Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754 to 1838) was one of the most significant political figures in modern French history. Beginning his career as the cynical bishop of Autun, he went on to become a revolutionary leader, a diplomat, and ultimately, foreign minister under Napoleon I. Despite his reputation as a schemer and backstabber, Talleyrand always claimed to put the national interests of France first, informing his decision to turn against Napoleon. He played a major role in the Congress of Vienna, helping France get the best possible outcome after Napoleon's defeat.

Talleyrand was born on 2 February 1754 in Paris, France, to an old but penniless noble family. He was the eldest son of Count Charles-Daniel de Talleyrand-Périgord and Alexandrine de Damas d'Antigny. His father had served as an officer in the French Army during the Seven Years' War and very much desired his son to follow in his footsteps and become a soldier. However, this would prove impossible. When he was four years old, Talleyrand fell off a chest of drawers and dislocated his foot. The injury never properly healed, and he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. While Talleyrand himself attributed his handicap to this unfortunate incident, many modern scholars think it more likely that he was born with a clubfoot. In any event, he was unable to serve in the army, and his father chose for him what he believed was the next best path to wealth and power: a life in the Church.

At the age of 8, Talleyrand was shipped off to school at the College d'Harcourt, and in 1770, he entered the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Talleyrand despised the Church and the ecclesiastical life that had been forced on him by his father. He rebelled against it in two significant ways, each of which would shape the rest of his life. The first was by reading the progressive works of the Enlightenment philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire; indeed, so enraptured was he by these intellectual idols that he made a pilgrimage to visit the dying Voltaire in 1778. His second act of rebellion was expressed through lust. One night, during a rainstorm, he offered to share his umbrella with a young actress. During their conversation, he learned that her parents had forced her onto the stage just as his own had forced him to the Church. They bonded over their shared misfortunes and struck up a torrid love affair. The actress would become the first of Talleyrand's many mistresses.

In December 1779, he was finally ordained a Catholic priest. Less than a year later, he had become agent-general of the clergy, responsible for protecting the privileges of the Gallican Church (i.e., the Catholic Church in France) and acting as a liaison between the Crown and clergy. To the surprise of those who knew him, he took this job quite seriously. He vigorously defended the Church's right to retain its property and argued that clergymen should continue to be exempt from taxation. Talleyrand, it would prove, did not undertake these arguments out of any love for the Church, but simply to increase his own public profile and hone his political skills. In private life, he was as cynical and hedonistic as ever. He spent his free time gambling and womanizing, and could often be found in the fashionable Paris salons, schmoozing with the most notable wits and beauties of the day. Nevertheless, he was appointed Bishop of Autun in late 1788. Talleyrand would visit his new see only once, in April 1789, to secure election to the forthcoming Estates-General. He made sure to leave before Easter Sunday, so he would not have to say Mass.

The reason for Talleyrand's sole visit to Autun was to prepare for the Estates-General of 1789, an assembly of the three estates of pre-revolutionary France (clergy, nobility, commons). France was currently in the throes of a dire financial crisis that was exacerbating pre-existing social tensions; having exhausted all other options, King Louis XVI of France was forced to summon the Estates-General to Versailles to help resolve the matter, even though the body had not met for nearly 175 years. But no sooner had the Estates-General convened on 5 May 1789, than the proceedings were derailed. The Third Estate (commons) felt frustrated by the fact that it did not have equal voting power to the upper two estates, despite representing over 90% of the population of France. In protest, it broke away from the Estates-General and proclaimed itself a National Assembly, vowing not to disperse until it had given France a new constitution. Pushback from the Crown and from elements of the old nobility increased tensions and led to the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July. The French Revolution had begun.

Like many of his peers, Talleyrand saw the coming of the Revolution as a chance to implement Enlightenment values and move away from the repressive institutions of the Ancien Régime. After joining the National Assembly, he reversed many of his previous convictions about the Church. He proposed a motion for the state to seize all church property, which would then be sold to pay off the national debt, and lobbied for the repeal of the tithe. In 1790, he performed Mass at the Feast of the Federation and was thereafter regarded as the 'Bishop of the Revolution'. He proposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which required all practicing priests in France to swear oaths of allegiance to the forthcoming constitution rather than to the Pope in Rome. In response, Talleyrand was excommunicated by the Pope in 1791. Talleyrand simply laughed off the news of his excommunication, writing to a friend, "Have you heard that I have been excommunicated? Come and console me by having supper with me. Everyone must refuse me fire and water, so this evening we will have cold meat and iced wine" (quoted in Cooper, 36).

