineage gave him entrée to the court and its opportunities. In September, 1775, he was confirmed as the abbot of Saint-Rémy in Rheims, a sinecure that paid him eighteen thousand livres a year. Henceforth, his rise in the church hierarchy was rapid: In 1779, he became a deacon and a priest; in 1880, he became an agent-general of the Assembly of the Clergy to manage ecclesiastical property; in 1789, he became the bishop of Autun. He also managed to pick up other properties in Champagne and Poitou. All of his benefices combined gave the thirty-four-year-old prelate a personal income of about 100,000 livres a year. With such resources he could now live the good life, far from ecclesiastical duties in provincial cities.

In church matters Talleyrand had a reputation as a defender of tradition and privilege, but his private life was otherwise. He preferred to spend his time in Paris, frequenting the salons, conversing with such men as Voltaire, Comte de Mirabeau, and Charles Alexandre de Calonne, and seducing women. His sexual successes were the subject of much gossip, admiration, and amusement.

Despite absenteeism from his official obligations—Talleyrand visited his bishopric only once, for a period of thirty days—he became Autun’s clerical delegate to the meeting of the Estates General held at Versailles in May, 1789. The petition of grievance, or cahier, which he brought with him, and which he helped to write, called for the establishment of local representative government, for the abolition of feudal privilege, and for the creation of a national assembly to curb the power of royal despotism. He favored putting the estates of the Church at the disposition of the nation; when the time came, he provided the rationale for reconciling such expropriation with the sacredness of private property. Talleyrand argued that these church lands had been the property of the nation all along, maintaining the entire body of the faithful in a Catholic land could be the nation itself. His knowledge of Church administration was invaluable in helping to destroy the organization’s power.

Talleyrand also gave legitimacy to the civil constitution of the clergy by celebrating Mass on the Feast of the Federation, July 14, 1790, at the Champ de Mars on the first anniversary of the taking of the Bastille. He helped consecrate recently elected bishops to replace those who had refused to pledge their loyalty to the new order. Shortly afterward, in February, 1791, he renounced his priestly vows and returned to the status of layman, whereupon he was excommunicated by the pope.

Life’s Work

Talleyrand’s first attempt at national diplomacy , a métier that became his main profession the rest of his life, came in 1792. Because of the self-denying ordinance, he was unable to run for election to the new parliament created by the old constituent assembly. Instead, he managed to be sent on a mission to London to try to secure British neutrality in the event of the outbreak of hostilities between France and Austria. The mission was not successful; the British wanted to maintain their free hand as the holder of the balance of power and rejected any commitments. Talleyrand nevertheless continued his diplomatic efforts. He returned to London on two other occasions—in January and May of 1792—but the results were equally disappointing.

At home Talleyrand watched with dismay the increasingly radical direction of politics. During his third visit to the British capital, France was at war with both Austria and Prussia. The early defeats led to the outbreak of domestic violence that led to the September Massacres, which made life dangerous for all men of Talleyrand’s antecedents. With the coming of the Reign of Terror, he fled to Great Britain, then was forced to leave for the United States, where for a time he lived in Philadelphia. He did not like American hospitality. In his opinion the climate was too hot or too cold, there was a dreadful lack of culture, and the food was inedible.

Not until 1796 did he return to France, the new government of the Directory giving him permission. He found that in his absence he had been elected to the newly formed Institute of Arts and Sciences. He renewed old acquaintances, through which he came to the attention of the powerful director, Vicomte Paul de Barras, who had him named minister of foreign affairs in July, 1797. At this time France was in an expansionist mood, believing its destiny lay in extending its boundaries to the Alps and the Rhine and in liberating Europe’s suppressed peoples from the yoke of feudalism and despotism. Its mission was to carry out a crusade for universal freedom.

Such ambitions did not seem unreasonable to nationalists, even though, as long as France was committed to such goals, there would be constant war. None who held high office at this time could have publicly believed otherwise, least of all a minister of foreign affairs. Talleyrand wanted to make France respected and feared, but he believed war to be wasteful and absurd. He wanted to end the current hostilities with Austria and Great Britain, but the victory had to contribute to the stabilization of Europe by not destroying the balance of power. It must also contribute to French prosperity.

