Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was born on the 2nd of February 1754, and he died on the 17th of May 1838, having served every major French government that existed in between. He was a bishop who voted to strip the Church of its property. He was Napoleon's indispensable diplomat who secretly conspired against Napoleon. He was a revolutionary who helped restore the monarchy. The name Talleyrand has become a byword for crafty and cynical diplomacy, yet the French philosopher Simone Weil argued that he served not every regime, as critics claimed, but France behind every regime. How does a man who was called "shit in a silk stocking" by Napoleon himself end up negotiating the terms that kept France intact after the Napoleonic Wars? And what kind of person plans, in the final years of his life, to have his memoirs published thirty years after his death, so that he might still shape his own reputation from beyond the grave?

• 2. The Limping Bishop

  ›

  Talleyrand walked with a limp from childhood, earning him the nickname le diable boiteux, French for "the lame devil." He attributed this in his Memoirs to an accident at age four, but later research established the condition was congenital, possibly a clubfoot. Because of it, he could not inherit his father's military title despite being the eldest surviving son. His parents chose the Church instead. The family had its eye on a particularly rich prize: his uncle Alexandre Angélique de Talleyrand-Périgord held the Archbishopric of Reims, one of the wealthiest dioceses in France. Talleyrand studied at the Collège d'Harcourt and then the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, reading theology at the Sorbonne until he was twenty-one. In his free time he read Montesquieu and Voltaire, writers who were already questioning the authority of the old order. As a subdeacon he stood at the coronation of Louis XVI at Reims in 1775. He was not ordained a priest until the 19th of December 1779, at the age of twenty-five. The following year, 1780, he became Agent-General of the Clergy. In 1788, his family's influence overcame the King's personal dislike and secured him the Bishopric of Autun, with a stipend of 22,000 livres. He was consecrated a bishop on the 4th of January 1789 by Louis-André de Grimaldi.

• 3. Revolutionary Clergyman

  ›

  Shortly after his consecration, Talleyrand attended the Estates-General of 1789, representing the clergy, the First Estate. He then proceeded to help dismantle the institution he nominally served. Alongside Mirabeau, he promoted the appropriation of Church properties by the state. He participated in drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and proposed both the Decree on the goods of the clergy placed at the nation's disposal and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which subordinated the French Church to the new government rather than to Rome. On the 14th of July 1790, during the Fête de la Fédération, he celebrated Mass on the Champ de Mars. He also produced a 216-page Report on Public Instruction, proposing a pyramidical school system running from local to departmental levels, parts of which were later adopted. Pope Pius VI excommunicated him on the 13th of April 1791; Talleyrand resigned his bishopric immediately and never returned to the clergy. When the National Convention issued a warrant for his arrest in December 1792, he had already left Paris for London, having obtained a passport from Danton personally. By March 1794, Pitt's expulsion order forced him out of Britain, and he made for the neutral United States. The ship was driven by rough weather to stop at Falmouth, where Talleyrand recounts an awkward chance encounter with Benedict Arnold at an inn. In America he supported himself as a bank agent, engaged in commodity trading and real estate speculation, and was a house guest of Aaron Burr in New York. On the 19th of May 1794, Matthew Clarkson, the mayor of Philadelphia, received his oath of allegiance to the United States.

• 4. Napoleon's Necessary Man

  ›

  Talleyrand returned to France in September 1796, helped back into the country by the lobbying of the abbé Martial Borye Desrenaudes and Germaine de Staël, who worked to have his name removed from the émigré list. He became Foreign Minister in July 1797, and quickly spotted in Napoleon a possible political career worth cultivating during the Italian campaigns of 1796-1797. He wrote Napoleon many letters, and the two became close allies. Talleyrand was instrumental in the 1799 coup d'état of 18 Brumaire that established the French Consulate, though he had prepared contingency plans for flight if things went wrong. As Foreign Minister he achieved peace with Austria through the 1801 Treaty of Lunéville and with Britain in the 1802 Treaty of Amiens. He believed France had by then reached its maximum safe expansion and urged Napoleon to hold what he had. During the German mediatization, a consolidation of small German states, rulers of Baden, Bavaria, Württemberg, Prussia, Hesse, and Nassau all paid bribes to secure favorable territorial adjustments; Talleyrand and his associates collected about 10 million francs in the process. In May 1804 Napoleon made him Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, a position worth almost 500,000 francs a year. Two years later, in 1806, Talleyrand was created Sovereign Prince of Benevento, a former Papal fief in southern Italy, a title he held until 1815. From 1801 to 1804, he owned Château Haut-Brion in Bordeaux. Napoleon later ordered him to acquire the Château de Valençay in May 1803 as a venue fit for receiving foreign dignitaries; Talleyrand made it his primary residence for the rest of his life.

