Talleyrand: A Biographical Study

by Joseph McCabe

The style of the speech is plain, except in the peroration, but it is solid and convincing. We can well believe that the speaker was interrupted over and over again with loud applause. Here was a financial expert, and a bishop, putting in impressive form the vague dream of so many of them. From the Right, naturally, came a flood of rhetoric. The Abbé Maury bitterly assailed Talleyrand, while Mirabeau vigorously defended the proposal.[17] But Talleyrand took no further share in the debate. He wished to speak again on November 2nd, the day the law was passed, but the closure had to be voted, and he was content to publish his speech (which was written, as was customary in the Assembly). The second speech adds little to the first, which had now, by order of the Assembly, been printed and distributed throughout the country. That he strengthened his position with the Radicals need not be stated. The Moniteur spoke of him as “the youngest, most intrepid, and most enlightened prelate in the ecclesiastical college.” The pamphleteers of the Right denounced him as “the limping devil,” “Judas,” “the disgrace and scandal of the Clergy, the shame of the nobility, the basest and vilest of gamblers.” The last phrase was suggested by the Abbé Maury’s declaration that Talleyrand was acting in concert with Jewish speculators. We may remember that, as Castellane points out, Talleyrand’s proposal would have the effect of reducing his own income to the most slender proportions. We must admit, too, that the appropriation of Church property was only a matter of time; and we must allow the probability of M. de Lacombe’s suggestion that Talleyrand feared the confiscation would be carried with the rough injustice and ignorance now so often exhibited in the Assembly, and he resolved to secure a just and rational settlement by his action. When we have admitted all this, there is little reason for us to seek further and dishonourable motives. We shall find him later boldly reminding the Assembly of their engagement to stoop to no injustice in the matter.

Not so leniently can we pass over a letter to his diocese, bearing the date of October 12th, which must have been written while he was preparing his speech. It enjoins the prayers of the Quarant Ore in accordance with the King’s instructions, but it is painfully religious. “The religion of Our Lord,” it begins, “is the firmest support of thrones, the most solid ground for the prosperity of States. In vain does the pride of man spend itself in brilliant speculations on the alleged force of reason and nature in systems of government that are independent of religion.” The work was most probably entrusted to Des Renaudes. Talleyrand’s clergy had been somewhat shaken when they heard of his voting for the abolition of tithe. After his speech of October 10th they wrote a strong letter of protest. Talleyrand replied with vague and mild excuses, and they retorted with some warmth; but he took no further notice, and the quarrel was suspended.

Meantime the Assembly had followed the King to Paris, and was meeting temporarily at the Archbishop’s palace, now deserted by the emigrant prelate. It would be difficult to imagine the feelings of even the staid Talleyrand after this transfer into the very crater of the national volcano. A glance at the Minutes of the Assembly shows a kind of panic amongst the Deputies. On October 9th the President was asked to grant 200 passports to members of the Assembly. Disease spread amongst them with appalling effect as the date approached for going to Paris. Even presidents complained of “extinction of the voice” when awkward debates came on; and one needed some voice in an Assembly where three orators would occupy the tribune at once, to the accompaniment of a hundred others and several hundred spectators. It must have been hopelessly bewildering to moderate politicians and refined people like Talleyrand. Moreover, one beacon that had more or less guided him so far was extinguished. He had looked forward to a place in the Ministry. Mirabeau had included him in his scheme of a Ministry, when the patriots got wind of it, and, at the beginning of November, passed a law that no member of the Assembly should accept any office or commission for two years after leaving it. The pay of an ordinary Deputy was 18 francs a day. Calculation was now of little use. Talleyrand must either emigrate, and leave France to the violent and ignorant, or remain an observant member of the Assembly, and cultivate faith and hope.