To these ends Talleyrand put forth a scheme to establish French preponderance in the eastern Mediterranean by mounting an expedition to Egypt. The Turkish Empire was in dissolution and, by seizing its choicest parts, France could expand its commercial interests and hold bargaining counters to bring about peace with the British. Ever mindful of his own interests, Talleyrand began cultivating a friendship with Napoleon I, who also favored the Egyptian campaign. Both were contemptuous of the current political system that they believed was contributing to French defeat and weakness.

In July, 1799, sensing that the end of the Directory was near, Talleyrand resigned his post and retired to private life. When Napoleon returned from Egypt in October of that year, Talleyrand joined a conspiracy to bring the general to power. For his support, Napoleon made Talleyrand foreign minister. The two seemed to agree on the essentials of French foreign policy and upon the necessity of creating a European equilibrium that could assure the security and prestige of France.

Talleyrand presided over the reorganization of Germany. He helped to arrange compensation for princes dispossessed of their territories on the west bank of the Rhine by giving them church lands in other parts of Germany. These transactions satisfied the time-honored principle of compensations, but they also made Talleyrand tremendously wealthy. In fact, the foreign minister was one of the greediest men of France in an age renowned for corruption. He saw nothing wrong in demanding kickbacks for his services to enable him to live in the style befitting his station. Such venality often made it difficult to ascertain the dividing line between personal and public advantage.

The height of his professionalism undoubtedly came with the signature of the Peace of Amiens, on March 25, 1802. In this treaty the British had to acknowledge effective French control of the Netherlands, Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, and northern Italy. The British, especially in recognizing French power in the lowlands, abandoned a policy that they once regarded as essential for their security. Thus, after a decade of wars, France emerged as the most powerful state in Europe. Talleyrand boasted that his country now enjoyed such power, glory, and influence that even the most ambitious person could desire nothing more for his country.

Napoleon, however, was not the sort of master ever to be satisfied. While his foreign minister struggled to make the Peace of Amiens the basis of a new European equilibrium, Napoleon was planning ever larger conquests. Relations between the two men began to chill, but Talleyrand continued to share in Napoleon’s glory. He could be an embarrassingly servile sycophant when it suited his purposes. When it at last became obvious that Talleyrand could no longer reconcile his sense of moderation and longing for personal survival with such a willful conqueror, he resigned. This event occurred in 1807, after the signing of the Treaty of Tilsit with Russia that recognized the division of Europe into two spheres: the Russian in the East and the French in the West. Talleyrand, having accumulated sufficient worldly goods to live in royal style—he was the master of the vast feudal estate of Valençay and of a superb town house in Paris on the Place de la Concorde—became the reigning prince of Benevento but again left before the fall of a regime.

Napoleon was vexed at his minister’s desertion but continued to use him for special tasks. In these tasks Talleyrand proved less than reliable. At the summit conference at Erfurt with Alexander I, Talleyrand secretly urged the Russian czar to stand firm and not let Napoleon destroy Austria. After helping Napoleon arrange the overthrow of the Spanish Bourbons, Talleyrand turned against the venture and conspired with Police Minister Joseph Fouché to have Napoleon overthrown, replacing him with Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat. Napoleon discovered who was behind the scheme and denounced Talleyrand, on January 28, 1809, before a restricted meeting of the council of state.

Talleyrand lived in retirement until 1814, when, with the Napoleonic empire in ruins, he helped arrange the Bourbon Restoration. Talleyrand insisted that this be conditional upon the establishment of constitutional government. Talleyrand again became minister of foreign affairs. He was largely responsible for the Treaty of Paris, which concluded peace between France and the allies. He was also the principal French representative at the Congress of Vienna—arranged by the British, Russians, Prussians, and Austrians— which restored an equilibrium to a Europe ravaged by a quarter of a century of war.

