Talleyrand in London

The Master Diplomat's Last Mission

Linda Kelly

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786721501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The arrival of Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, as French ambassador in London in September 1830, was regarded as a great event by the British government. Two months earlier the July Revolution in Paris, overthrowing the reactionary rule of Charles X, had brought the liberal Louis-Philippe to the throne. Talleyrand, the best-known diplomat in Europe, had emerged from retirement at the age of 76 to lend his support to the new monarchy and to confirm its acceptance by the other European powers.Few people had aroused more controversy than Talleyrand. A former bishop whose love affairs were notorious, and a turncoat who had abandoned every master he had served, he was widely detested by the French public. But he was greeted as a celebrity in London, where the July Revolution - foreshadowing Britain's own Reform Bill - had been hugely popular. London society had not yet acquired the virtuous tone of the Victorian era.
The easy-going morals of the Regency had carried on into the reign of William IV, and the fact that Talleyrand's niece by marriage, the Duchess of Dino, 37 years his junior, was not only his hostess but reputedly his mistress, merely added to theinterest he induced.Talleyrand had arrived in London at a perilous moment. Revolution had broken out in Belgium, where the Belgians demanded independence from Holland to which they had been forcibly joined in 1815. The autocratic powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia threatened war to restore the status quo. It was largely thanks to Talleyrand's diplomatic skills and his close collaboration with the British that the creation of Belgium as a constitutional monarchy was peacefully achieved.Talleyrand's four years in London were the last and, in his own opinion, the most important of his diplomatic career. Linda Kelly's sparkling narrative brings the period to life, providing a fascinating picture of one of Europe's greateststatesmen as he appeared to English eyes.

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The July Revolution

It was 36 years before Talleyrand saw England again. This time his entry was triumphal. Less than two months before, while the coach of the deposed King Charles X rolled towards the coast and a safe haven in England, Louis-Philippe had been proclaimed king of the French, following the three-day insurrection – the July Revolution – when Paris had risen up in arms against the reactionary edicts of Charles X. Talleyrand’s arrival at Dover on 24 September 1830, as ambassador of France – now a representative monarchy along British lines – set the seal on the legitimacy of the new regime and was treated as a great event. His ship was announced by a salvo of cannon; Lord Charles Wellesley, son of the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, was waiting to escort him to London and his carriage, decorated with tricolour streamers, was greeted by cheering crowds along the route. ‘When I heard the booming of the cannons from the fortress at Dover,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I could not help remembering the time when, 36 years before, I had sailed from these same English shores, exiled from my country by revolutionary upheavals and chased from British soil by the intrigues of the émigrés.’1

During the tumultuous years that followed his expulsion from Britain, Talleyrand had played many roles. He had returned to France as foreign minister after the fall of Robespierre in 1794, helped by the money and efforts of Madame de Staël, whom he later discarded coolly, as he would discard many others in the course of his career. From the Directory to the Consulate, from the Consulate to the rise of Napoleon, he had been at the centre of events, never the leading player, but always a key figure behind the scenes. He had served as foreign minister through all the tremendous dramas of the Napoleonic Wars, only resigning office when Napoleon in his view betrayed the interests of France – first with the invasion of Spain in 1807, then with the campaign against Russia. It had been thanks to his good relations with the tsar, with whom he had been secretly corresponding, that it had been possible to achieve a peaceful transition to a constitutional monarchy when Russian troops reached Paris in 1814. And it had been thanks to his consummate skills as a diplomat at the Congress of Vienna that France had been saved from dismemberment by the victorious allies and had been able to take her place among the great powers of Europe again.