One better feature of the time was that the powerful Mirabeau was becoming alarmed. When he had whispered to the President of the Assembly on October 5th that “Paris is marching on us,” he had been told that it was “so much the better; we shall get a Republic all the sooner.” Talleyrand and he and other constitutionalists met at the “Society of Friends of the Constitution,” the successor of the Breton Club, meeting now in the library of the Jacobin convent in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Its debates were then quiet and orderly, the general public not being admitted. Most of the abler moderates met there—Duport, Barnave, Lameth (the well-known triumvirate—“triumscroundrelate,” Mirabeau said later), Sieyès, Chapelier, the Duc d’Aiguillon, &c. Many non-deputies, especially writers, were admitted after the transfer to Paris, and the club became a lively centre of journalism and pamphleteering. Gradually it became infected with the general violence of the time, and Talleyrand and the moderates left it in May to found the more respectable club of the Feuillants, with La Fayette, Bailly, Sieyès, Chamfort, and Marmontel. But Paris was being rapidly denuded of all that appealed to Talleyrand. By the middle of October there were 60,000 émigrés in Switzerland alone. The society that replaced them must have tried Talleyrand’s infinite restraint. One of Napoleon’s rough marshals said of him that “you could attack him thirty times in the rear (coups de derrière) before any indication appeared on his face.” He needed that quality most of all in the days of the Revolution.

During the remainder of 1789 he confined himself to practical work and moderation. On November 7th he appeared in the tribune to appeal for the proper protection of the confiscated estates. Towards the close of the month he was appointed on the bank committee, and he delivered its report on December 4th—a very able, technical discourse on the bank question, directed to be published by the Assembly. In December he helped to carry the abolition of the royal lottery, and in January he still further embittered his former friends of the Right by securing the enfranchisement of the Jews in the south. We have also speeches of his pleading for a uniform standard of weights and measures in the country (of which he afterwards sent a copy to Sir J. R. Miller, who was urging the cause in England), and on registration fees and the coinage of small money.

But his most important achievement about this time was the eloquent defence of the Assembly which he delivered on February 10th. Carlyle’s disparagement of that body’s labours is a faithful, if not very judicious, reproduction of what the crowds and the pamphleteers were saying. The plague of pamphlets was now at its height. E. de Goncourt says that 6,000 men were engaged in distributing them daily. The Cordeliers district had taken under its august protection any scribblers in its area, because the liberty of the press followed from the liberty of man. As a result the Assembly was constantly attacked, in the “theory-of-irregular-verbs” spirit. It was still too full of “aristocrocs” or “aristocranes”: it was a mere talking-shop. “Dames of the market” had been in it themselves, and knew. The Assembly directed its constitution-committee to inform France what it had done. The committee entrusted the work to Talleyrand, and he gave them a pyrotechnic display which brought on again that “species of intoxication” which was growing familiar to chroniclers. The Moniteur reporter (Is there a parallel to this in the history of reporting?) was too overcome with emotion even to remember its chief points; but he excuses himself with the plea that no patriot could have done otherwise. It evoked, he said, “applause without example.” But it was read again the next day and published, and then scattered lovingly over France at the expense of the Assembly. It is certainly a fine piece of rhetoric, with some notable phrases. “The King desires to guard his people from the flatterers he has driven away from his throne.” “Patience! It is for liberty. You have given so many centuries to despotism!” Talleyrand won a great deal of popularity by the speech. Ten days afterwards he was elected President of the Assembly (for the customary fortnight), in opposition to Sieyès, by 323 votes to 125. He was often cheered in the street, and once Mirabeau and he were called to the window by an admiring crowd during a banquet at the Palais Royal.

His diocese, as we can imagine, did not regard this new kind of distinction with satisfaction. At the beginning of the year he had sent them his greeting, and they had responded. But during the stormy debates of February, on the suppression of the monastic orders and the civil constitution of the clergy, they looked in vain for the name of their Bishop. Talleyrand took no part in the struggle. He saw the suppression of monasteries decreed on February 13th—and Capuchin monks rush to be shaved as soon as the report came, while others rushed to less respectable establishments without waiting to cast off their habits. He gave no assistance to the religious speakers of April 12-13th who tried to induce the Assembly to make a formal declaration that the Catholic Church was the Church of the nation, and he refused to sign their subsequent protest. Then his clergy reminded him of his office. No doubt, they said, with some irony, he had only abstained in the idea of making a more solemn protest at the head of his clergy. They had signed a protest and forwarded it to him to head the list of signatures and present to the Assembly. He sent a conciliatory reply, pointing out that it was unwise to ask a political body to meddle with religion: the Catholic faith was the religion of the nation. His people were divided on the receipt of this letter, but one of his Vicars-General made a vehement attack on him, and the local pamphleteers entertained each other for a time. Talleyrand’s policy was really clear enough. He believed that religion was wholly necessary for the people, and had no thought of impairing its action. But he knew that there were grave abuses to be suppressed, and he was content to watch, in the interest of the nation and of justice, while the State took over control of the Church. Twice he intervened with dignity and courage for justice to the clergy; once on June 13th, when he reminded the Assembly of its promise to treat the despoiled clergy as the first creditors of the State, and again on September 24th. Dillon afterwards claimed that he and the majority of his colleagues acted “as true gentlemen,” but would hardly claim religious motives. Talleyrand could say as much.

