Yet he possessed an astonishing capacity for peaceful persuasion. Though with his club-foot and constant spitting and hawking he reminded some of an old, fuddled village schoolmaster, many of his countrywomen still found him irresistible. He had taken an exact measure of his fellow creatures. He had no wish to make them better or anything but what they were, nor did he attempt to impress them with his moral superiority. Instead, he addressed himself with unfailing tact and good humour to inducing them to do whatever should make him comfortable and secure. Being habitually idle, he relied on others for almost everything he did.
He had spent his youth in the most cultured society on earth, and his taste for pleasure and good living was exquisitely refined. He used to say that no one who had not lived before the Revolution had any idea how pleasant life could be. For all his coarse moral fibre, he was wholly civilised. Though he had contrived to live by democracy, he hated its drab social consequences. It followed that he wished, so far as was safe, to restore the life of privilege for his own enjoyment. As this was quite dissociated in his mind from any wish to ensure it for his class—for he was wholly without loyalty—he was able to do so while employing the revolutionary technique by which he had risen.
In this he served the future better than he knew or probably cared. After a quarter of a century in a France that was parvenu and restless, he wished to spend his remaining years in one that, while still favouring the adroit and cunning, should enable them to enjoy their spoils
in safety. He was the patron of the profiteer, the contractor and the banker, of such aristocrats, old and new, as had made their peace with Power and wished to stabilise things at the highest possible level of good living: of all whose bread was well buttered and who, knowing that any further change must be for the worst, wished to keep things as they were. An artificial ancien regime of those who had been clever and sharp enough to survive the Terror and Napoleon was not likely to endure except on a broad bottom of popular prosperity. Talleyrand, therefore, made it his business to give it one.
His political aims were twofold. He sought to make France comfortable and prosperous and, by securing for its facade of legitimate monarchy an honoured and respectable place in Europe, to satisfy its wounded vanity. Though neither an orator nor an administrator— he was so indolent that he could scarcely pen a long letter or dispatch —he understood, like Wellington, what could be done with time. In his prescient patience he had outlasted Napoleon. He now set himself to outlast the legend of his conquests. By guaranteeing, by his presence near the throne, the Revolutionary gains of the new bourgeoisie and peasantry, he gave a reluctant France time to settle down and exploit those gains. The natural wealth of the country, its traditional civilisation and the innate intelligence and capacity for enjoyment of its people, would in time, he saw, do the rest. They would turn to pleasure as flowers to the light.
For under the surface of the nerve-racked, turbulent France created by the Revolution was much that was gracious and instinct with new life. The frugal peasants toiling to improve their land, the industrious artificers in their neat clothes, the cheerful throngs of pleasure-seekers, oblivious of class or nationality, flocking to some fete-champetre or gliding to music in painted barges along the tranquil rivers on summer holidays, were earnest of a happier future, if only the national mind could be deflected from thoughts of conquest. So were the puppet-theatres and the crowds, all bustle and loquacity, on the tree-lined boulevards, the delicate, elegant toys in the shop windows, the opera dancers with their skill and grace, the grisettes with their speaking eyes and tripping gaiety, the universal sweetness of address that marked the very gamins of the streets. "Pardon, monsieur" a beggar boy, rebuffed, cried with a bow to a Scottish visitor, "une autre occasion!" For all their vices and blackguardism the French people were artists in living. Haydon, walking in the meadows near Magny, heard a violin and, on entering, found a party dancing in the cool of the summer evening with the grace inherent in their race. When a great mineralogist entered the lecture room at the Jardin des Plantes the entire audience rose to show its respect for learning.1
By creating a moratorium on war and revolution Talleyrand gave such shoots the opportunity to grow. When a generation later another Napoleon seized the throne of France, the itch to conquer had gone out of her. The Grand Nation had become the land of the artist and academician, the peasant and the bon-vivant. By ceasing to be gigantic, in Talleyrand's words, she had grown great. It happened so gradually that no one realised it had happened at all; the French in 1870 still thought they were a conquering race. But when they left the theatre of Offenbach for the theatre of war, they found that it was not so. For all their valour they no longer enjoyed fighting.
