Lady Blennerhassett sees a grave inconsistency, inspired by a base motive, in Talleyrand’s protesting against the affair of June 20th, and then condoning the worse attack of August 10th and siding with the Jacobins. We must remember that many things had happened since July 13th. Hostile armies hung threateningly on the frontier; one must take desperate measures now to secure the continued neutrality of England. Further, on July 13th it was not at all certain that the Jacobins could not be checked; it was now clear that one must work with them or through them, or desert the country to its fate, for no human judgment, not patriotically intoxicated, could see how Prussia, Austria and Brunswick were to be held off. It is a sheer perversion of history to say that Talleyrand deserted the King after August 10th. He had deserted his cause long ago; his person, his life and liberty, Talleyrand never willingly saw endangered; nor did he ever cease to be a partisan of limited monarchy. It is, indeed, a question if the events of August 10th did not put the royalist cause in a more hopeful plight. Certainly the royalists thought so. These events doubled the pace of the armies that were heading towards Paris. Finally, it is quite impossible to see that Talleyrand expected any advantage out of the new administration.
Briefly, then, Talleyrand was perfectly consistent in writing the official “explanation” of August 10th. One would imagine from some of the references to it that it was a blatantly patriotic boast of the affair; one need only recollect that it was written by an astute diplomatist to a well-informed country, and for a strictly conciliatory purpose. It merely pointed out the extenuating features of the “terrible events” with diplomatic casuistry. We must not judge Talleyrand as if he had ever believed in the divine right of Kings. Nor had he any particular grounds of personal loyalty to King or Queen; nor can he be accused of untruth in laying on the royalist cause the burden of the Austrian and Prussian invasions.
But Lady Blennerhassett is herself unpardonable when she says Talleyrand’s destiny “dragged him deeper still, into the bloody torrent of the September massacres.” This is a most unhappy way of expressing the fact that Talleyrand was a disgusted spectator of those awful scenes, and that he fled the country as soon as they happened. We lose sight of him from August 18th, when he penned the diplomatic defence of Danton, until September 14th. On that day Barrère finds him leaving Danton’s room in travelling dress with a passport for London.[23] Danton had sent his friend Noel to London to supersede Chauvelin and keep England neutral. At the beginning of September Noel had written to say that negotiations seemed possible (August 10th had evidently not been regarded as inexcusable at London), and Danton had thought the conditions suggested were not inacceptable. Meantime, the hostile forces were converging successfully on Paris. On August 29th comes terrible news of Prussians, Austrians and Brunswick, and of the rising in La Vendée. There are not weapons, when even women offer to bear them. Danton gets an order for a visitation of suspected houses and incarceration of suspects. Royalists are leading every invading army. Paris is in the last stage of the new “intoxication.” The awful story of the first week of September has been told often enough. By Thursday evening Talleyrand would hear that more than a thousand men and women, mostly innocent, had been savagely murdered. The next day he obtained from Danton a passport: “Leave to pass to Citizen Talleyrand, going to London by our order.”
The last phase of the movement he had followed since May 6th, 1789, was too repulsive. He could say no longer that “provided he remained French, he was prepared for anything.” He was not prepared for murder. His one thought was to leave France. On the pretext of a mission to persuade England to adopt the metrical system he received permission to leave. Research in the archives of the Foreign Office has brought to light (says M. Pallain) a letter in which Talleyrand asks permission to return and continue his work in London before the end of August, when the guillotine had already begun its work. He did not, therefore wait until there was personal danger before he fled. He did not cling to ruling powers until their long lists were drawn up. However, he would probably have less difficulty than is supposed in securing permission to leave from Danton. It was more than ever imperative to have an able man in London. The British Ambassador, like all others, had fled from Paris. Noel had to face a storm of indignation in England. Danton would, one imagines, see no more useful man in the emergency than Talleyrand. However that may be, he left Paris on September 14th, not to return until the long story of the reign of violence was over. His “real aim” was, he says, to get away from France; but he applied for a passport so as not to close the door behind him in the event of his wishing to return.
He arrived in England on the 23rd, only to find, as he expected, his whole diplomatic work in sad danger. He announced his arrival to the Foreign Office, denying that he had any mission, but expressing his readiness to give information. He was not invited to give any. A good deal has been written on the question whether he had a mission or no, but the solution is hardly obscure when all the evidence is read. While denying in England (and even in a letter to Danton) that he had any mission, he told several correspondents that he had, and in his later petition from America he claimed that he was enjoined to prevent a rupture between England and France. The conflict of evidence is easily reconciled if we suppose he had an informal, secret understanding to that effect with Danton. It is the most likely thing to happen in the circumstances. In any case he had not long to continue his delicate task. The Opposition in England was prepared to support him to very great lengths, even after the triumphant Jacobins at Paris had decreed a war of revolutionary propaganda. Talleyrand always regarded this as a fatal step, and he even now wrote to Paris to counteract the feeling. The very able memorandum “On the actual relations of France to the other States of Europe,” which he forwarded to Lebrun, now Chief Minister, and to several members of the Convention, has been published by Pallain. It is a finely-written and sober political document. To the new idea of French dominance he replies that “the only useful and reasonable dominance, the only one that becomes free and enlightened men, is to be master of one’s self, and never to make the ridiculous pretention to domineer over others.” It is time that a mature France had done with illusions. An understanding with free nations, for peaceful, commercial purposes, should be the ideal. Wars of aggrandisement should be condemned. It is a very sincere and admirable political gospel.