With the establishment of Louis XVIII (Louis XVI’s younger brother) as a constitutional monarch, it might have been thought that Talleyrand’s work was done. This was certainly the opinion of the king, who in September 1815 dismissed Talleyrand as his chief minister, offering him the face-saving sinecure of grand chamberlain instead. For the next 15 years Talleyrand watched French politics from the sidelines, spending long stretches of time at his magnificent chateau of Valençay, deep in the countryside of Berry. One of the lessons that he had learned from his impoverished stay in London was never to be a ‘pauvre diable’ (poor devil) again, and during the years that followed he had enriched himself shamelessly under every regime which he had served. It was not unusual at the time for statesmen to accept inducements and rewards from foreign powers; it was the scale of his venality that shocked his contemporaries. ‘When he is not intriguing he is trafficking,’ wrote his arch-enemy Chateaubriand;2 even his admiring biographer Duff Cooper admitted that Talleyrand’s ‘conduct with regard to money, from the beginning to the end of his career, was indefensible’.3

One reason why Talleyrand was content to spend long periods at Valençay was that after innumerable love affairs he had finally found happiness in his private life. In 1802, under pressure from Napoleon, he had married his mistress Catherine Grand. Beautiful and silly – ‘one has to have been the lover of Madame de Staël to appreciate a stupid woman,’ he remarked4 – she had long been separated from Talleyrand when in 1815 he settled down to a life of quasi-domesticity with his niece by marriage Dorothea, Duchesse de Dino, daughter of the Grand Duke of Courland. Thirty-nine years younger than Talleyrand, she had acted as his hostess at the Congress of Vienna, and though gossip suggested that they were lovers the proprieties were always carefully preserved. In Paris Dorothea had her own set of apartments in Talleyrand’s vast hôtel in the rue Saint-Florentin, and at Valençay she lived in a separate wing of the chateau. Married off at the age of 15 to a feckless and unfaithful husband, by whom she had three children, she had been separated from him for some years. They were briefly reunited in 1821 when she moved in with her husband for several months; she gave birth to a daughter, Pauline, later that year. Malicious tongues suggested that Talleyrand was in fact the baby’s father and that her husband’s gambling debts had been paid off in return for his presence at the appropriate time. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was certain that Talleyrand and Dorothea were devoted to one another and that the relationship, whether platonic or not, was central to their lives. The fact that Dorothea sometimes had affairs with younger men did nothing to break the link between them.

In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and his younger brother Charles X came to the throne. A Bourbon who had indeed learned something, Louis XVIII had tried to steer the tricky path between revolution and reaction, between censorship and disorder, and had to some extent succeeded. Charles X showed no such willingness to heal the divisions in the country or to recognise the achievements of Napoleon and the Revolution. Obstinately set on turning back the clock, he had had himself crowned with medieval ceremony, passed laws condemning sacrilege and increased the privileges of the Church and aristocracy. Talleyrand had not been particularly supportive of Louis XVIII’s moderate policies – probably because he had been piqued by the king’s dismissal of his services. But he was appalled by the path which Charles X was following, which would lead inevitably, he thought, to the downfall of the regime. He did nothing to precipitate the crisis he saw looming. But he positioned himself accordingly. He had always been on good terms with the Duc d’Orléans, head of the younger branch of the Bourbon family, whose salon at the Palais-Royal was a centre of progressive opinion. The duke had no more desire than Talleyrand to undermine the monarchy. But the fact that a royal alternative to Charles X existed made him a focus of liberal hopes, and as the king’s reactionary politics grew more unpopular Talleyrand was seen more often at the Palais-Royal.

Charles X’s appointment of the arch-reactionary Prince de Polignac as his chief minister in August 1829 removed the monarchy’s last chance of coming to terms with liberal opinion. From then on, with the smiling serenity of somnambulists, king and minister moved towards their doom. The opposition was gathering its forces; the liberal press, indignant at the choice of Polignac, attacked the ministry with unprecedented violence. Sustained by his belief in the divine right of kings, Charles ignored the warning signs. His minister shared his faith: he claimed to have heard voices and that he had been visited by the Virgin. ‘There is no such thing as political experience,’ wrote the Duke of Wellington, no liberal himself. ‘With the example of James II before him Charles X is setting up a government by priests, for priests and through priests.’5 Significantly, the liberal paper the National, founded in January 1830 by Talleyrand’s brilliant young protégé Adolphe Thiers, devoted a series of articles to the English revolution of 1688.