In the international sphere Talleyrand's service to France was more spectacular. In diplomacy he had no equals. His country's conquerors were aristocrats by birth who had been belatedly made realists by experience: he himself had been both when most of them were in the schoolroom. He had dealt with them in the days of their collaboration; they had known him as their dreaded master's unjust steward who had done them favours on the sly and bid them say nothing. He could talk their language, whether of the ancien regime or the thieves' kitchen. His conversation, matching his furrowed, disillusioned face, was that of a cynic, but also a gentleman; he was without the professional wit's pedantry, yet every now and then could come out with some mot winch was never forgotten. His genius lay in simplification and clarification: the Aladdin's lamp which brave men sometimes fashion for themselves in a revolutionary age.
It was Talleyrand who had prevailed upon the Czar to bring back the Bourbons and, in doing so, to grant France a liberal peace. Without his resource and address Castlereagh could not have persuaded the victorious war lords to agree to a restoration for which they had such scant sympathy and for which in France there seemed scarcely any support. But this limping renegade with his crooked face and
1 Haydon, I, 246-8, 249, 251, 260-1, 270, 277; Wansey, 12; De Selincourt, II, 902; Dudley, 255-6; Gronow, II, 299; Mercer, II, 30, 89, 128, 264; Simpson, 105, 107, 125, 143-4; Bury, I, 263-4; Marlay Letters, 265-6; Stanley, 99, 124-5. And see an interesting passage in Greville (Suppl.), I, 86-7.
body made the impressionable Alexander see that a Bourbon restoration was the way to tranquillise the country and that the only alternative was a Jacobin Republic. Anything in between, Talleyrand explained, would be an intrigue that could not last. Convinced by that beguiling tongue, the Czar abandoned his romantic projects of a Napoleonic Regency or of a new dynasty under his protege, Bernadotte.
Having, as the restored King's Foreign Minister, negotiated a peace which left a vanquished France larger than in the days of the Grand Monarch, Talleyrand prepared to assert her right to a leading place in the councils of Europe. The objective he set himself was the destruction of the united front which Russia, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain had formed at Chaumont. For unless he could dissolve this twenty-years league against France, her people, when they recovered from their defeat, were certain to challenge both it and the settlement it guaranteed. The old cycle of revolution and war would then begin again.
Since the enemy commanded the bigger battalions, Talleyrand formulated no detailed plan of campaign. Like Wellington under similar circumstances, he prepared to wait upon their mistakes and exploit them as they arose. His strength was that he knew exactly what he wanted and, representing a new Government, was not hampered by previous entanglements.
For those with whom he had to negotiate, though they had bound themselves to act together, had not freed themselves thereby from earlier commitments. These, since they conflicted, were bound to involve them in dispute. Russia, who had received Sweden's Finnish provinces as the price of earlier subservience to Napoleon, had in 1812 regained that country's goodwill by promising her Norway, the ancient fief of the pro-French King of Denmark. Britain, grateful for any ally, had underwritten this lamentable transaction. A year later Russia had secured Prussia's alliance by
undertaking to restore to her territories as extensive as those she had enjoyed before Jena. Russia, Prussia and Britain had acknowledged Austria's claim to the territories of the extinguished Venetian Republic and to suzerainty in Italy as compensation for her lost Belgian provinces. The Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, in return for an offer of military aid and in gratitude, it was rumoured, for the favours of his wife, Napoleon's sister, had secretly guaranteed to Joachim Murat—an innkeeper's son—his usurped Neapolitan throne. For, despite the claims of legitimacy, this promised better for a Habsburg hegemony beyond the Alps than a return of the lawful Bourbon house.
