Talleyrand: A Biographical Study

by Joseph McCabe

From an engraving, after the picture by Huet Villiers.

LOUIS XVIII.

Two days later the Tsar reached Compiègne, and endeavoured in vain to induce the King to surrender his illusions. The Senate was also brought from Paris, and was introduced by Talleyrand. “You succeed to twenty years of ruin and misery. Such a heritage might frighten an ordinary virtue,” he said gravely to the pompous mediocrity before him. His sense of humour seems to have failed him when, after pleading for a “constitutional charter,” he went on: “You know even better than we do, Sire, that such institutions, so well approved among a neighbouring people, lend support to, and do not put restraint on, monarchs who love the laws and are the fathers of their people.” It was all of very little avail. An English caricature of the time represents the banquet at Compiègne that night, with the Tsar, the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, Prince Schwartzenberg, Blücher, Bernadotte, and the leading figures amongst the Allies and in France around the tables. Talleyrand sits in silence at one end of the room, but a thread passes from his hand to each of the other diners, as if they were puppets under his control. The truth is that Talleyrand had now encountered one of the most serious difficulties of his career. All his diplomacy fell before the royal system of filling the ante-chamber with sleek, cunning, incompetent favourites and flatterers. The King refused to take the oath to the new constitution, or to adopt the moderate proclamation prepared by Talleyrand. His satellites prepared one more in accord with his inflated pretensions—the Declaration of St. Ouen—and posted it throughout Paris. It gave a constitution to the nation instead of receiving one from the people’s representatives. Providence had restored the throne, and to Providence, rather than statesmanship, it was to be confided. In ten months the king would be flying ignobly for the frontier.

However, Louis XVIII had accepted the substance of Talleyrand’s constitution, and he gave the guarantees which were to dispel the expectation of vindictiveness. Talleyrand returned to Paris to prepare for his reception, which was at least orderly. A few days afterwards he was appointed Foreign Minister and Grand Almoner to the King’s household. There is a story that after he had taken the oath of loyalty to the King he observed to him: “That is my thirteenth oath of loyalty, Sire, and I trust it will be the last.” History had another in reserve for him—the oath to Louis Philippe. Although he afterwards spoke strongly of the peers who had “violated the religion of the oath” during the Hundred Days, he had not a great awe of that ceremony. He is said to have described it once as “the ticket you take at the door of the theatre.” Speaking once of cheeses, he declared that the Brie was the king of cheeses; he had thought so in his youth and thought so still. Eugène Sue observed that he had “taken no oath to that royalty.” On another occasion, when he had to administer the oath to a pretty lady, he said, with a glance at her ankles: “That is a very short skirt to take an oath of fidelity in.”

Not only was Talleyrand omitted from the committee appointed to frame the new constitution, but its members were strictly forbidden to confer with him on the subject. He was jealously excluded from influence on home affairs, and he saw with increasing bitterness the gradual emergence of the worst faults of the old regime. One of the restored nobles went about complaining that he did not feel free as long as the press was free. Another was advocating that the King’s ministers must be “people of quality,” with the real workers as drudges under their control. But the task of completing the settlement with the Allies still engrossed his attention for some time. Barante describes how Nesselrode or Metternich or other ministers would drop in as Talleyrand was dressing in the morning, and discuss the situation. It was no light work to effect a generous settlement, with the King forcing on him exorbitant pretensions and the Prussians thirsting to avenge Jena. Talleyrand succeeded by his personal influence in attaching England and Austria, and so defeating the righteous demands of Prussia. In the end he was able to hand over to the King a considerably larger France than Louis XVI had ruled, an army of 300,000 men, all the works of art that the Directory and Napoleon had “imported,” and a complete acquittance of all claims for indemnity. While foreign ministers were being severely censured for admitting such terms, Talleyrand had to listen to vapid complaints of their insufficiency amongst the Court party. The King’s young nephew, the Duc de Berry, was especially talkative. “You seem to have been in a great hurry to sign that unhappy treaty,” he said one day. “Yes, Monseigneur,” said Talleyrand. “I was in a great hurry. There are senators who say I was in a great hurry to get the crown offered to your royal house.” Another day the pretentious young prince was boasting what they would do with the army that had been restored to France by Talleyrand surrendering the fortresses. Talleyrand, who was sitting quietly near, got up and blandly reminded him that this army had been obtained by the “unhappy treaty” he had signed with the Allies. He actually heard courtiers talk of making war on the Allies with this army. The Tsar was deeply disgusted, and began to regret the return of the Bourbons. Talleyrand made every effort to prevent his alienation from the King. “The King has studied our history: he knows us. Liberal principles are advancing with the spirit of the age.” He wrote these things at a time when he saw the whole country being disposed to welcome a return of Napoleon.

The three months that followed the conclusion of the treaty with the Allies were spent in preparation for the coming Congress and uneasy observation of internal development. Some of the smaller sovereigns set up by the Peace of Paris entered on their domains at once, but the definitive settlement of the map of Europe was postponed to a Congress to be held at Vienna in the autumn. At this Congress Talleyrand would have to meet a formidable effort on the part of the diplomatists he had just discomfited, and skilfully to evade the inflated directions that the courtiers were pressing upon the King. His first care was to part on good terms with the ministers who were to reunite at Vienna. His personal qualities and the general recognition of the fact that he had endeavoured throughout to moderate the bloody march of Napoleon favoured his effort, but there was a feeling that he had secured too much for France, and a plot was forming to exclude him by some stratagem from the important discussions at Vienna. It was, moreover, visible to all that the Tsar was entirely surrendering his protection of France. The Prussian ministers departed with bitter determination to press their claims at Vienna. The Tsar went off to England with a mortified feeling of having been betrayed into a blunder by Talleyrand. With the English ministers Talleyrand retained good relations, though he had (as usual) little respect for their diplomatic gifts. “What a prodigious amount these English do not know!” he said afterwards, à propos of Castlereagh, who was at Paris with his brother and Lord Cathcart. Lord Wellington came to Paris as ambassador in August, and became a great admirer and friend of the French Foreign Minister.

At the house of Mme. de Staël, who was once more shining in Paris, the Liberals and Constitutionalists discussed the situation with concern. The whole policy initiated by Napoleon of the open career was being discarded. Degrees of “attachment” to the exiled royal family were made the sole grounds of qualification for office amongst the crowd of incompetent claimants.

“Regicides” were marked out as excluded from all honour and position. When Talleyrand protested that this was no reason for rejecting the abler and more useful of the Republicans, the King pleaded that his courtiers would not tolerate them. The King’s chief confidant, Blacas, replied to all suggestions of the dangers they were incurring with a lofty declaration that there could be no compromise between truth and error, between the monarchy and the revolution. Talleyrand by this time knew how to wait, and fell back on that attitude. His only action in the Senate, to which he belonged, was to defend the proposals of the new Minister of Finance, his friend, Baron Louis.