After resigning his bishopric, Talleyrand became a diplomat. He went to London in early 1792 to help forestall a war between Great Britain and Revolutionary France. While he was abroad, the situation at home took a turn for the worst. The Storming of the Tuileries Palace on 10 August effectively ended the monarchy, while the September Massacres saw hundreds of supposed 'counter-revolutionaries' butchered in the streets of Paris. Following the trial and execution of Louis XVI, Britain and several other European powers joined the French Revolutionary Wars against France.

Talleyrand was understandably reluctant to return home, leading the National Convention – the revolutionary body that had succeeded the National Assembly – to issue a warrant for his arrest in December 1792. Now an exile, Talleyrand remained in London until early 1794, when he took ship for the United States. As he was preparing to set sail, he met a former American general who, he later learned, was the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold. Talleyrand later wrote that he felt "extremely sorry" for Arnold; in his eyes, Arnold's greatest mistake was not that he had betrayed the United States, but that he had gambled on the losing side. Talleyrand arrived in Philadelphia in May 1794 and stayed there for the next two years.

By 1796, the bloodiest phase of the Revolution – known as the Reign of Terror – had ended, leaving Talleyrand feeling safe enough to return to France. Shortly after arriving back in Paris, he was offered the position of foreign minister for the new, moderate revolutionary government, the National Directory; he was the most qualified candidate around, seeing as most others were either dead or still in exile. The Directory was infamous for its corruption, and Talleyrand was hardly any different, using his new office to enrich himself. The most notable example of this came in 1797, when he refused to receive three American envoys unless they paid him an enormous bribe. This scandal, called the XYZ Affair, led to the Quasi-War, a brief, undeclared naval conflict between the US and France.

In October 1797, Talleyrand confirmed the Treaty of Campo Formio, which ended the War of the First Coalition with Austria. The terms of the treaty had been dictated by Napoleon Bonaparte, a young and dashing general whose victories in Italy had turned him into the most popular man in the French army. Talleyrand saw much value in a friendship with the ambitious Bonaparte and began regularly corresponding with him. In 1798, Talleyrand helped convince the Directory to approve Napoleon's Campaign in Egypt and Syria; though the expedition ended in failure, it only increased Bonaparte's fame back home. By now, Talleyrand had grown weary of the Directory and sought to replace it with a stronger government that would have a better chance of preserving the gains of the Revolution. He placed his trust in Bonaparte and, in November 1799, supported the general in the Coup of 18 Brumaire. The coup was successful; Bonaparte overthrew the Directory and established a new government, the French Consulate, with himself in the top position of First Consul. Grateful for Talleyrand's help, Bonaparte kept him on as foreign minister. Unlike Arnold, Talleyrand had backed the winning horse.

With a more popular and stable government in place, Talleyrand believed the next step should be to make a lasting peace in Europe, in order to secure France's recent military conquests and revolutionary improvements. Initially, it seemed that Bonaparte was aligned with this goal. After his decisive victory at the Battle of Marengo (14 June 1800), he allowed Talleyrand to negotiate peace treaties with Austria and Britain, ending the French Revolutionary Wars in 1801. That same year, Bonaparte reconciled with the Catholic Church with the Concordat of 1801, which also revoked Talleyrand's excommunication. However, as part of his attempt to earn the favor of the pope, Bonaparte forced Talleyrand to marry his longtime mistress, Catherine Grand, in 1802. All the while, Talleyrand helped Bonaparte consolidate his power. In 1802, he worked to establish Bonaparte as 'consul for life' and, in March 1804, was complicit in the abduction and murder of the Duke of Enghien, a Bourbon prince living on foreign soil. Two months later, Bonaparte rewarded Talleyrand for his service by naming him Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, a title that came with 500,000 francs per year.

But by then, cracks were beginning to show in the relationship between the First Consul and his foreign minister. On 2 December 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French; within months, he was back at war with a coalition of nations that included Austria, Russia, and Britain. In 1805, Napoleon won a glorious victory over an Austro-Russian army at the Battle of Austerlitz. The following year, he defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. In each instance, Talleyrand urged the emperor to treat his defeated foes with grace, to preserve the delicate balance of power in Europe, and to create a greater likelihood of a lasting peace. But Napoleon, feeling invincible after his string of magnificent victories, was in no mood to be lenient, and imposed harsh terms on both Austria (Treaty of Pressburg) and Prussia (Treaties of Tilsit). The latter treaty was particularly harsh, forcing Prussia to cede nearly half of its territory to France; at Tilsit, Talleyrand was said to have consoled Queen Louise of Prussia as she wept. Talleyrand had begun to see that Napoleon was more interested in war and conquest than in stability and peace. Feeling his own interests had diverged too far from the emperor's, Talleyrand resigned from the Foreign Ministry in 1807.

