Talleyrand

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord was born in Paris on 2 February 1754 into one of the oldest noble families of France, a house that traced its lineage to the medieval counts of Perigord ^[1]. His parents held positions at court but had little money and less time for their son, who was placed with a wet nurse and later with his great-grandmother in the countryside. A deformity of the foot, whether congenital or the result of a childhood accident (accounts differ, and Talleyrand's own memoirs are not reliable on the point), left him with a lifelong limp and closed off the military career expected of an eldest son of his rank ^[2].

His family redirected him toward the Church, the standard alternative for aristocratic sons unfit for the army. He studied at the College d'Harcourt in Paris and then at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, where by his own later admission he felt no religious vocation whatsoever ^[1]. What the seminary did give him was an education in reading people, managing patrons, and waiting for opportunity. He was ordained a priest in 1779, and family influence secured his rapid advancement.

In 1788, King Louis XVI appointed him Bishop of Autun in Burgundy. Talleyrand spent barely a month in his diocese, but the position carried income, status, and, crucially, a seat when the king summoned the Estates-General the following year ^[3]. The clergy of Autun elected him their deputy, sending a thirty-five-year-old bishop with worldly tastes and empty pockets into the assembly that would dismantle the old France.

The Revolution made Talleyrand's name. Anyone asking who was Talleyrand in 1789 would have heard of an ambitious cleric; by 1791 they would have heard of the bishop who helped nationalize the Church's property. In October 1789 he proposed to the National Assembly that ecclesiastical lands be placed at the disposal of the nation to rescue state finances, a motion of enormous consequence coming from a bishop ^[3]. He went further, celebrating the Mass at the Festival of the Federation in July 1790 and consecrating the first constitutional bishops in defiance of Rome. Pope Pius VI excommunicated him in 1791, and Talleyrand resigned his see without visible regret ^[1].

As the Revolution radicalized, he read the danger early. Sent to London in 1792 on informal diplomatic missions, he was abroad when the monarchy fell, and the Convention soon issued a warrant against him after compromising papers surfaced in the king's confiscated correspondence ^[2]. Expelled from Britain in 1794 under the Aliens Act, he crossed the Atlantic and spent two years in the United States, mostly in Philadelphia, supporting himself through land speculation and commercial ventures while the Terror consumed many of his former colleagues ^[4].

He returned to France in 1796 after the fall of Robespierre, aided by friends who lobbied for the removal of his name from the emigre lists. Through the influence of Madame de Stael and his own careful networking, he was named foreign minister of the Directory in July 1797 ^[3]. It was the beginning of a hold on French foreign policy that would persist, with interruptions, for a quarter of a century.

Talleyrand's partnership with Napoleon Bonaparte defined the central chapter of his career. He supported the coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799 that brought the young general to power, and served as foreign minister of the Consulate and then the Empire until 1807 ^[1]. He helped negotiate the treaties that punctuated Napoleon's early victories, including the Treaty of Luneville with Austria in 1801 and the Treaty of Amiens with Britain in 1802, and he grew immensely rich in the process, taking payments from foreign governments on a scale that was notorious even by the standards of the era ^[2].

The most debated of Talleyrand facts is his conduct after 1807. Convinced that Napoleon's endless wars would destroy France, he resigned the foreign ministry, though he retained the dignity of Grand Chamberlain and the title Prince of Benevento. At the Congress of Erfurt in 1808 he secretly advised Tsar Alexander I to resist Napoleon's demands, an act his defenders frame as loyalty to France over its ruler and his critics call plain treason ^[5]. Napoleon, learning of intrigues in 1809, subjected him to a furious public dressing-down, reportedly calling him filth in a silk stocking, yet never prosecuted him.

When the allied armies entered Paris in 1814, Talleyrand was ready. He persuaded Alexander I that only a Bourbon restoration could stabilize France, headed the provisional government, and helped draft the terms under which Louis XVIII returned ^[3]. Then came the achievement on which any account of Talleyrand achievements must rest: the Congress of Vienna. Representing a defeated power, he exploited divisions among the victors, invoked the principle of legitimacy, and maneuvered France into a secret defensive alliance with Britain and Austria in January 1815 against Prussia and Russia. France, which might have been carved up, emerged with its 1792 borders essentially intact and its seat at the table of great powers restored ^[5].

Talleyrand's private life scandalized contemporaries and has entertained biographers ever since. As a bishop and afterward he kept mistresses openly, and his salons in Paris were famous for their cuisine, their conversation, and their gambling. His chef Antonin Careme, the most celebrated cook of the age, worked in his household, and Talleyrand treated the dinner table as an instrument of diplomacy as serious as any treaty draft ^[4].

In 1802, under pressure from Napoleon to regularize his situation, he married Catherine Grand, a divorced woman born in India to French parents, with whom he had been living for several years. The marriage required a complicated papal accommodation, since Talleyrand remained a bishop in the eyes of canon law even after laicization, and it was never happy. The couple separated in practice long before her death in 1835 ^[2].

The great attachment of his final decades was his relationship with Dorothea, Duchess of Dino, the wife of his nephew. She managed his household from the Vienna congress onward, accompanied him to his last embassy, and stayed at his side until his death. Whether the bond was romantic has been argued for two centuries; what is certain is that she was the most important person in his later life ^[6]. He had no legitimate children, though several illegitimate offspring have been attributed to him, including, on contested evidence, the painter Eugene Delacroix.

The restored Bourbons rewarded Talleyrand and then discarded him. He served briefly as president of the council of ministers in 1815, but the ultra-royalists distrusted the ex-revolutionary bishop, and he resigned in September of that year. For fifteen years he held the largely ceremonial post of Grand Chamberlain, cultivated his estate at Valencay, wrote his memoirs, and delivered occasional barbed speeches in the Chamber of Peers criticizing press censorship and reactionary policy ^[3].

The July Revolution of 1830 brought him back one final time. King Louis-Philippe, whose accession Talleyrand had quietly encouraged, appointed the seventy-six-year-old prince ambassador to London. There, between 1830 and 1834, he helped negotiate the international settlement recognizing Belgian independence and neutrality, working closely with the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston at the London Conference ^[5]. It was skilled, patient work, and it anchored the new French regime in a partnership with Britain rather than isolation.

He retired in 1834 and spent his last years between Paris and Valencay. On his deathbed in May 1838, after long negotiation conducted through his great-niece and the Abbe Dupanloup, he signed a retraction reconciling himself with the Catholic Church, a final settlement debated ever since as sincere repentance or a last diplomatic transaction ^[1]. He died in Paris on 17 May 1838, aged eighty-four, and was buried at Valencay.

Few reputations divide historians so cleanly. To detractors, Talleyrand was venality itself: a priest without faith, a minister who sold his influence to any power that paid, a servant who betrayed every master. Napoleon's verdict at Saint Helena was unsparing. To admirers, beginning with biographers such as Duff Cooper and continuing through modern scholarship, he was a statesman of rare clarity who understood earlier than anyone that France's true interest lay in peace, balance, and moderation, and who worked toward that end under every government that would employ him ^[6].

His handiwork proved durable. The Vienna settlement he helped shape gave Europe the framework of a long peace among the great powers, and the doctrine of legitimacy he articulated there became a working principle of nineteenth-century diplomacy ^[5]. The Belgian neutrality he negotiated in the 1830s lasted until 1914. Diplomats still study his methods: the uses of patience, the value of information, the power of a well-timed dinner.

Any Talleyrand biography ultimately confronts the same puzzle he posed in life: whether consistency of principle can survive service to six successive regimes. His own answer was that he never conspired except when he had the majority of France for an accomplice. Readers can weigh that defense against the bribes, the intrigues, and the abandoned oaths. What is beyond dispute is that between 1789 and 1834, at nearly every turning point in French history, the limping bishop from Perigord was in the room, and usually on the winning side ^[1].