893 



TALLEYRAND-PERIGORD, CHARLES. 



TALLEYRAND-PERIGORD, CHARLES. 



604 



motion. A constituent committee was appointed immediately after 

 the capture of the Bastille, and he was the tecond person nominated a 

 member of it. In this capacity he was called upon to take part in 

 maturing measures which have had a lasting influence upon tlie pro- 

 gress of affairs in France : the first of theso was the re-distribution of 

 the national territory into districts better adapted than the old pro- 

 vinces for the purposes of government ; the second was the organi- 

 sation of a system of finance. In the financial discussions which took 

 place in the committee and assembly, M. do Talleyrand retained his 

 dislike of lotteries. He supported all or most of the various loans 

 proposed by Necker ; and seconded Mirabeau's exhortations to keep 

 faith with the national creditor. He suggested practical measures 

 with a view to this end, and among others the sale of Church lands 

 (he had previously supported the abolition of tithes), reserving how- 

 ever a competent provision for the priesthood, and even improving 

 the condition of the poorer clergy. He also proposed to establish a 

 1 caisse d'amortissement,' as an additional guarantee to the state's 

 creditors. The task of making arrangements for levying the part of 

 the revenue derived from taxes upon persons exercising professions, 

 and upon transfers of property, devolved upon M. de Talleyrand. 

 Connected with his labours in preparing a new territorial division of 

 France, and a new method of collecting the national revenue, was the 

 motion which he made and carried in the Assembly, in August 1790, 

 to the effect that the king should be intreated to write to his Britannic 

 majesty, to engage the parliament of England to concur with the 

 National Assembly in fixing a natural unit of weights and measures ; 

 that, under the auspices of the two nations, an equal number of com- 

 missioners from the Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of 

 London might unite to determine the length of the pendulum in the 

 latitude of 45, or in any other latitude that might be thought 

 preferable, and to deduce from thence an invariable standard of 

 weights and measures. At the same time that he was taking part 

 with his colleagues of the Constituent Committee in these labours he 

 was charged by them with the important task of preparing the report 

 upon national education, which was read to the Assembly on the 10th, 

 llth, and 19th of September 1791. The basis of the system advo- 

 cated in this report was the secularisation of instruction : education 

 was to be the gift of the state, not of the Church ; the state was to 

 provide instruction for those who proposed to enter the Church, 

 exactly as it was to provide instruction for those who proposed to 

 enter any of the other learned professions. Equal stress was laid 

 upon the establishment of elementary schools in every canton ; and 

 of a higher class of schools, for the benefit of those who wore not 

 destined to embrace a learned profession, in the chief town of every 

 district. Two acts of M. de Talleyrand, which have been much 

 commented upon, appear to be as it were necessary corollaries of the 

 principles avowed in the legislative career we have been passing in 

 review : his appearance as principal actor in the theatrical celebration 

 of the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille ; and his taking upon 

 him the office of consecrating the national clergy. 



It is absolutely necessary that some estimate be formed of the 

 conduct and character of M. de Talleyrand while a member of the first 

 National Assembly, as a guide to an appreciation of his far more 

 enigmatical subsequent career. M. de Talleyrand entered the 

 Assembly with the reputation of a dexterous negociator, which he had 

 acquired in his discharge of the office of agent to the clergy. He had 

 then, and he retained in after-life, the character of a self-indulgent 

 man, of a man with a large instinct of self-preservation, but also of a 

 humane man. The disciple of Voltaire and Fontenelle could scarcely 

 be a very zealous Christian, but M. de Talleyrand had always been a 

 respecter of conventional morality : his was precisely that kind of dis- 

 position and intellect that supports a church not from belief, but as a 

 useful engine for preserving order in society. M. de Talleyrand, like 

 all the literati of his day, had a theoretical belief in the equality of 

 men ; at the same time that with regard to the privileges of the 

 nobility, he was inclined to support them in the same way that he did 

 the authority of the Church as a useful political engine. But in- 

 voluntarily and perhaps unconsciously M. de Talleyrand was a warmer 

 partisan of the aristocracy than the clergy ; he waa noble by birth 

 and attached by taste to the habits of a select society, whereas the 

 ecclesiastical character forced upon him against his will had some- 

 thing repulsive to him. In short, M. de Talleyrand saw clearly the 

 rottenness and the absurdity of many of the old institutions of hi? 