His popularity with the Left and the bitterness of the Right were doubled when he said Mass for the last time on July 14th—the famous Mass of the Champ de Mars. Much has been written, in the way of sneers, on that famous ceremony, and Talleyrand’s share in it; much of it is clearly unjust. It must be remembered that the demonstration in the Champ de Mars was not a piece of ritual arbitrarily devised to satisfy the sooty citizens who had taken the Bastille. Before the end of the preceding year this collective demonstration and oath-taking had started in provincial towns. As the months of 1790 advanced Paris was piqued to hear that town after town was solemnly swearing loyalty to King and constitution—or constitution and King—without any lead from itself. In May Lyons sent word that it had conducted a most enthusiastic ceremony of the kind. Paris must conclude and crown the series. The anniversary of the taking of the Bastille was divinely appointed for it, and the Champ de Mars provided. The municipality decreed it, and invited delegations from all parts of France. Clearly there were great moral possibilities in such an event. A banner could be raised there under which all parties could gather, except the extreme Right; and that banner might be—with embroideries and fringes—the banner of constitutionalism. As July 14th drew near everything pointed to the realisation of these hopes. Talleyrand was nominated by the King to preside episcopally at the function. He saw the theatre of the demonstration growing into shape during that marvellous fortnight: saw boys and girls, and university professors and curés, and prostitutes and countesses (among them his old friend, Mme. de Genlis, with a “mahogany barrow,” and a little model of the Bastille at her neck), and butchers and brigands and lawyers, decked with tricolours and cockades, digging and singing and wheeling barrows. It was a new “species of intoxication,” but most certainly it might mean a rally to a constitutional ideal, burned in by a blazing pageantry.

I believe myself it was with these thoughts that Talleyrand faced his great audience from the high altar on July 14th. Imagine oneself looking out on that living amphitheatre of 300,000 incandescent souls, all, or nearly all, in transfigured earnest, swearing loyalty to King and law and nation; and think what type of man would be like to mock at it. Surely not one who felt, if ever he felt anything, that a serious rally to a national idea was the pressing need of France. The statement that Talleyrand whispered mocking words to Lafayette as he mounted the steps rests on the thinnest of rumours, too eagerly welcomed by Sainte-Beuve. Lafayette does not confirm it; he would, in fact, be the last man to whom Talleyrand would say them, if he had them on his lips, for he would surely see the symbolic power of the moment. And the supposed letter to Mme. de Flahaut, in which Talleyrand is made to sneer at the ceremony, is not worth considering. For most of Talleyrand’s actions during these two years we have to construct ourselves the inner mood. The memoirs are almost silent. In this case it is difficult to believe that Talleyrand missed the real potency of the occasion, and we have no evidence to make us think so. The suspicion arises from a twofold mistake. It is too readily assumed that Talleyrand had no serious interests, but was ever in the mood of Goethe’s Mephistopheles. This is false. His affection began at home, if you will, but his public and political action constantly shows that it did not end there. In the second place, the theological element of the demonstration is taken too literally and too narrowly. The fact that Talleyrand and his deacon and sub-deacon (Louis and des Renaudes) were rationalists is no impediment whatever to their being thoroughly serious. Like many priests before and since they took their service symbolically, and looked to the effect on the audience. The ceremony was religious on quite other grounds from those on which the theologian examines it. I respect his technical objection, but the religion remains.

For my part I cannot conceive a man so sensible as Talleyrand was of the needs of France, and the possibilities of such a ceremony, looking with even indifference from those altar-steps. Would the fire of their enthusiasm burn on? Would this idea of allegiance to law and an orderly constitution work deeper into them? If so, it were well for France; but even if not, it was worth attempting. It was a great political experiment.