HistoryCharles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was one of history's great survivors. Born in 1754, he lived to the age of 84 , surviving no less than six political regimes.
For three years of his life he was a bishop, for another eight he was foreign minister and for five years in the early 1830s he was French ambassador in London. The eldest son in a relatively impoverished aristocratic family, he was born with a club foot which ruled him out of a traditional army career and obliged him to enter the Catholic Church instead. Suitably devoid of religious belief, he soared in the church's administrative hierarchy to become Bishop of Autun - but never returned there after his consecration - and led a hedonistic salon life in Paris, surrounded by mistresses and adored for his charm and wit.
When the revolution came, it was he who proposed selling church land to pay off the state's debts and secularising its education system to make it more modern and relevant. Then, after consecrating the first four bishops of the schismatic revolutionary church, he abandoned the priesthood he had never wanted and turned towards a diplomatic career. This took him to England, where he soon ran into trouble as Jacobins in France classified him as an emigré while the English expelled him as an enemy undesirable. His next stop was North America, where George Washington snubbed him, but he was able to rebuild his investment portfolio and acquire a Caribbean mistress.
By 1797 he was back in France, where his contacts fixed him up with the post of foreign minister at the very moment when the young Corsican general, Napoleon Bonaparte had burst on to the scene with his spectacular conquests in northern Italy. He also met the Indian-born Catherine Grand, who was his mistress until Napoleon - who loathed her - persuaded him to marry for respectability's sake in 1802. In the meantime, the Corsican and the aristocrat formed an effective working relationship and, despite being responsible for Napoleon's fiasco in Egypt in 1798, Talleyrand was a leading figure in the cabal that prepared the coup d'état that brought him to power at the end of 1799.
As Napoleon's foreign minister he then negotiated the treaties that ended the war with Austria and Britain, but when war erupted again in 1803 the Napoleonic genie began to escape from Talleyrand's diplomatic bottle. Talleyrand disliked the humiliation inflicted on Austria after defeat at Austerlitz in December 1805. Instead he wanted to build a partnership with Vienna that would force England to end hostilities and stabilise peace on the continent. He resigned as foreign minister after the Tilsit treaty with Russia in 1807, opposed the invasion of Spain and sabotaged Bonaparte's attempts to strengthen his alliance with Alexander II at the Erfurt Conference in October 1808. When he began plotting with the police minister, Joseph Fouché, Napoleon raced back from Spain to sack him from his lucrative post as imperial vice- chamberlain, shouting the memorable insult: "You are nothing but shit in a silk stocking". Talleyrand's response - "What a shame that such a great man is so ill bred" - was muttered below his breath. But, as if to prove the accuracy of Napoleon's remark, two silk stockings walked straight to the Austrian embassy to sell their wearer's services to the acting ambassador, Klemens von Metternich.
He was probably lucky to avoid arrest or execution over the next few years, but bobbed up again in the spring of 1814 to head the provisional government that eased the overweight Louis XVIII back on to the French throne after Napoleon's abdication to Elba. As reward, he became foreign minister, negotiating the Treaty of Paris that let France off lightly for the Napoleonic wars and pulling a master stroke at the Congress of Vienna to restore it as a major diplomatic power. He opposed Napoleon's return and the Hundred Days, sat in the Chamber of Peers during the Bourbon restoration and ended his active career as ambassador to England, whose politics he always admired, in the early 1830s.
David Lawday is a writer and journalist, now based in Paris, who analyses Talleyrand's life and career with fluency and a range of anecdotes and sayings. The man may never have said that treason was a matter of dates but he did say that Châteaubriand imagined he was going deaf merely because no one was talking about him any more. Admittedly, Châteaubriand had got his retaliation in first, when he saw Talleyrand leaning on Fouché on the way to meet Louis XVIII in 1814, by commenting that it was like watching "vice supported on the arm of crime". Talleyrand certainly had vices. He was a social snob of the first order, a time-server and a money-grabber always on the look out for bribes and sweeteners. He was a serial liar and a cynical flatterer of anyone with influence. Yet he was also an astute diplomat, an unflappable negotiator and a level-headed critic of the unbalanced ambitions of Bonaparte. I would not agree with Lawday in attributing the end of centuries of Franco-British rivalry to his influence, and would certainly disagree with portraying his character as a key to understanding the nature of the (non-existent) French "race". Yet it is regrettable that Talleyrand has attracted no serious English-language biography since Duff Cooper's classic work of 1932, when the diplomatic history of the empire and restoration has been subjected to major revision. Lawday's biography does not replace Duff Cooper's. Yet it does provide new information in a number of areas. It is enjoyably written, well balanced and clearly sympathetic to a man who, as Lawday notes, would be as appalled at the diplomatic behaviour of the current world superpower as he was at the behaviour of the Napoleonic superpower in its final years.
Hugh Gough is associate professor of history in University College Dublin. He writes on the French Revolution and is currently researching a book on death and the guillotine in France during the late 18th century
Napoleon's Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand By David Lawday Jonathan Cape, 386pp. £20