Of these conflicting commitments the most embarrassing was that by which Russia had bound herself to double Prussia's size and population. Most of the promised increase was based on rights derived from flagrant aggressions during the early years of the Wars. By partitioning Poland two decades before, Russia, Austria and Prussia had enlarged their territories at the cost of allowing France to dominate Europe. It had been their preoccupation in this which had enabled the Revolutionary armies to overrun Germany. The subsequent occupation of Vienna, Berlin and Moscow had been a just retribution.
After Jena, Napoleon had seized most of Prussia's Polish spoils, including the former capital, and re-constituted them as the Duchy of Warsaw, making much play in his words, though not in his deeds, of Polish nationality and patriotism. To this he had added after his victory in 1809 part of Austrian Poland—Cracow and part of Galicia —placing the whole under the nominal sovereignty of his puppet, the King of Saxony. Early in 1813 all these territories—the whole of eighteenth-century Poland except the portion still remaining in Austria's hands—had been liberated and occupied by Russian armies.
Unless, therefore, Russia was prepared to hand back to Prussia the latter's Polish territory—and nothing had been said of this in the Russo-Prussian Treaty of Kalisch—she was committed to supporting an equivalent aggrandisement of that State in central and western Europe. It seemed unlikely, after her armies had been the chief instrument in liberating Europe, that she would now withdraw them without some compensation for the sacrifices she had made. Expansion to the west through Poland had been her goal for at least half a century.
Moreover, the Czar of Russia was inspired by progressive ideals. For many years he had had a Polish mistress and a Polish Minister. He profoundly regretted the rape of Poland by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, and her foreign allies. He wished to make amends by reuniting and restoring that ancient kingdom. He wished to become its king. As its liberator, it seemed to him his duty to humanity.
It was never easy to turn Alexander from his duty to humanity. He loved, he said, to sit on his terrace and busy himself with the welfare of mankind.1 He loved praise. He wished to satisfy his allies, the Prussians. He wished—within reason—to please the Poles; he wished to reward his subjects and free them from the bugbear of attack from the West. As the heir of Peter the Great, it was his mission to open the door of Europe to Russia. As God's vicegerent, it was his duty to extend his beneficent sway and liberate the oppressed.
It was difficult for statesmen of commoner clay to deal with a man so devout. He always seemed to have one foot in heaven and one on earth—and Russian earth at that. There were times when his attitude was scarcely of this world. When he entered Paris he assured the city fathers that he had come, not to conquer, but to learn the wish of France and to carry it out for the good of her people. It was not surprising that simple folk far removed from the realities of state regarded him as more than mortal.
Unfortunately the results of his actions were often different from those he intended. When by a magnanimous gesture he liberated— without the slightest provision for their journey—the French prisoners in Russia, they not only died in thousands on the roads but carried typhus into every city of Europe. When he chivalrously granted a safe-conduct to a beautiful Frenchwoman captured in the fighting near Paris, she was immediately raped by Cossacks. Holy Russia was like that. And, for all his liberalism and passion for western civilisation, the Czar was a Russian and not a western ruler. He had acquired the Slav passion for arguing with flawless logic from premises arrived at by mysterious higher processes. And as he seldom stopped talking, was exceedingly vain and, when thwarted, invincibly suspicious, he presented a problem to his ministers and colleagues.
He suffered, too, like all autocrats, from the fact that no one in his entourage could safely contradict him. He was unused to opposition. When he encountered it from his equals, he reacted violently. This unsuited him for diplomacy. The events of the past eighteen months had greatly aggravated this unsuitability. Once he had taken the
1 Havelock, 142.
heroic decision to burn his capital and fight on, Alexander had marched from victory to victory. His natural irresolution and melancholy had been succeeded by a new decision and confidence; he who had been found sobbing after Austerlitz and had feared dethronement during the retreat to Moscow had become the arbiter of Europe's destinies, the prop, as he loved to be told, on which mankind leant. With God's miraculous aid he had ridden at the head of his armies into Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfort and Paris. His shining eyes were raised to Heaven, his high and noble forehead was crowned as with a halo. Tall, magnanimous and dedicated to the service of God, he brought the jubilee. He could not be expected to give way over Poland.
