Talleyrand
The French diplomat who served six regimes and talked a defeated France back into the ranks of the great powers at Vienna.
Talleyrand held high office under the Bourbon monarchy, the Revolution, the Directory, Napoleon, the restored Bourbons, and finally Louis-Philippe. He was a bishop who confiscated the Church's land, a revolutionary who outlived the Terror, Napoleon's foreign minister who worked against him, and the man who took a beaten and occupied France to the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and brought it home as a great power with its borders intact.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord was born in 1754 into an old noble family. A childhood injury left him lame, so instead of the army, which is what his class did, he was steered into the Church. He became Bishop of Autun in 1789 without any noticeable religious conviction. In October of that year he stood up in the National Assembly and proposed that the state seize all Church property to pay off the national debt. The Assembly agreed. Rome excommunicated him in 1791.
He sat out the Terror in England and then Philadelphia, returned in 1796, and was foreign minister by 1797. His agents promptly demanded a large bribe from American envoys before he would receive them, which became the XYZ Affair and nearly caused a war with the United States. Taking money was not an occasional lapse. It was his business model, and every court in Europe knew it.
Serving Napoleon, then undermining him
He helped Bonaparte seize power in 1799 and ran his foreign ministry until 1807. Then he decided his master was going to destroy France, and the invasion of Spain confirmed it. At the Erfurt conference in 1808, while formally negotiating on Napoleon's behalf, he privately advised Tsar Alexander I to hold firm, on the grounds that Europe needed something to check French power. Napoleon found out and denounced him to his face in front of the whole court, ending with the line everyone remembered: that Talleyrand was excrement in a silk stocking. Talleyrand did not react, walked out, and reportedly observed on the way that it was a pity such a great man had been so badly brought up.
In 1814, with allied armies at the gates of Paris, he organized the Senate vote that deposed Napoleon and installed Louis XVIII. He was foreign minister again within days.
Vienna
France arrived at the Congress of Vienna as the country that had spent twenty years invading everybody. The four victorious powers intended to settle Europe among themselves and inform the French afterward. Talleyrand refused to accept that and argued a principle instead: the Congress existed to restore legitimate rights, not to divide up loot, and legitimacy applied to France as much as anyone. Then he waited for the winners to fall out, which they did, over Russia's claim to Poland and Prussia's claim to Saxony. In January 1815 he signed a secret defensive alliance with Britain and Austria against Russia and Prussia. From that moment France was inside the room.
The settlement left France with its 1792 frontiers, no dismemberment, and a seat among the powers. Napoleon's escape from Elba cost the country harsher terms in the second treaty later that year, but the structure held. It is arguably the most successful diplomacy ever conducted by a losing side.
He was not finished. In 1830 he took the London embassy at 76 and helped negotiate Belgium into existence as a neutral state. He died in 1838, reconciled with the Church a few hours before the end.
The lesson is not about his character, which nobody defended. It is that the powers at Vienna chose to bring the defeated aggressor back into the system rather than crush it, and the settlement they built kept general war out of Europe for a century. In 1919 the victors did the opposite at Versailles. Talleyrand would have spotted the mistake immediately.