While helping to establish French supremacy in neighbouring states and assisting Bonaparte in securing the title of First Consul for life, Talleyrand sought all means of securing the permanent welfare of France. He worked hard to prevent the rupture of the peace of Amiens in May 1803, and he did what he could to prevent the sale of Louisiana to the United States earlier in the year. These events, as he saw, told against the best interests of France and endangered the gains which she had secured by war and diplomacy. Thereafter he strove to moderate Napoleon's am bition and to preserve the European system as far as possible. The charges of duplicity or treachery made against the foreign minister by Napoleon's apologists are in nearly all cases un founded. This is especially so in the case of the execution of the duc d'Enghien (March 1804), which Talleyrand disapproved. The evidence against him rests on a document which is now known to have been forged. On the assumption of the imperial title by Napoleon in May 1804, Talleyrand became grand cham berlain df the empire, and received close on 500,000 francs a year.
The Empire.—Talleyrand had rarely succeeded in bending the will of the First Consul. He altogether failed to do so with the Emperor Napoleon. His efforts to induce his master to accord lenient terms to Austria in November 1805 were futile; and he looked on helplessly while that Power was crushed, the Holy Roman Empire swept away, and the Confederation of the Rhine set up in central Europe. In the bargainings which accompanied this last event Talleyrand is believed to have reaped a rich har vest from the German princes most nearly concerned. On July 6, 1806, Napoleon conferred on his minister the title of prince of Benevento, a papal fief in the Neapolitan territory.
In the negotiations with England which went on in the summer of 1806 Talleyrand had not a free hand; they came to nought, as did those with Russia which had led up to the signature of a Franco-Russian treaty at Paris by d'Oubril which was at once disavowed by the tsar. The war with Prussia and Russia was ended by the treaties df Tilsit (7th and 9th of July 1807). Tal leyrand had a hand only in the later developments of these nego tiations; and it has been shown that he cannot have been the means of revealing to the British government the secret arrange ments made at Tilsit between France and Russia, though his pri vate enemies, among them Fouche, have charged him with acting as traitor in this affair.
Talleyrand had long been weary of serving a master whose policy he more and more disapproved, and after the return from Tilsit to Paris he resigned office. Nevertheless Napoleon retained him in the council and took him with him to the interview with the Emperor Alexander I. at Erfurt (September 1808). Talleyrand disapproved of the Spanish policy of Napoleon which culminated at Bayonne in May 1808; and the stories to the contrary may in all probability be dismissed as idle rumours. On Talleyrand now
fell the disagreeable task of entertaining at his new mansion at Valencay, in Touraine, the Spanish princes virtually kidnapped at Bayonne by the emperor. They remained there until March At the close of 1808, while Napoleon was in Spain, Talleyrand entered into certain relations with his former rival Fouche (q.v.), which aroused the solicitude of the emperor and hastened his return to Paris. He subjected Talleyrand to violent reproaches, which the ex-minister bore with his usual ironical calm.
After the Danubian campaign of 2809 and the divorce of Josephine, Talleyrand used the influence which he still possessed in the imperial council on behalf of the choice of an Austrian consort for his master, for, like Metternich (who is said first to have mooted the proposal), he saw that this would safeguard the interests of the Habsburgs, whose influence he felt to be essential to the welfare of Europe. He continued quietly to observe the course of events during the disastrous years 1812-13; and even at the beginning of the Moscow campaign he summed up the situation in the words, "It is the beginning of the end." Early in 1814 he saw Napoleon for the last time ; the emperor upbraided him with the words : "You are a coward, a traitor, a thief. You do not even believe in God. You have betrayed and deceived everybody. You would sell even your own father." Talleyrand listened unmoved, but afterwards sent in his resigna tion of his seat on the council. It was not accepted. He had no share in the negotiations of the congress of Chatillon in February–March 1814. On the surrender of Paris to the allies (March 3o, 1814), the Emperor Alexander I. took up his abode at the hotel Talleyrand, and there occurred the conference wherein the statesman persuaded the tsar that the return of the Bourbons was the only possible solution of the French problem, and that the principle of legitimacy alone would guarantee Europe against the aggrandizement of any one state or house. As he phrased it in the Talleyrand Memoirs: "The house of Bourbon alone could cause France nobly to conform once more to the happy limits indicated by policy and by nature. With the house of Bourbon France ceased to be gigantic in order to be great." These arguments, reinforced by those of the royalist agent de Vitrolles, convinced the tsar; and Talleyrand, on April r, con vened the French senate (only 64 members out of 140 attended), and that body pronounced that Napoleon had forfeited the crown. Ten days later the emperor recognized the inevitable and signed the Act of Abdication at Fontainebleau. The next effort of Talleyrand was to screen France under the principle of legitimacy and to prevent the schemes of partition on which some of the German statesmen were bent. Thanks mainly to the support of the tsar and of England these schemes were foiled; and France emerged from her disasters with frontiers which were practically those of 1792.