By a curious chance it must have reached Paris[24] just before the Convention began to discuss the question of putting its author on the list of emigrants, forbidden to return under pain of death. A letter had been found amongst the King’s papers, in which Laporte, the King’s steward, had reported (in April, 1791) that Talleyrand was anxious to serve him. On the strength of this letter condemnation was passed on December 5th, and Talleyrand was made an exile. A letter, signed D. (probably from des Renaudes, but possibly Danton), was inserted in the Moniteur in defence of Talleyrand. It appealed to the minister Lebrun, and others to whom Talleyrand had sent his patriotic memorandum a few days before, to produce this proof of his loyalty. Talleyrand himself wrote a letter to the Gazette in which he flatly denied that he had any relations whatever with the King or Laporte. He claimed that the only particle of truth on which one could make such a statement was that he had written a report in defence of freedom of worship (which we have considered, dated May 7th, 1791), in which he upheld the King’s right to the ministration of a non-juring priest. Laporte, he said, must have seen this memorandum as it circulated privately—as so many speeches did—before May 7th, and interpreted it to mean that Talleyrand favoured the King. It is likely enough, and at all events we have no further evidence. But the defence was of no avail. Talleyrand remained on the proscribed list for three years.
It is not probable that Talleyrand would have ventured again to live at Paris during those years. He was an aristocrat, even if he clothed himself from head to foot in tricolour. He was a man of refined and humane temper, and could not possibly have co-operated further with the sanguinary parties that now came to power. At the most he would wish to retain a distant connection in the event of an improvement in the condition of Paris. A few days after reaching London, in accepting an invitation to Bowood, he wrote to Lord Lansdowne that “when one has passed the last two months at Paris one needs to come and refresh oneself with the conversation of superior people.” Then came news of the impeachment and trial of the King. London listened with growing horror and disgust to the details of the “trial.” On January 21st Louis was guillotined. On January 24th the late French ambassador, Chauvelin, the only official-looking Frenchman the Government could find, was swept out of England. On February 1st the Convention declared war against England and Holland (the one entanglement that endangered England’s neutrality). Talleyrand found the door which he had so cleverly contrived to leave open violently slammed upon him.
He says in the memoirs that he did not intend to stay long in England. In fact, we know now that he applied about this time for permission to settle in Tuscany, but the Grand Duke had to refuse on the ground of his neutrality. The position must have been trying for a man of Talleyrand’s taste and ambition. If we may trust his later observations, his mind wandered unsteadily from one country to another and one occupation to another. He settled down, however, to the life of an emigrant in London, and managed to spend a year not unpleasantly. His library had been transferred to London,[25] and he spent his mornings in writing. He does not tell us the subject, but says that when he had returned to France a huge mass of his notes and memoranda came over from London. He would have us believe that they proved of little use for the writing of his memoirs, but the chapter on the Duc d’Orléans is so ample and circumstantial that it seems to have been written at an early date, and was not improbably written in 1793. It affords a thorough reply to the rumours, for which no documentary ground has ever been discovered by his most bitter enemies, that he was secretly working with the Orleanist group. He did not frequent the Palais Royal in a political capacity.
But in spite of emigrant hatred and the general British hostility to France, he found a sufficiently large social circle in London. Mme. de Genlis had come to England with her niece. Talleyrand offered her a little money out of his small fund, and actually did assist other compatriots. Many of them were, as is known, living in bitter poverty. Mme. de Staël came over in January and remained until the summer. She took a house near Richmond, and Talleyrand spent a good deal of his time there. In Kensington the Countess de la Châtre kept a house, where many of Talleyrand’s old friends met. Narbonne had with difficulty got away—with the assistance of Mme. de Staël and Talleyrand—at the beginning of September. Rivarol and Lalley-Tollendal and many other constitutionalists were there. Fox and Sheridan and their friends afforded a fairly large circle of English acquaintances. Lord Lansdowne continued friendly long after he left England. At his house Talleyrand speaks of frequently meeting Hastings, Price, Priestley, Romilly, and Jeremy Bentham. His reputation for culture and conversation opened many doors. Sydney Smith was brought in contact with him somewhere, and says that he found him unequal to his reputation; but one imagines that Sydney Smith would not be unbiassed, and he admits he could not understand his French. The German physician, Bollmann, found him so charming that he “could listen to him for years.” On the whole, Talleyrand fared better than most of his indigent companions, though the enforced idleness annoyed him. “Patience and sleep,” he told Mme. de Staël, was his programme for the present. In another letter he described his chief occupations as “fishing and correcting proofs” (of Mme. de Flahaut’s novel).
It is from the letters he wrote to Mme. de Staël after her return to France that we find he is still watching the situation in that country without despair. In one letter he sketches a plan. The southern provinces, which still show some attachment to the constitution, should unite, and invite the members of the old Constituent Assembly to meet at Toulon. He believes that the nation is still attached to the constitution, and that it is really in the supposed defence of this that they have risen against King and invaders. When he hears of the execution of the Queen he has to modify his view. “It is all over with the house of Bourbon in France,” he says; but he never believed that France would remain permanently republican. His wistful speculations, which were equally resented by republicans in France and royalists out of it (who charged the constitutionalists with bringing all his misfortunes on the King), were cut short at the beginning of 1794 by a peremptory order to quit England within five days (in another place Talleyrand says twenty-four hours).