One man against the world
Timely lessons for the Trump era from the careers of Talleyrand ... and Napoleon
From the beginning, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s life was a struggle. Born with a club foot and raised at a distance from his aristocratic parents, the young Talleyrand was dealt a stern fate: his younger brother would inherit the family name and title while Talleyrand, too lame to serve in the army, would become a priest.
The church, with its required celibacy for clergy, was not a natural home for the young man. That became clear when he met a woman while he was a seminary student.
“A chance encounter in a church, an offer to share his umbrella in the rain, led to an intimacy that lasted for two years,” wrote Duff Cooper, the English politician whose 1932 Talleyrand biography is a classic. “She was a young actress whom her parents had forced to go upon the stage against her will; he against his will was in process of becoming a priest. … the priest who could not love the Church found consolation in the arms of the actress who hated the stage.”
“It is odd that his first romance, like that of Sir Walter Scott, should have begun under an umbrella.”
Improbably Talleyrand would become a bishop of the French church and almost a cardinal, but for the opposition of the queen, Marie Antoinette. He would also be excommunicated by the Pope for backing the French revolutionary regime’s assertion of control over the church.
But Talleyrand’s mark on history had little to do with his short-lived career as a bishop. It was as a statesman and diplomat that we remember him. And in several ways, his career left behind lessons that are very relevant to the world of 2025. One of them has to do with his venality, but oddly enough, another has to do with his adherence to liberal principles.
‘Never be a poor devil’
Talleyrand would become notorious for his prolific love life —and for his cunning, a quality that saved his neck from the guillotine of the French Revolution, thanks to well-timed periods of exile in England and America.
But it was Talleyrand’s greed that exploded into controversy in the United States in 1798, during the presidency of John Adams.
“It was an age of corruption,” wrote Duff Cooper. “In France, as in England, men who went into politics expected, as a general rule, to be paid for their pains.” Once Talleyrand was appointed France’s minister of foreign affairs, he set about acquiring “a tremendous fortune,” Cooper noted. “He received vast sums from many sources, principally from the Governments of other countries.”
The three commissioners President Adams sent to France to negotiate a peace agreement ending the “quasi war” between the two nations were told they would have to pay Talleyrand for the privilege of meeting with him. The three French intermediaries were described in coded letters as “X,” “Y” and “Z.” When Adams made the letters public, Americans were outraged by the “XYZ Affair.”
David Lawday gives the incident an expanded look in his 2006 biography of Talleyrand, “Napoleon’s Master.”
The representatives of France said that “Talleyrand required a sweetener of 50,000 English pounds placed at his personal disposal. This should be attached to a hefty U.S. trade loan to France, signaling American support for the financially strapped republic.”
“You must pay money,” one of the French agents told the Americans.
“You must pay a lot of money.”
The exchange heated up. Accused of failing to respond to the demand, one U.S. commissioner, the revolutionary war general Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, insisted that the Americans had already given an answer.
The answer was: “No, not a sixpence!”
One of the other commissioners sent to negotiate with France was John Marshall, later the chief justice of the United States. In a toast at a dinner for Marshall in Philadelphia on June 18, 1798, Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina coined a phrase that would shape U.S. foreign policy for years: “Millions for defense but not a cent for tribute.”
Talleyrand suffered some embarrassment when his corruption was revealed, but in France, he could get away with it. The Americans eventually got an unproductive meeting with Talleyrand even though they didn’t pay him off. But other governments did give him money, and it was eagerly accepted.
As Duff Cooper wrote, Talleyrand “had only one principle so far as money was concerned which he himself enunciated in youth and clung to in age: 'Il ne faut jamais être pauvre diable.’” (One must never be a poor devil.)
Demanding tribute
Today the United States is not an infant republic as it was when Talleyrand, representing one of the most powerful nations on earth, asked for his payment.
The U.S. is a superpower with enormous wealth and a gigantic consumer market to which other nations must have access. Today it is the nation demanding tribute.
The Trump administration is using its leverage everywhere: to obtain a new Air Force One, to acquire a “golden share” in Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, to gain tariff deals with vague promises of investment in American projects favored by President Donald Trump, to force universities to pay hundreds of millions to settle accusations of allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus, to pressure the media to settle libel suits brought by the president. Trump has said the money goes to benefit the nation, conservative causes he supports or his eventual presidential library, rather than his personal gain.
Critics argue that the president has violated the emoluments clauses of the Constitution. But it is hard to see that the same Supreme Court conservative majority that granted Trump absolute immunity for official acts during his presidency would ding him for violating the emoluments clause.
The scale of the “tax” Trump is exacting from foreign governments, industries, universities and the media is unprecedented: certainly it could run into the billions, depending on the lifespan of the tariffs.
Trump wants more than just the money. He is using tariffs and other threats to demand, so far unsuccessfully, that Brazil stop the trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro, that Israel cancel the trial of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that Russian President Vladimir Putin end his war against Ukraine.
Those battles are being waged in public. But it may be that what happens behind the scenes will prove especially significant. In an article for National Review, Caleb Petitt of the Independent Institute think tank, pointed out that after imposing the steepest tariffs in a century, all Trump “has to do is wait for interest groups to ask for exemptions.”
“He benefited from his ability to hand out exemptions during his first term. Research suggests that handouts were less likely to go to firms that supported his political opponents, and were more likely to go to firms that supported him.”
