Talleyrand de Périgord, CHARLES MAURICE, Prince de Bénévent, the most inscrutable and resolutely self-regarding of modern politicians, was born at Paris on 2d February 1754. His father, Charles Daniel, Comte Talleyrand de Périgord (1734-88), was an officer in the army of Louis XV. during the Seven Years' War. An accident early in life, followed by an act of legal injustice, seems to have had a determining influence—for evil and not for good—on Talleyrand's character and career. By this accident he was lamed for life, and, in consequence, his rights of primogeniture were transferred to a younger brother, while he himself was, to his regret, educated not for the army but for the church. He threw himself, however, at the Collège D'Harcourt, at the Séminaire de St Sulpice, and at the Sorbonne, which he subsequently attended in succession, into the work of gratifying his ambition. He made himself a fair scholar, and cultivated the character of a rake and a cynical wit. His promotion, considering his well-known immorality, was rapid. He obtained the abbacy of St Denis in 1775, and five years later he was appointed agent-général to the French clergy; finally, Louis XVI. appointed him Bishop of Autun in 1789. Meanwhile he had been watching the signs of the times in France, and carefully studying politics. In 1789 the clergy of his diocese elected him to represent them in the States-general; and on this occasion he delivered a speech which at once stamped him as a political leader. He now became an authority on constitutional, financial, and educational questions, and the friend of men of such widely different gifts as Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Lally-Tollendal. He was one of the members of Assembly who were selected to draw up the Declaration of Right. He took a cynical delight in attacking the profession to which he still nominally belonged. It was he who in 1789 proposed the measure for the confiscation of the landed property of the church. He had rightly calculated that nothing could make him more popular with the rank and file of the revolutionaries in the Assembly; and on the 13th February was elected its president for the usual period. In November he took the oath to the new constitution, and in the beginning of 1791 he consecrated two new bishops—those of Aisne and Finisterre—declaring at the same time his sincere attachment to the holy see. It was now, however, open war between it and Talleyrand. In April he was excommunicated by the pope; he retaliated by giving up the clerical career altogether. About this time he was appointed director of the department of Paris in succession to Mirabeau. His most remarkable achievement, however, as a member of the National Assembly was his preparation of a report upon public instruction. This document was greatly in advance of the times, and was undoubtedly the model followed in all the great changes that subsequently took place, when France reorganised her educational system.
Talleyrand, although a favourite in Paris, had never been in sympathy with the fiercer spirits of the Revolution, and indeed was at heart a believer not in the Republic but in a constitutional monarchy. He was heartily glad, therefore, to leave France for London on an unofficial diplomatic mission early in 1792, and did his best to reconcile Pitt to his country, but failed. In December of the same year his connection with the Revolution was brought to a close by his being placed on the list of émigrés. He remained in exile in London till the end of January 1794, when he was compelled to leave under the provisions of the Alien Act. He had made many friends in London, and Lord Lansdowne having given him an introduction to Washington, he sailed for the United States. After the fall of Robespierre the sentence of proscription on him was recalled, and he returned to Paris in 1795. He attached himself to the party of Barras, and in 1797 he was called by the public opinion of the country to the post of foreign minister under the Directory.
Talleyrand was for a time the first man in
France, Barras being simply his tool. But he had already recognised the genius of Bonaparte, and established intimate relations with him. For a short period, however, he was in disgrace, the fact having been revealed that he had indicated his willingness to sell his services in connection with the conclusion of a treaty between Great Britain and the United States for money. But on the establishment of the Consulate he was restored to his former position as foreign minister, and for many years was closely associated with the fortunes of Napoleon. He had no genuine love for his master, but simply made him a means towards his own aggrandisement and enrichment. Gambling was his chief pleasure, and laid the foundation for an enormous fortune. Among the more odious of the acts of Napoleon with which Talleyrand will always be associated are the kidnapping and murder (March 1804) of the Due d'Enghien. It is virtually beyond doubt that it was by his instructions that the crime was consummated in spite of the vehement opposition of Josephine, whose opposition led her to denounce him as a maudit boëux. He was greatly instrumental in consolidating the power of Napoleon first (1802) as consul for life and then (1804) as emperor. When in the following year Great Britain, dreading a French invasion, formed a powerful European coalition against France, it was by the ingenuity of Talleyrand that it was partially broken up. To him as much as to Napoleon was owing the organisation in 1806 of the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon and he were thoroughly at one as regards the foreign policy of France till the conclusion of the peace of Tilsit in July 1807. After his creation as a prince of the empire under the title of Prince de Bénévent, he withdrew from the Ministry. The failure of Napoleon's designs in Spain was, however, the occasion of the first real rupture between him and Talleyrand.
