Talleyrand's Wit

Talleyrand in 1808, 
painted by François Gérard

As promised, in today’s post I want to delve a little deeper into the life of one of the Regency era’s most prominent figures, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I touched on him briefly in my recent post on the Congress of Vienna, where he skillfully negotiated favorable terms with the Allies for the restoration of the monarchy in France, following the defeat of Napoleon.

Talleyrand was born into the aristocracy in 1754 under France’s old monarchical system or ancien règime – the one that came to a bloody end during the French Revolution. An early childhood accident left him with a limp that remained with him all his life. Disinherited by his father in favor of his brother, Talleyrand went into the clergy and was made a bishop in 1789.

But in what became his signature move, Talleyrand abandoned the Church and was defrocked as a result of his support of the French Revolution. He also helped the revolutionary government weaken the Roman Catholic Church's power and prestige in France. It was probably just as well he left the Church; he became a notorious womanizer who eventually married a divorced woman, outside the bounds of Catholicism. 

Then in 1792 while the Reign of Terror raged in France, Talleyrand went first to England as an unofficial representative of France and later, when he was kicked out of Britain by Pitt, to the United States, a neutral country, where he waited until the horrors in France subsided. 

(Fans of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton might like to know that Talleyrand stayed with Aaron Burr in Philadelphia, where he got to know Alexander Hamilton. But years later when Burr came to France, Talleyrand shunned him for killing his friend Hamilton in a duel.)

When Talleyrand returned to France in 1796 he abandoned his revolutionary aims to help Napoleon rise to power. Later he switched sides again, abandoning the Emperor after Napoleon's stunning defeat. Talleyrand was instrumental in putting the Bourbons, the surviving brothers of the guillotined King Louis XVI, back on the throne in 1814.

But Talleyrand's career wasn't over. In 1830, following another revolution and the abdication of the last Bourbon king, Talleyrand didn't waste any time serving the new King of France, Louis-Phillipe, as ambassador to Great Britain.

It's been said that Talleyrand betrayed most everyone he ever worked for at one point or another. For this reason, some have called him a traitor.

But I see him as a wily survivor. He used his formidable intelligence and diplomatic skills to survive and even thrive during a violent and tumultuous period of French history. Many of his aristocratic contemporaries, especially those who lost their heads during the Revolution, weren’t so lucky.

The Man with Six Heads (“L’Homme aux six tệtes”) 
 1815 caricature of Talleyrand showing his involvement
 with six different French governmental regimes 

An educated, witty man, Talleyrand was extremely quote-worthy, and his words translate well from French to English. It was hard for me to select only a few good quotes from the many that have been recorded, but here are some of my favorites:

From Talleyrand the wry social observer:

“Mistrust first impulses. They are almost always good.”

“Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.”  

“If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand one another.”


From Talleyrand the politician:

“I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.”

“War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.”

“Without freedom of the press, there can be no representative government.”


From Talleyrand the cynic:

“What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits.”

“To succeed in the world, it’s much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool, than to discover who is a clever man.”

“Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.”

***

But my favorite quote comes from an anecdote about Talleyrand when he was an 84-year-old man on his deathbed. To be fair, this story is also attributed to other famous people so it may be apocryphal. Yet I'd like to think it did happen; it seems so appropriate. 

According to the story (which I've loosely translated), King Louis-Phillipe visited Talleyrand in his final days. The King asked the dying man if he was suffering.

“Oh, yes,”  Talleyrand moaned. “Like I'm in hell.”

To which the King murmured in reply: “Already?” 



***

Additional sources include:
  • Napoleon's Master, A Life of Prince Talleyrand by David Lawday, St. Martin's Press New York, 2006
  • Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian Authors, by Craufurd Tait Ramage, published by Edward Howell, Liverpool, 1866.

Images from Wikimedia Commons


The "Dancing" Congress of Vienna: An Attempt to Rewind the Clock



The Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna circa 1800

Ah, Vienna! The name of that storied city conjures up visions of delicious pastries, waltzes, and elegance. But the city didn’t always have that image. Vienna, though a perfectly nice city before 1814, was transformed into a brilliant social mecca in the fall of that year.