Those responsible for British foreign policy failed at first to appreciate these factors. They knew the Czar as a man of high Christian faith and liberal sympathies who, after an unfortunate spell of collaboration, had helped them to liberate Europe and who now wished, with them, to pacify it. Like everyone in England they deplored the treacherous aggression that had led to the extinction of Poland twenty years before and would have liked to have seen its independence restored. But they knew that, strategically speaking, it was far beyond their power to challenge that twenty-year-old fait accompli. And after a generation of war a crusade by Britain against her allies was unthinkable. Her statesmen, as practical men, saw that the status quo of partition was the only way of avoiding disturbing and dangerous changes elsewhere.
When, therefore, during the preliminary discussions in London the Czar showed himself set on a solution of the Polish problem incompatible with inter-allied agreement and international law, they were much disappointed. They did not object to his proposal to revive a Polish state under his own sovereignty in the parts of Poland which had long been incorporated in Russia; on the contrary, they welcomed it as an instalment, however incomplete, of the restitution due to the Poles. Nor had they any objection to a reasonable expansion of Prussia in western Europe. Now that Austria had abandoned her old outpost in the Netherlands and withdrawn beyond the Rhine, it seemed wise to strengthen the only other German Power capable of resisting French aggression. For this reason the British were ready to overlook Prussia's seizure of Hanover during the earlier stages of the war. They remembered only that she was an old ally who had fought valiantly at the end and led the movement for German liberation.
But the Czar's unilateral claim to almost all Poland and his proposal to compensate Prussia with the entire domain of the King of Saxony struck at the whole system of European equilibrium and at that common action by the victor Powers on which Castlereagh and his colleagues believed that peace depended. To preserve the latter they tried hard to find a compromise that would satisfy the Czar. Being British, they hoped that good would somehow come out of evil. But the Czar, being an autocrat, disapproved of compromise. When the islanders attempted to reason with him, he replied that he had 120,000 troops in Poland and that no one could turn him out.
Such an argument awoke old suspicions which were difficult to still. Russian insistence on expansion in one direction implied Russian expansion in others. Britain, with her minute base and her roots in the ocean, had always been jealous of any Continental Power that sought ascendancy outside Europe. She had fought Spain, Holland and France in turn on that score. Paramount herself in I
ndia and southern Asia, she saw in Russia a greater Asiatic Power stretching out tentacles towards every sea. What if, having occupied Finland, Bessarabia and Poland, the northern colossus should now strike southwards across the central Asian deserts to the Indian Ocean? During their collaboration with Napoleon, its rulers had twice planned such a project. Now once again came reports from remote British consuls of Russian intrigue and infiltration; with the defeat of Napoleon the star of Muscovy was in the ascendant throughout the East.1 It could be seen by the agents of the British East India Company as they rode in the vale of the Indus or were borne in their palanquins towards the Hindu Kush. They transmitted their fears to London.
Talleyrand also distrusted the Russians. A French eighteenth-century bishop was not to be fooled by a windy ideologue from the Neva. He knew when the Czar talked of the re-establishment of Poland, he was not thinking of giving up what he possessed of it but
1 "It seems to be the object of the Emperor of Russia to establish a predominant influence throughout Europe and particularly in those courts where Great Britain, by the assistance which she afforded to them during the war, has acquired a just influence." Sir Henry Wellesley, Castlereagh, X, 180. See idem, 75.
merely of acquiring those parts which he did not possess. And if Talleyrand did not wish to see Cossacks on the Oder, he had still less wish to see a predominant Prussia. He did not share the English view of Prussians. He had twice seen them in his country, with their stupid, swashbuckling officers, their grab and jackboot culture, their plundering, bullying ways. Their State—the Sparta of Europe —was built, like Napoleon's, round an army; their destiny, writ large across their brief, bloodstained history, to conquer or cringe. Talleyrand knew that if Prussia's population was increased from five millions to ten, it would merely increase her capacity for aggression. For it would double the size of her army.
The Age of Elegance Page 25