Talleyrand retired once more, this time unwillingly, in September, 1815. Fifteen years later, however, with the advent of the July Monarchy, he was again offered the foreign ministry. He chose instead to go to London as an ambassador. He stayed in this post the next four years, participating in the negotiations that established an independent Belgium. In his long career he had served under seven different regimes and had intrigued against more than half of them; as he later noted, however, these betrayals had the support of a majority of his fellow countrymen. Upon his deathbed, he insisted that he receive extreme unction on the knuckles of his clenched fists rather than on his palms as befitting a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church.

Significance

Talleyrand embraced the assumptions existent since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that foreign policy was essentially nonideological and that states could preserve their independence by preserving a proper balance of power. This moderate approach made him favor creating an entente with the entrenched powers against the revisionist powers, which meant assisting Great Britain and Austria curb Russia and Prussia, as he did at the Congress of Vienna. He characteristically exaggerated his role at that summit meeting, but his performance there was consistent with the principles by which he believed the affairs of nations should be conducted. He told the representatives of the great powers:

The first need of Europe is to banish forever the opinion that right can be acquired by conquest alone, and to cause the revival of that sacred principle of legitimacy from which all order and stability spring.

Through skillful exploitation of the differences among the allies, Talleyrand managed to put France on a more equal footing with them, helping to increase the respectability of the French monarchy as a force for order, moderation, and conservatism.

Although frequently vilified for his material and sexual excesses, Talleyrand is a Freudian’s delight with his loveless mother, his disinheritance, and his love-hate relationship with Catholicism. Talleyrand stands forth as the quintessential diplomat, one who realized that international politics is the art of the possible. He realized, too, that national security is not dependent on the survival of the fittest but on the mutual acceptance by great powers of their limitations and on the need to temper their rivalries and ambitions to preserve the security of one another.

Bibliography

Brinton, Crane. The Lives of Talleyrand. New York: W. W. Norton, 1936. If Brinton’s biography were not so engaging, intelligent, and analytically erudite, it would be dismissed as a rank apology. Indeed, Brinton seems to go out of his way to make allowances for Talleyrand, but his presentation of Talleyrand as the consummate moderate diplomat is nevertheless convincing.

Cooper, Duff. Talleyrand. New York: Harper & Row, 1932. This Tory politician makes no great discourse on Talleyrand’s skills or vices, presenting him simply as an eminently sensible Frenchman, a practical, peace-loving man free from the vice of nationalism and horrified by the spirit of conquest—in a sense, one of the first Europeans.

Dwyer, Philip G. Talleyrand. London: Longman, 2002. Dwyer portrays Talleyrand as a pragmatic politician who was willing to mediate between various factions to achieve a compromise. Part of the Profiles in Power series.

Ferrero, Guglielmo. The Reconstruction of Europe: Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna, 1814-1815. Translated by Theodore R. Jaeckel. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941. Ferrero credits three men with the creation of a new and stable order out of the ruins of the Napoleonic empire: Czar Alexander I, King Louis XVIII, and Talleyrand, who “seems to have the right of precedence over all the statesmen who have appeared in the Western world since the Revolution.” Ferrero attributes Talleyrand’s predisposition to revolt against all regimes and powers to the childhood accident that left him disabled.

Greenbaum, Louis S. Talleyrand, Statesman and Priest: The Agent-General of the Clergy and the Church of France at the End of the Old Regime. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1970. Primarily an examination of the administrative history of the French Catholic Church in the last third of the eighteenth century. Greenbaum also shows how such an organization became the school for statesmanship in forging the political career of Talleyrand.

Orieux, Jean. Talleyrand: The Art of Survival. Translated by Patricia Wolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. Comprehensive treatment that borrows heavily from the definitive biography in French by Georges Lacour-Gayet. Written in a catechistic style, the work portrays Talleyrand as a great custodian and transmitter of civilization, one “ever willing to meet the demands of the future for the sake of survival and the preservation of mankind’s achievement.”

Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de. Memoirs of the Prince de Talleyrand. Edited by the Duc de Broglie. Translated by Raphaël Ledos de Beaufort and Mrs. Angus Hall. 5 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891-1892. A standard primary source. The first two volumes are somewhat sketchy in documentation. There is some compensation in the fullness of the official correspondence concerning the Congress of Vienna and the London Conference.