What helped change that city’s image is what also changed the face of a conquered Europe following the Napoleonic Wars - The Congress of Vienna. 

This September marks the 203rd anniversary of this gathering of diplomats who came together to answer the question of “now what?” once Napoleon had abdicated his throne in defeat and was safely put away on Elba (or so everyone thought). 

The purpose of the Congress was to hash out an effective way to balance the powers of Europe to prevent future imperialistic power grabs and wars, like the one that had just ended.

The aristocrats, nobles, and royals convening in Vienna also badly wanted things to go back to the way they were before revolutionary fervor gripped Europe.

Ambassadors of every European nation attended, but the representatives from Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, Austria, and France pretty much ran the show. 

The Congress of Vienna, by Jean Godefoy, CC BY-SA 3.0

Hosting the negotiations was Klemens von Metternich, Foreign Minister for the Emperor of Austria, Franz I.

Other notables who attended were Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary of Great Britain (Castlereagh later left and was replaced by Wellington) and Tsar Alexander I of Russia, a handsome and well-liked monarch. The summer before the Congress convened Alexander was in London, where he was the toast of the town as the populace celebrated Napolean's defeat and exile.  

Prussia sent its Chancellor, Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, though the King of Prussia (Frederick William III) was often there, too.  

Representing France was the clever and rather unscrupulous Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, known simply as Talleyrand(I’ll write more about him in this Friday’s post.)

The delegates started gathering in Vienna in late September 2014, and the Congress officially opened on October 1 (though some sources say it was November 1). Deliberations lasted until June 9, 1815, when the Final Act was signed. 

While Congress was sitting, Vienna became a glittering social scene for the enjoyment of its attendees and their entourages. The city’s social calendar was packed with operas, banquets, and balls. In November Beethoven performed his Symphony No. 7 in a concert attended by no less than the King of Prussia and two empresses.

An observer on the scene, the Duchesse d’Abrante, described Vienna during this time as “a place of enchantment and delicious pleasure,” and another witness to the festivities, Charles-Joseph, the 7th Prince de Ligne, commented that le congrès ne marche pas, mais il danse (roughly translated, "the Congress of Vienna isn't working, but it's dancing”). 

But Napoleon cast a long shadow over the proceedings. That spring, while the diplomats talked and partied in Vienna, Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba and sailed to mainland Europe. (He didn't have to go far – Elba is only six miles off the Tuscan coast of Italy.)

Once Napoleon landed at the Gulf of Juan (on France’s Côte d’Azur) he wasted no time gathering an army and marching on Paris. On March 13, 1815, seven days before Napoleon reached Paris, the diplomats in Vienna declared him an outlaw. But that didn't stop him.

An early 19th-century depiction of Napoleon on Elba

On June 18, less than two weeks after the Congress of Vienna ended, Napoleon made his last, unsuccessful stand against Wellington in a field near a small Belgium town, in what came be known as the Battle of Waterloo.

Here are some highlights of what the Congress of Vienna accomplished, in spite of Napoleon’s pesky interruptions:

  • Poland disappeared from the face of the map, with both Russia and Prussia getting pieces of it.
  • Germany and Italy were sectioned off, neither one the whole countries we know today.
  • Prussia’s gains, which in addition to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw included Swedish Pomerania, over half of Saxony and most of the Rhineland, upped its status as a world power.
  •  Austria’s share of the spoils included an enlargement of the Hapsburg Empire and access to the Mediterranean Sea. Austria’s newly-acquired land holdings included the kingdom of Venetian Lombardy (in what is now Italy) and Dalmatia (in Croatia, where those spotted dogs come from).  
 
Dalmatian dogs were wildly popular during the Regency.
It was fashionable to have one trotting alongside your coach
as you wheeled through Hyde Park. They also guarded stables.