In July 1830 the storm broke. On the twenty-fifth of that month, exasperated by press criticism and his government’s failure to obtain a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, the king issued the fatal ordinances that would bring about his downfall, dissolving parliament, reducing the franchise and, above all, suspending the freedom of the press. This last clause sparked revolution. On 26 July, a group of journalists, led by Thiers, issued a manifesto, denouncing the clauses as unconstitutional, and calling on the nation to resist. On 27 July, the presses of the opposition papers, issued in defiance of the ordinances, were destroyed by the police. Angry crowds spilled onto the Paris streets; that evening, as garrison troops moved onto the boulevards, the barricades began to go up. By 29 July, after three days of bitter street-fighting, Paris was in the hands of the insurgents. The tricolour floated above the Tuileries, and Talleyrand, watching the rout of the royalist troops from a window on the rue Saint-Florentin, turned to dictate a note to his secretary: ‘On the 29th of July, at precisely five minutes past twelve, the elder branch of the Bourbon family ceased to reign over France.’6

What of the younger branch? While the fighting raged in the streets of Paris, Charles X’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, remained discreetly on the outskirts, sending messages of loyalty to the king. It was to him that the deputies, alarmed at the popular fury and seeking to contain it, now turned. Son of Philippe Égalité, a soldier in the revolutionary army at Jemappes, he had all the qualifications needed for a liberal monarch. On 30 July, he was offered the post of lieutenant general of the realm; it was, as he knew, the first step to the crown. Urged on by his brave and ambitious sister, Madame Adélaïde, and secretly advised by Talleyrand, he accepted. The next day, before a huge and still volatile crowd, he was proclaimed lieutenant general from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville and, holding an enormous tricolour, publicly embraced by the republican hero, Lafayette. The crowd, persuaded by the tricolour, dispersed. The three days of revolution, ‘les trois glorieuses’, were over.

The transition to a monarchy was quickly achieved. Two days later, having confirmed his cousin’s appointment, Charles X abdicated in favour of his ten-year-old grandson, the Duc de Bordeaux. But Orléans had come too far to stand down now. The abdication was announced without reference to Bordeaux, and on 8 August, after intensive discussions, limiting and redefining the royal powers, he was invited to take the throne as Louis-Philippe, ‘roi des Français’ – or, as he was known, the citizen king. King of the French, but not of France, he based his legitimacy on his claim to be the nation’s choice.

From the moment Charles X had been defeated Talleyrand had been in constant touch with Louis-Philippe and had worked with him closely on the discussions leading up to his acceptance of the crown. Far worse than the most reactionary regime would have been a return to the anarchy of the French Revolution, while the idea of a republic, first tried in 1792, still carried hideous memories of the Terror. The best hope for stability, in their view, lay with a representative monarchy along the lines set out in 1814, and first envisaged by the constitutionalists in 1789. With Louis-Philippe’s accession to the throne this aim had finally been achieved. For Talleyrand, after more than 40 years, the wheel had come full circle.

Order had been restored in France, but the new government’s position, attacked by disappointed republicans on the left and angry legitimists on the right, was still precarious. A period of peace abroad was essential to calm the political passions at home. It was far from certain, however, that the great powers of Europe would recognise the new regime. It was true that Louis-Philippe was a Bourbon, head of the French royal family’s younger line; it was true too that in accepting the crown he had managed to contain the spread of revolution. But Austria, Russia and Prussia, the so-called Holy Alliance, created in 1815 to preserve the principle of legitimacy in Europe, were making threatening noises; it seemed for a moment that they might combine forces to restore the monarchy of Charles X. The recognition of the new regime on 30 August by the British prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, did much to stay their hand. The subsequent appointment of Talleyrand, the most experienced statesman in Europe, as French ambassador to London, was a further source of reassurance. ‘Since M. de Talleyrand is associated with the new French government,’ the tsar was said to have remarked, ‘it must necessarily have a chanc...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Supporting Cast
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• 1 • The July Revolution
• 2 • Ambassador in London
• 3 • The Belgian Conference
• 4 • Social Successes
• 5 • The Search for a Monarch
• 6 • The Eighteen Articles
• 7 • French Troops in Belgium!
• 8 • ‘A Firm and Cordial Entente’
• 9 • The Triumph of Reform
• 10 • Leave of Absence
• 11 • Besieging Antwerp
• 12 • A New Challenge
• 13 • The Quadruple Alliance
• 14 • A Changing Scene
• 15 • Time to Go
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Images Section