Talleyrand: A Biographical Study

by Joseph McCabe

Talleyrand had already written to the Vatican in the same feeling, at the direction of the First Consul. Mr. Holland Rose and many other writers entirely misunderstand Talleyrand’s share in the work of religious pacification, because they have a quite false idea of his attitude towards the Church. I interpret the negative evidence to mean that Talleyrand was agnostic rather than deistic, in spite of his admiration for Voltaire and his dislike of Diderot and d’Holbach. But he was an agnostic Liberal statesman of a type familiar in France (and many other countries) down to our own time. He never attacked or ridiculed religion. He believed the Church to be a useful agency among the mass of the people, provided it was earnest and spiritual, and did not meddle with politics beyond promising eternal torment to the more violent radicals. Of this we have evidence enough even in his speeches of 1790-1792. He would not at all resent Napoleon’s proposals, if Napoleon would firmly maintain the rights of the constitutional clergy. There is not a particle of evidence that raises any difficulty as to Talleyrand’s attitude.[35]

He is nowhere found with the angry soldiers and politicians who thought the revolution had made a French Church an anachronism, and who filled Paris with fresh murmurs at the idea of a Concordat.

Towards the end of 1800, Paris had a new fact to proceed on in its cafés. The Vatican had sent Mgr. Spina, the Papal Nuncio at Florence, to confer with Talleyrand and Napoleon. The sagacious priest did not flaunt his purple, merely announcing that the Archbishop of Corinth had come to treat with Napoleon on matters concerning the administration of Rome. But the religious controversy had revived in France, and the appearance of a papal envoy fanned the flame. The relaxation of the laws had introduced a large number of the emigrant clergy, and these contended everywhere with the Constitutionalists for the care of souls and of presbyteries. The confusion was increased by the Theophilanthropists, who claimed the sacred edifices of the country in the superior name of virtue, and asked the people to bow to their august abstractions. After a mass they would decorate Catholic altars with flowers in honour of morality, and they showed no lack of courage in defending their fair ideals. Philosophic deists and quick-witted atheists smiled on the confusion. But all eyes were now centred on the pale and portly prelate who sat in long conference with the ex-bishop at the Foreign Office.

Mgr. Spina had been generally directed to avoid the excommunicated apostates, but to moderate the rigour of the Canon Law when “urbanity” demanded. “Urbanity” clearly involved amiable relations with Talleyrand, and the suave, serious tone of the diplomatist at once disarmed the Italian. Talleyrand would “very soon return to the Church,” Spina wrote to Rome. Napoleon, however, had another agent at hand for this negotiation. He had retained the Breton priest, Bernier, at Paris, and now used him as a foil against the astute Italian. The Pope’s temporal possessions, the Legations, were the central difficulty in the negotiations that followed. Pius VII was pledged to work for their restoration; Napoleon had no intention whatever of restoring them. Talleyrand clearly stated this position, and then allowed the abbé and the archbishop to expend their diplomatic talent over the impasse for a month or two. At last a draft of a Concordat was submitted to Rome, the First Consul sending with it the unexacting but precious present of the wooden statue of Our Lady of Loretto, which the revolutionary troops had brought from Italy, and telling his envoy to “treat the Pope as if he had 200,000 soldiers.” It was an original standard of spiritual respect.

But Talleyrand’s interest in the constitutional clergy of France—Napoleon is reported to have called them “a pack of dishonourable brigands”—found expression in the Concordat. The Pope was requested to secure the resignation of the orthodox emigrant bishops, so as to begin the foundation of the new church on a clear ground. The unhappy Pope was forced at length to ask this resignation, and the emigrant clergy cast off all restraint, and a good deal of theology, when the invitation reached them. While forty-five of them agreed to do so a large number sent a fiery and defiant reply to the Pope. Pamphlets circulated at London and at Rome in which priests described Pius VII as a Jew, or Judas, and declared it to be blasphemy to mention his name in the mass. The prospects of Catholicism in England had to be reassured by a counter fulmination from twenty-nine Irish Catholic Bishops and English Vicars Apostolic. At the same time the Pope was told that he must sanction the national appropriation of the estates of the Church in France. “The difficulties you raise,” Talleyrand wrote to Rome, “are imaginary. The Church has been stripped of her possessions in every age, and the despoilers have never been touched—unless weak.” And as the Vatican still lingered over these formidable demands Napoleon angrily summoned Talleyrand, Bernier, and Spina to Malmaison, formulated his ultimatum, and declared that if Rome did not comply within five days he would throw it over and erect a national Church.

On the fifth day the Pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Consalvi, was in Paris. He had left Rome placarded with the florid denunciations of the Pope by the emigrant bishops; he found Paris holding a congress of the constitutional bishops, who denounced the Concordat with equally lively rhetoric from their own point of view. The Pope was profoundly dejected and miserable; the First Consul was radiantly surveying the universe from the height of success; Talleyrand was wearying of the futile resistance of the Romans. Consalvi brought every weapon from the diplomatic arsenal of the Vatican. Thinking he understood Talleyrand, he said to him: “People make me out to be a pietist. I’m nothing of the kind. I like pleasure as well as anyone.” But Talleyrand did not admire Consalvi’s diplomacy. After a few days he sent him a final draft of a Concordat, and left Paris to take the waters at Bourbon l’Archambault. Mr. Holland Rose puts it that “the polite scoffer, the bitter foe of all clerical claims, found it desirable to take the baths at a distant place, and left the threads of the negotiation in the hands of two men who were equally determined to prevent its signature.” I have already pointed out that Talleyrand never scoffed at religion, and was not at all a foe, “bitter” or otherwise, of clerical claims of a non-political character. Further, Talleyrand left Paris, firstly, because it was his custom to go to the baths about this time, and secondly because he wanted the Concordat signed without further palaver. As a fact, Consalvi expressed satisfaction that Talleyrand was out of the way at the moment of signing. Talleyrand, again, was bound to leave his functions in the charge of d’Hauterive, his second in command, and the belief that d’Hauterive was “equally determined to prevent signature” is an equally unjust inference from the mere fact of his being an ex-cleric. In fine, the story that the chiefs of the Foreign Office tried to trick Consalvi into signing a draft materially differing from the one they had given him, is only mentioned by Consalvi, and has been gravely questioned by some writers.[36]

The Concordat was signed by Consalvi and Joseph Bonaparte on the night of July 15-16. Consalvi admitted to his friends that he had been empowered to make even greater concessions than he had been forced to do, and attributed his comparative success to the absence of Talleyrand. But before he left Paris Talleyrand returned from the south, and at once pointed out to Napoleon the unsatisfactory features of the Concordat. The chief of these was that it contained no recognition of the constitutional clergy or of the married and secularised ex-priests. Rome was just as eager to ignore or punish these as Talleyrand was to defend them; and the First Consul was inclined to sacrifice them to the general agreement. But Talleyrand insisted on a recognition of their status; it is in this connection that Consalvi describes him as a “powerful opponent,” not with the implication that he is a “bitter foe” of clerical claims generally. Consalvi again fruitlessly struggled against the Foreign Minister. On August 29th Talleyrand was able to report to Napoleon that “the Holy See had sanctioned, without any material reserve, the results of the negotiations of its ministers—had, in fact, done more, as it had given the name of bishops and archbishops to the titular prelates of the constitutional clergy.” He had threatened that France would not ratify the convention if the Vatican attempted to stigmatise in any way the clergy or ex-clergy of the country, but he permitted it the luxury of referring to their wives as “corrupt women,” and was content to suppress, as far as possible, the Brief containing the phrase.

The Concordat became law in April, 1802. The only people who murmured against it were, says Talleyrand, “a few soldiers—very brave fellows, but with minds too narrow to admit a conception of that kind.” The phrase clearly indicates his view of it. Broad-mindedness and a desire for peaceful social advance recommended the measure. It put an end to the unseemly squabble over churches and presbyteries, and ended the ridiculous confusion of the Republican day of rest (décadi—every ten days) and the Sabbath. It reconciled the Catholic feeling that still existed in the country (though this is sometimes grossly exaggerated) with the Napoleonic regime. Talleyrand would be the last to wish to sacrifice these solid advantages to a sentimental rationalism. He is one of the chief architects and builders of the Concordat.

A few months after the ratification of the Concordat Talleyrand was “secularised” by the Pope. This procedure has somewhat mystified his biographers, and as a fact it was a mere empty form, another concession of the Vatican to the perversity of the age. On Catholic principles the Pope cannot annul the priestly character; he may release the priest from his vow of celibacy. Pius VII affected to do the former, but cleverly refrained from doing the latter, for Talleyrand. His letter, dated June 29th, 1802, and addressed to “our very dear son,” ran: “We were overjoyed at learning of your ardent desire to be reconciled with us and the Catholic Church. Hence, extending our fatherly love to you, we relieve you, in the fulness of our power, from the bond of all the excommunications, and grant you liberty to wear secular costume and to administer all civil affairs, whether in the office you now fill or in others to which your Government may call you.” The statement that Talleyrand thought this secularisation would leave him free to marry, and had asked for it, is ridiculous. The Vatican has only annulled the priestly vow of celibacy twice in the course of its history, though it professes to have full power to do so in any case. It was Napoleon who asked the Pope to secularise Talleyrand. Excommunications sat lightly enough on the ex-bishop; and he would, no doubt, keenly appreciate the “paternal charity” of the Pope in “reconciling” him by removing his excommunication and gravely admitting him to secular employment, while carefully refraining from noticing his notorious domestic relations and his infidelity.