France and Britain’s gains were not as flashy. Britain may not have gotten any land in Europe, but it did get protection for its shipping lanes and kept enough of its holdings around the world to become a dominant colonial power. 

France, even though it was technically a defeated country, made out pretty well thanks to Talleyrand’s diplomacy. France had to return some of the lands Napoleon took from its neighbors, but the nation retained its position as a world power as the monarchy was restored under King Louis XVIII.

So much for the French Revolution.

In all, the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe, based on its pre-revolutionary border arrangements, and the continent stayed much the same until the First World War. Here is an informative animation illustrating how the map of Europe changed as a result of the Congress of Vienna.

Some historians regard the Congress of Vienna as a conservative reaction to the revolutionary and liberal ideas that had been sweeping across Europe, which began with the Enlightenment movement in the 18th century and culminated in two revolutions - the French and the American. The Congress of Vienna was intended to bolster the status of the old monarchies and reinforce their power. 

And it did just that.

Other critics credit the Congress of Vienna with creating stability in Europe and a peace that lasted until the early 20th century. However, that peace lay just on the surface – underneath it the currents of change were still moving, leading to an inevitable outcome.

I’m no historian, but in my opinion, you can’t hold back change forever – its momentum is too strong. Despite all the discussions and treaties worked out during the fall, winter and spring of 1814-15 in Vienna, the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers on topics such as liberty, tolerance and constitutional government refused to die.

Before 1920 political change transformed most of Europe despite the best efforts of the Congress over a hundred years earlier to stem the tide. 

Emperor Napoleon III, the last monarch of France, lost his throne in 1870. In 1917, Russia was convulsed by a revolution that toppled its monarchy. The next year, 1918, saw the Hapsburg dynasty come to an end under its last ruler, Charles I. And about that same time (1918-19) the Prussian nobility lost their political clout when their monarchy was abolished due to the German Revolution and the creation of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of WWI, though Prussia wasn't formally dissolved until 1947. 

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

JFK in West Berlin, 1963


Those are the words of another consummate politician, John F. Kennedy. He said them in a speech to a crowd in Frankfurt in 1963, about 370 miles in physical distance and 149 years in time away from the Congress of Vienna. And I think those words are just as relevant today as they were in 1963, and would have been in 1815.

The timeless nature of change - just another one of history’s paradoxes, in the Regency and every era.

***


Sources for this post include:
  • Our Tempestuous Day, a History of Regency England, by Carolly Erickson, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1986
  • Events That Changed the World: 1800-1820, the Nineteenth Century, Jodie L. Zdrok, Book Editor, Greenhaven Press, Missouri, 2005
  • Rites of Peace, The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, by Adam Zamoyski,, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2007
  • The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency, 1811-1820, by J.B. Priestley, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1969
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Friday Follies: Five Famous Dandies

Oscar Wilde
Here’s the first post of a new blog feature I'm trying out, Friday Follies, where I have a bit of fun riffing on subjects I’ve covered in past posts.

In my last post, I talked about Beau Brummell. He’s one of the most famous men of the Regency, and one of the things he’s famous for is being a dandy.

According to the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was himself a dandy, dandies have “no profession other than elegance . . . no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons . . . The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror.”

Pharrell Williams
I don’t know too many people who’d fit that description, but I scoured the Internet to find five famous dandies, past and present, not including Brummell (just because he's been covered so well already). The list I came up with includes three writers and two musicians. All these men have been described as dandies, either by historians or contemporary fashion sources such as GQ Magazine

Here they are: 

1. George Gordon, Lord Byron
2. Oscar Wilde
3. Noel Coward
4. Kanye West
5. Pharrell Williams

Can you think of anyone else who should be on the list?

And for a fun, here’s our Prince Regent, a right royal dandy, as portrayed by Hugh Laurie in the BBC comedy series Blackadder the Third:




Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Beau Brummell and Casual Friday

There's nothing casual about this
guy - 1805 caricature of Beau
Brummell by Robert Dighton


My husband works at an engineering agency in the decidedly relaxed city of Portland, Oregon. The lower floors of his office building are home to a software development firm. Apparently, the laid-back style of the high-tech folks is causing a bad case of clothing envy among the engineers. So much envy that my husband’s boss had to remind employees of the agency’s unofficial dress code.