 country : he was willing, desirous, that government should be 

 organised and act in a manner to promote the general happiness : but 

 he had no faith in the capacity of men for self-government ; and he 

 had been educated in a church, many of whose members were at that 

 time obliged to reconcile their consciences to remaining in it by adopting 

 the maxim that they were deceiving men for their own good. M. de 

 Talleyrand's idea, and he entertained it in common with a considerable 

 number, was, that the Revolution should be guided, checked and 

 rendered useful by approximating the constitution of the French to 

 that of the English government. He cared little for the creed of the 

 Church, but he wished to preserve the Church, and to render it in 

 France what the Established Church was in England. Hence his care, 

 even while laying hands on the property of the Church for the 

 exigencies of the state, to retain an adequate provision for the clergy, 

 hence his anxiety to identify the clergy with the nation. His 



anxiety to establish a constitution modelled upon that of England was 

 always avowed. His views (the views he adopted, it ia not meant to 

 attribute originality to them) regarding territorial divisions and the 

 organisation of local government, finance, and education, though over- 

 borne for a time in the storm of the Revolution, have revived and been 

 adopted by each succeeding dynasty. The recklessness as to the means 

 by which he attained his ends which he displayed even at this period 

 of his career is no evidence of insincerity, but merely of the want of 

 faith in men, which the treatment he had experienced in early life, and 

 his observation of the society he habitually mixed in, had instilled 

 into him. It waa his weakness through life to pride himself in the 

 display of his power of refined mockery, regardless of the enemies it 

 created : he gave vent to his spirit of raillery in actions as well as in 

 words ; and thus lent a grotesque colouring to his coups (Pttat, which 

 rendered them more startling than if they had been as prosaic aa 

 those of other men. The most startling of his devices is his solemn 

 inauguration of the constitutional monarchy by the religious celebra- 

 tion of the 14th of July. But the love of theatrical presentation and 

 the delusive belief that good may be effected by it is strong in every 

 man at some period of his life. Talleyrand in ail likelihood looked 

 forward at that moment to being the founder and future primate of 

 a church which should be to France what the Anglo-Episcopal has 

 been to England. The means to which he was driven to have 

 recourse in order to carry through the installation of the national 

 bishops, undeceived him, and brought back his early disgust for the 

 profession with redoubled force. He not long after resigned his 

 bishopric of Autun, and at the same time renounced his ecclesiastical 

 character. 



The history of M de Talleyrand from the dissolution of the Con- 

 stituent Assembly, iu September 1791, till the overthrow of the 

 monarchy, on the 10th of August 1792, would be instructive were it 

 merely as a demonstration of the folly of the self-denying ordinance 

 with which that body terminated its career. Its members were 

 declared ineligible to the next assembly, and also incapable of receiving 

 any appointment from the crown until two years had elapsed from 

 the date of its dissolution. The consequence was, that M. de Talley- 

 rand among others was rendered incapable of any legislative or 

 ministerial office. It was at that time an object with all who desired 

 that the Revolution should have fair play, to preserve peace with 

 England, which, although still ostensibly neutral, was every day pre- 

 senting additional symptoms of alienation. The court party hated M. de 

 Talleyrand for having taken part frankly with the Revolution ; the 

 republicans hated him for his advocacy of a limited monarchy ; all 

 parties distrusted him on account of his eternal sneer ; but all parties 

 agreed that he was the only man whose talents fitted him for the 

 delicate mission to England. And it was impossible to appoint him 

 to it. He was despatched however, in January 1792, without any 

 ostensible diplomatic character, to sound the English ministry, and 

 attempt to commence negociations. His want of an official character 

 allowed the queen to indulge her feelings of personal dislike to the 

 ex-bishop of Autun by turning her back upon him when he was pre- 

 sented at St. James's ; and this reception at once ensured his exclu- 

 sion from general society, and rendered him powerless. After the 

 accession of the Gironde to office, the attempt to ensure at least 

 neutrality on the part of England was renewed : Chauvelin was sent 

 to England as nominal, and along with him Talleyrand as real ambas- 

 sador. By this time however the French government had become as 

 obnoxious to the general public of England as to the court circles :. the 

 torrent was probably too strong to have been stemmed by Talleyrand, 

 even though he had been in a condition to act directly and in person. 

 He could do nothing, forced as he was to act by the instrumentality 

 of a man too jealous and opinionative to conform honestly to the 

 directions of one whose instructions necessarily made him feel himself 

 a mere puppet. Talleyrand's good faith at this period in labouring to 

 preserve peace between England and France, as the only means of 

 rendering a constitutional monarchy possible in his own country, 

 and the steadiness with which he pursued -his object, undaunted by 

 the most gross personal insults, are satisfactorily established by the 

 narrative of Dumoiit. 



Talleyrand was at Paris when the events of the 10th of August put 

 an end to the monarchy ; and it required all his dexterity to obtain 

 passports from Danton, to enable him to quit Paris. He fled to 

 England, and having saved little of his property, he was obliged to 

 sell his library there to procure himself the means of support. The 

 English government, jealous of his presence, after some time ordered 

 him to leave the country in twenty-four hours ; and, proscribed in 

 France, he was obliged, with a dilapidated fortune, to seek refuge in 

 America, when he had almost attained his fortieth year. 



Madame de Stael has claimed, and apparently with a good title, the 

 credit of instigating Chcnier to demand the recall of M. de Talleyrand 

 after the fall of Robespierre and the termination of the reign of terror. 

 The National Institute was founded about this time, and M. de Talley- 

 rand had in his absence been made a member of the class of moral 

 and political science. At the first sitting of this society which he 

 attended he was elected secretary, an office which he held six months. 

 During this period he read two papers, afterwards published in the 

 'Me"moires de la Classe des Sciences Morales et Politiques de 1'Institut 

 National,' which are justly considered not only as the most able and 