Though Talleyrand was no longer foreign minister, Napoleon still thought of him as a valuable advisor and brought him along to meet with European rulers at the Congress of Erfurt in September 1808. There, Talleyrand began meeting secretly with Tsar Alexander I of Russia, urging him to form a new coalition against Napoleon. Before long, he was also accepting bribes from Russian and Austrian agents to reveal Napoleon's secrets. Talleyrand would not have seen this as a betrayal – in his mind, he served only France, and he believed that the emperor's warmongering policies were putting France at risk. He even began conspiring with the Minister of Police Joseph Fouché to create a succession plan for after Napoleon's eventual dethronement. But even as he conspired against him, Talleyrand continued to do the emperor's bidding. In 1810, he helped negotiate the marriage between Napoleon and Marie-Louise of Austria.

In 1812, Napoleon's invasion of Russia ended in cataclysmic failure; of the 615,000 soldiers Napoleon had brought with him to Russia, less than 100,000 returned alive. For Talleyrand, this was sufficient proof that Napoleon was leading France to ruin, and he refused a request to return as foreign minister. In October 1813, the Allied powers decisively defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig. Over the next few months, the French emperor fought a desperate defensive campaign that ended with his defeat and abdication in April 1814. Talleyrand, meanwhile, managed to emerge on the winning side once again. After the inevitability of his former master's downfall had become clear, Talleyrand became president of the provisional government in Paris and welcomed the Allied armies into the capital. He even graciously hosted Tsar Alexander I in his home. Talleyrand played a key role in bringing about the Bourbon Restoration, which resulted in the accession of King Louis XVIII of France (the younger brother of the executed Louis XVI).

In September 1814, Talleyrand was sent to represent France in the Congress of Vienna, a gathering of the victorious Allied powers to discuss the political and constitutional future of a post-Napoleonic Europe. Here, Talleyrand was in his element. Hoping to get the best possible outcome for France, he secretly pitted the Allies against one another by playing into their mutual distrust and historic rivalries. For instance, he turned Austria and Britain against Russia by stirring their fears that the tsar meant to annex all Poland. By sowing these seeds of discord, Talleyrand managed to reduce many of the demands posed by the other great powers and secured a great deal, whereby France could keep its 1792 borders. But just when Talleyrand was on the cusp of his greatest diplomatic victory, Napoleon returned from his exile on the Isle of Elba and retook control of France. Though he was defeated for good at the Battle of Waterloo and exiled for a final time, the Allies were not about to go so easy on France a second time and pushed its borders back to the way they had been in 1790. Still, Talleyrand could chalk this up to a victory and return to Paris with the feeling that he had saved France from humiliation.

Although Louis XVIII wanted to keep Talleyrand on as foreign minister, many royalists balked at the thought of having a former revolutionary so close to the king's ear. As such, Talleyrand slipped into a quiet retirement, spending his time writing his memoirs and criticizing the men who had replaced him. Then, in 1830, he became involved in revolutionary activity once again. In the July Revolution, he threw his support behind the revolutionaries in their bid to replace the oppressive King Charles X of France with the more liberal Duke of Orléans. Following the abdication of Charles X, Orléans ascended the throne as King Louis-Philippe I, beginning the period of the July Monarchy. In recognition of Talleyrand's support as well as his decades of diplomatic experience, Louis-Philippe named him ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Talleyrand spent the next four years in London, where his primary goal was to convince the Englishmen of Louis-Philippe's legitimacy. He was now an old man and must have realized that this was the twilight of his career. However, he still made some notable achievements. In 1830, he played a major part in the negotiations that led to the formation of the Kingdom of Belgium. Then, in April 1834, he helped forge an alliance between France, Britain, Spain, and Portugal. Satisfied with these final accomplishments, he resigned in November 1834 and once again went into retirement. He spent his final years living a life of leisure, though his health was in constant decline, and he often suffered from depression when thinking about how he would be remembered. On 17 May 1838, he died at the age of 84, one of the most talented and adaptable politicians of his age.