Baseball caps, hoodies, shorts and tank tops, along with sandals and Crocs (a shoe company whose motto is “come as you are”) – all regularly worn by the high-tech workers – are off-limits to my husband and his colleagues.

And the engineers are allowed to wear jeans only on Casual Fridays, and then only if they don't have meetings scheduled with anyone outside the agency. Ties aren’t mandatory, but a collared shirt (for the men at least) is. 

My husband says there's been some grumbling, but overall the dress code, with the all-important exception for Casual Friday, has been accepted.

Now, the whole concept of Casual Fridays would have been hard for people in Regency England to fathom, for several reasons. For one thing, clothes were more expensive and individually hand-made, not mass-produced in generic sizes, like the clothes we wear today. Most people had fewer garments than a lot of us do in our stuffed closets, and they had less variety in their wardrobes.

During the Regency, people, especially the well-to-do, tended to be more formal in their speech and dress. What you wore proclaimed your class, social status and in many cases your occupation.

A young Byron in the Regency version of casual dress.
(Portrait by Henry Pierce Bone) 


 “Casual” in the early 19th century could be defined as Lord Byron wearing a shirt with an open collar instead of a high collar and precisely tied cravat. Alternatively, “casual” could refer to an aristocratic woman receiving select visitors at her home in a gorgeous, loose-fitting dressing gown that didn’t require wearing a constricting corset underneath.

Today, it’s common to see people going about town dressed as though they just got up from sprawling on the couch watching TV or doing chores around the house. Some restaurants have to actually implore their customers with a posted policy to put on shoes and a shirt before entering their establishments. And church-goers who once wore their “Sunday-best” clothes to church now think nothing of attending services in casual pants and T-shirts.

"The Reluctant Mistress" by Raimundo Madrazo

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the casual trend – it’s just another step in the evolution of fashion. For all I know, folks in the Regency would’ve loved to have an alternative to long skirts (for women) and starched cravats (for men). Though I doubt Beau Brummell, that prim and proper arbiter of Regency fashion (I blogged about his influence on fashion here) would have countenanced anything less than utter neatness and perfection in dress, no matter what century he lived in.

And yet, there’s a backlash developing in some quarters to contemporary casual dress, despite its comfort and convenience. I think it’s because some people like to dress up, and formal clothes give them more of an opportunity to express themselves than casual wear does.

For example, since 2011 there have been semi-annual Dapper Days at  Disneyland in Los Angeles, the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, and even once a year in the fall at Disneyland Paris. Participants forego park amusement attire like shorts and tank tops in favor of suits and dresses, complete with hats and gloves. Dapper Day is not a Disney-sponsored event, and Dapper Day enthusiasts also enjoy dressing up for other “elegant outings” to places like the LA County Museum of Art. (If you’re interested, you can get a schedule of upcoming events at the Dapper Days website.)

And the Wall Street Journal reported a few years ago that some companies are abandoning Casual Fridays to make way for Formal Fridays. On Formal Fridays, women leave their sensible slacks at home and wear dresses, even formal prom dresses, and male employees ditch their Dockers and polo shirts to wear a suit and tie, or, for the particularly enthusiastic, a top hat and bow tie.

I think Beau Brummell would approve.

Just how intricate and cumbersome were the clothes of yesteryear? Here’s a video of an 18th-century woman getting dressed, or rather, being dressed by her maid. Although the clothing styles of this period, with the stiff V-shaped stomachers pinned to the dress bodice, were out of fashion by the Regency a lot of the same dressing details – layering, pinning, and lacing – would also be necessary for the Empire-waisted Regency gowns. 



Like me, you might wonder if women could put these clothes on by themselves, without any assistance. But in the video, you’ll notice the maids are dressed in a similar style to their mistress, and they certainly wouldn’t have had attendants to help them get dressed. The maids must have learned how to don these clothes alone, or perhaps they helped each other in the morning rush to get ready for the day’s work.