• 5. Betrayal in Silk

  ›

  At the Congress of Erfurt in September-October 1808, Talleyrand secretly counseled Tsar Alexander I of Russia against Napoleon's proposals. Napoleon had expected Talleyrand to help persuade the Tsar to form a direct anti-Austrian military alliance. Talleyrand instead reinforced the Tsar's resistance. Napoleon never discovered that his minister was working against him at the very conference Napoleon had sent him to manage. After resigning as Foreign Minister in 1807, Talleyrand began accepting bribes from Austria and Russia to pass on Napoleon's secrets. His rapprochement with Joseph Fouché, normally his political and personal enemy, in late 1808 focused on the question of imperial succession: both men believed that without a legitimate heir, Napoleon's death would trigger a ruinous power struggle. When Napoleon learned of this, he called it treason. The famous dressing-down that followed, delivered before Napoleon's marshals, produced Napoleon's often-repeated line that he could "break him like a glass, but it's not worth the trouble", alongside the scatological remark that Talleyrand was "shit in a silk stocking." Once Napoleon left the room, Talleyrand coldly observed, "Pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up." By early 1814, Talleyrand could see power slipping away from Napoleon. He hosted Tsar Alexander after the fall of Paris, persuaded him that the Bourbon dynasty offered the best chance of stability, and on the 1st of April 1814 led the Sénat conservateur in establishing a provisional government, of which he was elected president. On the 2nd of April, the Senate officially deposed Napoleon with the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur.

• 6. Vienna and the Map of Europe

  ›

  At the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, Talleyrand arrived as the representative of a defeated nation, excluded from the inner decision-making circle dominated by Austria, the United Kingdom, Prussia, and Russia. He immediately positioned himself as the champion of the smaller European states and pressed for their admission to the negotiations. Through diplomatic maneuvering, and with the support of the Spanish representative Pedro Gómez Labrador, Marquis of Labrador, he won France a seat at the decision-making table. On the 3rd of January 1815, he signed a secret defensive treaty with Austria's Metternich and Britain's Castlereagh, committing the three powers to use force if necessary to resist Russian and Prussian territorial expansion. France ultimately returned to its 1792 boundaries without reparations. Talleyrand secured French control over the Comtat Venaissin, the County of Montbéliard, and Salm. He also ensured that Prussia annexed only part of Saxony rather than the whole kingdom. Some historians later argued that this decision, combined with Prussia's resulting gains in the Rhine provinces, placed the Prussian army at the French-German frontier for the first time and helped pave the way to German unification under the Prussian throne. Napoleon's return during the Hundred Days undid some of this work; Talleyrand remained in Vienna throughout. The second peace settlement, concluded after Waterloo, was markedly harsher than the first. Talleyrand was appointed foreign minister and president of the council on the 9th of July 1815, then resigned in September, objecting to the second treaty's terms.

• 7. Private Character, Public Guile

  ›

  Talleyrand had a reputation for promiscuity; he left no legitimate children, though he possibly fathered over two dozen illegitimate ones. The painter Eugène Delacroix was once rumoured to be his son, though historians examining the evidence have largely rejected the claim. Charles Joseph, comte de Flahaut, is generally accepted by historians as his illegitimate son. Napoleon forced Talleyrand into formal marriage in September 1802 with Catherine Grand, born in India and long his mistress, after repeated postponements that had tested Napoleon's patience with the arrangement. While serving at the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand entered into a relationship with Dorothea von Biron, the wife of his nephew the Duke of Dino; he separated from Catherine shortly after. Talleyrand's venality was notorious even by the standards of his era. His solicitation of payments from the American government to open negotiations precipitated the XYZ Affair and an undeclared naval war with the United States lasting from 1798 to 1800. His approach worked across European courts where the French army posed a genuine military threat, but failed with a country that lay beyond French logistical reach, protected by British naval dominance. Biographer Philip Ziegler described him as a "pattern of subtlety and finesse" and a "creature of grandeur and guile." He was a great conversationalist, gourmet, and wine connoisseur. At his Château de Valençay he employed Marie-Antoine Carême, the celebrated chef known as the "chef of kings and king of chefs", and was said to have spent an hour each day with him. His Paris residence on the Place de la Concorde, acquired in 1812 and sold to James Mayer de Rothschild in 1838, is now owned by the Embassy of the United States.

• 8. The Long Ending

  ›

  In December 1829, Talleyrand funded the founding of the National newspaper, run by his friend Adolphe Thiers alongside Armand Carrel, François Mignet, and Stendhal. Its first issue appeared on the 3rd of January 1830, and it quickly became the voice of the Orléanist cause among the French liberal bourgeoisie. After Louis-Philippe I came to power following the July Revolution of 1830, Talleyrand reluctantly became ambassador to the United Kingdom, a post he held from 1830 to 1834. He played a vital role in the London Conference of 1830, opposing a partition plan developed by his own son Charles de Flahaut and helping bring Leopold of Saxe-Coburg to the throne of the newly independent Kingdom of Belgium. In April 1834 he signed the treaty that allied France, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal. After resigning as ambassador in November 1834, he split his time between Château de Valençay and Saint-Florentin, hosting banquets and playing whist. He worried about his legacy and the growing Napoleonic myth. He cultivated friendships with Honoré de Balzac, Lady Granville, and Alphonse de Lamartine, people he believed would shape future public opinion. He ordered his autobiography, the Memoirs, published thirty years after his death to manage his reputation from beyond the grave. On the 16th of May 1838, he signed a retraction of his errors toward the Church and a letter of submission to Pope Gregory XVI. When the Abbé Félix Dupanloup tried to anoint Talleyrand's palms in the traditional rite, Talleyrand turned his hands over to receive the anointing on the backs, since he remained technically a cleric. He died the following day, the 17th of May 1838, at Saint-Florentin, and was buried in the Notre-Dame Chapel near Château de Valençay. The Memoirs were eventually edited by the duc de Broglie and published in 1891.