“Fossil fuels were exempted from the tariffs, and Big Oil contributed $96 million to the Trump reelection campaign. PET resin, the material used to make plastic bottles, was exempted; that benefits Reyes Holding and Coca-Cola, who were both significant supporters of the campaign. American footwear brands are currently asking for exemptions. Trump offered some exemptions to automakers after major lobbying efforts. The value of tariff lobbying has increased by 277 percent since the first quarter of 2024.”
Trump’s hunt for trade deals has “turned into a play for cold, hard cash as he tries to leverage U.S. economic power to cajole other nations to make multibillion-dollar investments in order to maintain access to America’s market,” wrote Alan Rappeport in the New York Times.
Immense power
All of this adds up to an immense amount of power in the hands of one man, far more than Talleyrand could employ since he was only a minister and adviser behind the throne of others, including the emperor Napoleon, rather than a head of state himself.
Talleyrand’s thirst for money was endless but it wasn’t indiscriminate. There was an “honor among thieves” quality to it. As Duff Cooper noted, “It was characteristic of Talleyrand that he saw no harm in accepting large sums of money from the Polish nobility for advocating this policy in which he believed, and it is equally characteristic and more important to remember that having failed to secure the adoption of the policy he felt obliged to return to those who had paid it the money that he had received.”
But there’s another aspect of Talleyrand’s diplomacy that warrants our attention. He helped put Napoleon on the imperial throne, and he proved useful to the emperor in many ways, not least as a source of flattery. But Talleyrand actually believed in many things that Napoleon disdained.
He sought peace; Napoleon waged constant war. Talleyrand admired the limited, constitutional monarchy in Britain and believed regimes could only succeed if they were viewed as legitimate by the people. He favored freedom of the press, an independent judiciary and free trade. Napoleon clamped down on free expression and scorned the British.
Talleyrand wanted a Europe that wasn’t subject to the whims and dictates of a single individual, even though that person was the head of the state he served. Talleyrand didn’t just disagree with Napoleon’s policies but worked actively in secret to subvert them. The emperor eventually realized he could no longer trust Talleyrand, but foolishly allowed him to remain in the imperial court.
In January, 1809, Napoleon let loose his anger at Talleyrand at a privy council meeting. In Cooper’s account, Napoleon called his minister “a thief, a coward, and a traitor” and said “that he had never worthily performed a single duty, that he had deceived everyone with whom he had ever dealt, that he did not believe in God, and would sell his own father. … Maddened by the impassivity of his victim, the Corsican lost all control and proceeded to taunt him with his lameness and to throw in his face the infidelity of his wife.” According to Napoleon, Talleyrand was “nothing but so much dung in a silk stocking.”
Talleyrand didn’t say anything in his defense. But, Cooper wrote, “As Talleyrand limped slowly down the broad corridor he turned to one of those who had been watching his ordeal and said calmly: 'What a pity that such a great man should be so ill-bred!'“
The Bourbons come back
As Napoleon’s invasion of Russia began to fail and rival nations struck back at him, Talleyrand worked to lay the groundwork for the next regime: the return of the Bourbon royal family that had been dethroned during the French Revolution. But even though he eased the transition to rule by King Louis XVIII, Talleyrand couldn’t persuade the royals to fully accept his liberal principles.
Of the Bourbons, he lamented, “They have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing.”
Duff Cooper made a wise choice of subject in writing a biography of Talleyrand. Cooper was also a colorful figure, according to Michael Hofmann, who wrote the afterword to Cooper’s novel “Operation Heartbreak.” Hofmann observed:
“Duff Cooper, then: soldier, diplomat, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, man of letters. Also gambler, lover, and bon viveur … Cooper was a product of Eton and New College, Oxford; a war hero, in what appears to have been a somewhat chaotic solitary action in the so-called ‘Battle of the Mist’ on the Albert Canal, for which he received a DSO (Distinguished Service Order); and a celebrity husband as the successful wooer of a famous British beauty, Lady Diana Cooper, all by 1920.”
Cooper served in Parliament for two decades. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he resigned in protest against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. He returned to government in Winston Churchill’s Cabinet, and later served as Ambassador to France.
His biographer John Charmley wrote: “Few men can have enjoyed life more than Duff.”
As an active player in politics, government and diplomacy, Cooper had an innate feel for the stances Talleyrand adopted. One of those in particular stands out today.
When the French diplomat, then in his late 60s, spoke out against restrictions on freedom of the press sought by the Bourbons, he also had a word of warning for anyone like Napoleon who attempted to unilaterally impose his brand of thinking on the rest of the world.
“In our time it is not easy to deceive for long.”
“There is someone,” Talleyrand went on, “who is cleverer than Voltaire, cleverer than Bonaparte, cleverer than any of the Directors, than any Minister in the past or in the future; and that person is everybody (tout le monde). To engage, or at least to persist, in a struggle in which you may find everybody interested on the other side is a mistake, and nowadays all political mistakes are dangerous.”
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Fabulous recounting of the Duff book and Talleyrand himself. The famous French statesman would fit in nicely in the current American administration, with one exception. He was extremely competent, knew exactly what he was doing, and others knew that about him, too, including Napoleon. One quote I recall from that book underscores the former (I paraphrase): “He had no scruples and no respect for those who did.” Another anecdote (that I recall from Bob Zoellick’s book “America in the World”) underscores how much our own country has changed since the founding: Shuffling along a Manhattan street one evening, Talleyrand noticed Alexander Hamilton working late by candlelight at his law office (this was after Hamilton had stepped down from being Treasury Secretary). Talleyrand thought to himself that in most countries he knew besides the United States, a man of Hamilton’s stature would have accumulated all the money he would ever need while serving in high office and never have to work for a living again. Thanks for posting.