Finally, I can’t resist a clip from a 1960s San Francisco band who called themselves The Beau Brummells. I like to think that their hit song, Laugh, Laugh, captures the reaction the real Beau Brummell would have had if someone had suggested Casual Fridays to him.


Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Royal Babies


The Duchess and Duke of Cambridge with their children.
Image from Alberto De Castro via Flickr


Great news from Kensington Palace – another royal baby is on the way! 

According to the official report, the Duchess of Cambridge is about 12 weeks along, which means the baby should arrive next spring. Hopefully, it also means she’s just about through with her extreme morning sickness (there's an official name for it - Hyperemesis Gravidarum), a condition which also plagued her in the early months of her two previous pregnancies.

As William and Kate mull over possible names for their new little one, perhaps they should look to the past for inspiration. After all, they drew from the royal well of names for little George and Charlotte.

As my blog readers know, I like to find Regency parallels to current historical events. When it comes to names there’s quite a bit of overlap between the Duke of Cambridge’s growing family and the family of his distant ancestor, King George III.

A close-up of King George III as a young man in his
coronation robes, portrait by Allan Ramsay, 1761-62

You remember King George III – he’s widely credited with losing the American colonies. Illness-induced dementia during the last decade of his 40 years on the throne made him incapable of reigning, so his son ruled in his stead from 1811 to 1820 as Prince Regent (our Prinny) and those nine years became known as the Regency. (George III’s medical condition also inspired a hit play and subsequent movie, The Madness of King George.) 

Prinny was christened George, just like the current adorable little Prince George of Cambridge, and in 1821 Prinny was crowned as King George IV.

Now that’s a lot of Georges, especially when you consider Prinny’s predecessors, the King Georges I through III, not to mention King George V and King George VI (little George’s great-great-grandfather) of the 20th century. 

So the name George is definitely a family tradition. And royals tend to go with traditional names, unlike celebrities who revel in giving their babies unusual names, like Blue Ivy (daughter of Beyoncé and Jay-Z) and North (daughter of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West). 

But Charlotte, the name of little George’s toddler sister, is another family name with a lot of history. It goes back again to King George III, who married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761. Just like William and Kate, King George and Queen Charlotte named their first daughter Charlotte.

Later on, Prinny named his ill-fated daughter and only child Charlotte, as well. 

Queen Charlotte with her two eldest sons, George
and Frederick, painted by Johann Zoffany, 1765 

If William and Kate do indeed look to the past again to name their new baby, they may want to consider one of the other names King George and his Queen selected for their 15 offspring. In addition to George, these royal boy names include Frederick, William, Edward, Ernest, Augustus, Adolphus, Octavius or Alfred.

And for girl names, there’s Augusta, Elizabeth, Sophia, Mary or Amelia - who, along with the aforementioned Charlotte, were all daughters of King George and Queen Charlotte.

The three youngest daughters of King George and
Queen Charlotte, the Princesses Mary, Sophia,
and Amelia, by John Singleton Copley, 1785


The Cambridges may decide that some of these names are already taken (like William, Elizabeth and Edward, the name of William's uncle) or have fallen too far out of use. (Augustus is kind of cool for a boy, in my opinion, but Octavius or Adolphus could prove to a bit of burden.) But some of the other names, especially Mary or Sophia, would easily fit into the modern age.

Whatever name William and Kate choose, it’s sure to set a fashion, with thousands of parents inspired to choose it for their own kids. Both the names George and Charlotte spiked in popularity after they were chosen for the little Prince and Princess of Cambridge. So, when the name of their new sibling is announced, whatever it is, it’ll be sure to appear on birth certificates everywhere. 

In the meantime, we'll just have to wait. 



Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay

It's a Blog Revival

The Regency Looking Glass is back! I have some good news - I'm happy to announce that The Regency Looking Glass (which I started in 2013...