Sudhir Hazareesingh
The Eyes of a Dead Fish
Napoleon’s Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand
By David Lawday
Jonathan Cape 370pp £20
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was a noble grandee who lived through the troubled era of the French Revolution. Yet unlike most of his fellow-grandees, for whom the end of the ancien régime was typically accompanied by broken careers, financial ruin and exile (not to mention the threatening hiss of the guillotine), Talleyrand came through and prospered. It all began when, as the freshly appointed Bishop of Autun, he attended the Estates General in 1789 as a representative of his diocese. Realising that the nobility and the clergy were spent forces, he switched sides to the bourgeois Third Estate, a timely move which soon propelled him to the presidency of the National Assembly in 1790. This knack for sensing the prevailing direction of the political winds rarely deserted him thereafter. Whenever and wherever power moved, Talleyrand moved with it as, from the mid 1790s, governments came and went and France successively experienced revolutionary, consular, imperial, provisional, Bourbon and Orleanist rule. The unsinkable Talleyrand served all these regimes, offering his singular combination of zeal, intelligence, egotism, and ironic detachment (‘this is my thirteenth oath, sire’, he laconically informed the bemused Louis XVIII as he was sworn in as his Foreign Minister).
There was clearly something prodigious about the resilience of ‘Old Talley’, and David Lawday’s biography helps to explain how and why this scion of the Perigordian aristocracy was able to make himself indispensable to France’s post-revolutionary rulers. His servility knew no bounds, and his cringing expressions of devotion to the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
Stephen Smith - Art of Rebellion
Stephen Smith: Art of Rebellion - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
literaryreview.co.uk
‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
Henry Hitchings - The Play’s the Thing
Henry Hitchings: The Play’s the Thing - A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk