Talleyrand

"Well, who wasn’t Talleyrand? He was a statesman in France before, during and after the French revolution. He was able to be foreign minister under a number of different regimes when people who were deviating from the orthodoxy of the moment were getting their heads chopped off left and right. He is the poster child for landing on your feet no matter what. Because he was so thoughtful, careful and obeisant, and always took care of himself, he was deeply distrusted by everyone. And yet he was also trusted by everyone, because he was given top posts and top assignments which he always handled well and made a bundle to boot. This was a time of cruelty and chaos when many people died for having principles. Napoleon had principles, and he brought tremendous destruction. All of the people of the Terror – Robespierre and others – were people of tremendous principle. Having principle is no guarantee against evil and destruction. When times are turbulent, sometimes survival is the best principle. One woman who knew Talleyrand at the time said of him: “One of the first things that struck me when I first talked with him was his complete lack of any illusion or of any enthusiasm.” I think what she meant was that he saw things as they were, not as he wanted them to be and not as other people saw them. That is another hallmark of prudence. But it’s always lonely. I’m grateful that you brought that word up. I did a study many years ago of various modalities of therapy, from Freudianism all the way through to cognitive behavioural therapy. My question was about their models of mental health rather than mental illness. In other words, what is the cure designed to bring about? The interesting thing was that despite the divergence and conflict among these modalities of understanding illness, they all had the exact same model of mental health. It was exactly what you just said: Adaptability. Mental illness was seen as a rigidity of response. Flexibility is another word for it. Flexibility means that when you have no illusions about reality then you can see what’s real. And when you can see what’s real, you can respond to it not in a stereotyped way but in a way that best serves your goals in the context of your circumstances. This is talked about all the time in the psychology of investing – poor investors have emotional relationships with their investments. They feel a tender connection to something because they own it, rather than seeing the reality that it’s just a pile of money with a label on it. Research shows that people get caught up in financial bubbles – even when they are knowledgeable about the danger of them – precisely because, unlike Talleyrand, they have a rigid and supine response to their own illusions."

"I don’t know how many biographies of Talleyrand there are in English and in French. I’ve read several in both languages over the years, but Duff Cooper achieved an extraordinary feat with this short book. It’s only about a hundred and fifty pages long. It brings Talleyrand completely to life and covers his own life, bringing out the person he was and the achievements he had to his credit (or, as some people would say, to his discredit). In a funny kind of way, Talleyrand has the same sort of problems with his personality and so on as Kissinger. There are some people who think he was a real scoundrel, and there are others who admire him greatly. He was devious, crafty, a fundamental survivor. He was a priest, which people tend to forget – I think he himself forgot it fairly often. He had a fairly interesting personal life. He managed to survive and steer French foreign policy through a very difficult period during the Revolution, the Napoleonic period and post-Napoleon. He was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna, which sorted out Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, but he also served Napoleon very faithfully for a while. He had a great capacity for compromise, for staying on the right side of things, for spotting which was the right side of things and making for it. He rendered very considerable service to France, quite apart from managing to keep going himself and to survive through all sorts of difficult periods and jobs at a time in history when survival was jolly difficult. No. I think it depends a little bit how you define ‘devious’. A diplomat has to understand why people are doing things, and one of the essentials in any diplomatic negotiation is to start by asking yourself what you want, what you hope to achieve, and then to ask yourself what the other guy wants and how he will try and get it, and then to be willing to sway with the punch of that and to recognise that if you are going to have an agreement you are going to have to compromise with what the other person wants. Is that devious? I don’t know, but it’s part of diplomatic skill."

"Talleyrand had a totally extraordinary political life. He supported six different separate regimes in his career and, naturally, got a reputation for being a turncoat. Some people have argued, including Duff Cooper in this brilliant biography, that he did have some central messages that he believed all his life—like liberalism and an affection for the English-style constitution. But the key reason to read this book is that it’s literature as much as history. It’s a beautifully written evocation of an era that Duff Cooper, having been British ambassador to Paris, knew well and actually saw the last glimmers of. And stays foreign minister or in the diplomatic sphere in some way or another for the rest of his life. He thereby met almost all the important people in Europe and was at the table when all the great decisions were made. He was born an aristocrat and was later an unfrocked bishop. He had a lame foot rather like Byron and Goebbels which apparently turns you into a sex maniac; he turned his niece into his mistress which I think today would have him defenestrated but, nonetheless, no one seemed to hold that against him either. It tells us that it was always rocky. Napoleon, quite rightly, didn’t trust him. Talleyrand was working especially with the Russians behind Napoleon’s back. Despite being extremely witty and obviously wonderful company, he was a dangerous person to have working for you. Talleyrand generally thought that France should be at peace and, of course, that’s very difficult when you’re the foreign minister of a conqueror. I don’t see that you can call Napoleon a warmonger given that, as we’ve said, of the seven wars of the coalitions he only started two. But I think there was a legitimist jihad against him and against the French Revolution. And he had to fight those. But, overall, Talleyrand was someone who, as a good negotiator and a diplomat, wanted peace. He was willing to betray absolutely everybody in the process. It wasn’t just Napoleon; he betrayed five different regimes in the course of his life. I’m certain that had he lived any longer, he would have betrayed the July Monarchy as well. This is another reason to recognise that Napoleon is not a proto-Hitler in the way he’s been portrayed by many British historians. If he were a proto-Hitler, he would have shot Talleyrand and Fouché (his police minister) years before. Napoleon was a dictator politically, in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators like Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler , and Stalin. When you say “for instance”, that implies that there were 20 or 30 Jaffas but there weren’t. There’s one at Jaffa and then, after that, in 1796 in Padua, Italy, he also let the troops run riot. But other than that, there just aren’t the mass executions. There aren’t the 40,000 people who died during the Reign of Terror, for example. “Napoleon was a dictator politically in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators” I go into Jaffa in some detail in my book about how the men who he executed had earlier promised to fight against France. And then, six weeks later, they were captured fighting against France. According to the very harsh rules of law in the late eighteenth century, they forfeited their lives. Yes, I think it’s hugely misguided. I think that commanders throughout history have had to harden their hearts to the inevitable losses made, but I don’t think he ever threw men into battle willy-nilly. He was one of the great commanders in history and one of the great soldiers of all time. Great soldiers don’t do that. And he was personally affected. There are times when he’s in tears in his tent after a battle, in the same way that Wellington was. The idea of him being some cold-hearted unemotional figure profoundly misunderstands him, as does the idea of him being humourless. Throughout my book, there are something like 80 or 90 Napoleon jokes. He was constantly making humorous remarks that even 200 years later remain extremely funny. That’s very good. There’s also the one with the cardinal archbishop of Paris who writes this oleaginous letter to him before the coronation. Napoleon makes a note on a piece of paper which says “please pay 12,000 francs to the archbishop out of the theatrical fund.”"