Review: The Lives of Talleyrand

The Lives of Talleyrand by Crane Brinton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up at a used bookstore in Georgia. It's a unique book, not least because it was written in 1936, and it's interesting to see how the style of biographies seems to have changed since then. All in all much of this book sounds, to me, very subjective, opinionated (he even writes, at one point "no one wants to read objective biographies") and meandering (it goes on many tangents). Some of this (especially when the author tries to show how people throughout the years have been misinterpreting Talleyrand, as well as the final two chapters) gets sort of tedious.

I also noticed a lack of footnotes or sources, which we seem to care about more these days I guess. To be fair, there is a bibliography, but it would be close to impossible to match the sources to the passages in the book itself.

The bulk of the book itself, however, is quite informative. Talleyrand is a very interesting man and the author did an excellent job of portraying him. You could probably skip the first and last two chapters though.

Interesting point: The author kept equating France's defeat in 1814 to Germany's in 1918, wondering why the terms were so lenient for the former, while so harsh for the latter, including suggesting that it was due to democracy (the leaders at Versailles had to answer to parliamentary and congressional pressure). I found that an interesting take.

Interesting quote: "One-way principles may lead to Heaven or to the scaffold - perhaps to Heaven by means of the scaffold - but not to diplomatic victories" (p.216)


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