Although Talleyrand was an advocate of the Austrian marriage, his voice was on the whole for a policy of wisdom during the later years of the first empire. In particular he was opposed to the invasion of Russia; and this gives some justification for his desertion of Napoleon in 1814. That desertion was complete and, from his own point of view, successful. He became the leader of the anti-Napoleonic faction; and through him communications were opened both with the allies and with the Bourbons. He dictated to the Senate the terms of Napoleon's deposition; and he became minister of foreign affairs under Louis XVIII., whom, indeed, he had placed on the throne. In his country's distress Talleyrand was now as much its good genius as was Thiers at a later and even darker period of its history. He negotiated the treaties by which the allies left France in possession of the boundaries which had been established in 1792, and in the congress which met in Vienna in September he successfully vindicated her rights to be heard in the readjustment of European arrangements. He had not calculated on the Hundred Days, however, and offered no help to Louis, who, on Napoleon's escape from Elba, had retired to Ghent. Yet the allied powers insisted on his being taken back into royal favour, and after the second restoration he became prime-minister. He remained in office, though, only for a short time, as he found himself the reverse of a persona grata to the king, and disliked by all existing parties in France.
During the reigns of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. Talleyrand was little better than a discontented senator who never lost an opportunity of injuring the court and the government, although it is possible that his protest in 1823 against the Spanish war was animated by genuine regard for his country's interests. During the July revolution he was Louis-Philippe's chief adviser. The citizen king offered him the post of foreign minister, but he declined it. He went to London as ambassador, and was well received there. He reconciled the British ministry and court to France, and returned in triumph to Paris, and finally retired into private life in 1834, and died at Paris on 17th May 1838, at the age of eighty-four.
'A man living in falsehood and on falsehood; yet not what you can call a false man' is Carlyle's view of Talleyrand. 'That rather middling bishop but very eminent knave' is De Quineey's. Both views have been widely entertained; but Talleyrand is a puzzle—more of a puzzle since the publication of his Memoirs than he was even before. That he was shamelessly corrupt, immoral, selfish, and mendacious is beyond doubt. Nor was he a wise statesman in the modern sense; the amelioration of human society never entered into his calculations as an object to be aimed at. But he was amazingly clever, infinitely dexterous, and an admirable judge of men. It must also be said for Talleyrand that he separated himself from the latest and most disastrous ambitions of Napoleon, and that in his tortuous diplomacy he generally considered and sought his country's advantage as well as his own.
The Talleyrand Memoirs, published in 1891 under the editorship of the Duc de Broglie, and translated into English by Mrs A. Hall (5 vols. 1891-92), are disappointing and by no means reliable, but they must be consulted by any one who wishes to know how Talleyrand himself desired to stand with the world. For his public career the works of Mignet, Bastide, and Louis Blanc, the Lamartine, Guizot, and Rovigo Memoirs, Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer's Historical Characters, Sainte-Beuve's lectures, and above all Pullain's Correspondence between Talleyrand and Louis XVIII. (Eng. trans. 1881) should be consulted. Mere formal biographies, such as Michaud's Histoire Politique et Privée (1853) and Pichot's Souvenirs Intimes sur M. de Talleyrand (1870), are not to be trusted, as being little better than partisan pamphlets.