Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Périgord, has been very well served by biographers. Alfred Duff Cooper’s 1932 life of the long-serving French politician and diplomat is an ornament of English letters, and since then four other impressive works have been written on the same subject. Like his distinguished predecessors, Robin Harris admires his subject and has no hesitation in hailing Talleyrand as a progressive statesman.1 Fortunately, however, he also gives the reader plenty of evidence to support a radically different view, that Talleyrand was in fact one of the most revolting human beings to have besmirched the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Written with immense scholarship, captivating wit, and a natural feel for European politics in the turbulent half-century between Louis XV and Louis-Philippe, Harris has subtitled his book “Betrayer and Saviour of France.” The first part of the epithet is undeniable—Talleyrand comprehensively betrayed every monarch and government he ever swore to serve—but it is left unproven that Talleyrand ever really saved France. What he did do on every conceivable occasion was to offer French foreign policy to the highest foreign bidder, although in his defense it might be argued that he rarely delivered. As Harris admits, his hero practiced “venality on a scale that made even venal contemporaries blush.”
Yet Talleyrand was forgiven by regime after regime. His own explanation why his various lies and crimes never seemed to be held against him was “the frivolity of the French,” which might indeed have been a reason.
