In some respects, the coup d’etat of Fructidor helped on the progress of the negotiations.  That event postponed, if it did not render impossible, the advent of civil war in France; and, like Pride’s Purge in our civil strifes, it installed in power a Government which represented the feelings of the army and of its chief.  Moreover, it rid him of the presence of Clarke, his former colleague in the negotiations, whose relations with Carnot aroused the suspicions of Barras and led to his recall.  Bonaparte was now the sole plenipotentiary of France.  The final negotiations with Austria and the resulting treaty of Campo Formio may therefore be considered as almost entirely his handiwork.

And yet, at this very time, the head of the Foreign Office at Paris was a man destined to achieve the greatest diplomatic reputation of the age.  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand seemed destined for the task of uniting the society of the old regime with the France of the Revolution.  To review his life would be to review the Revolution.  With a reforming zeal begotten of his own intellectual acuteness and of resentment against his family, which had disinherited him for the crime of lameness, he had led the first assaults of 1789 against the privileges of the nobles and of the clerics among whom his lot had perforce been cast.  He acted as the head of the new “constitutional” clergy, and bestowed his episcopal blessing at the Feast of Pikes in 1790; but, owing to his moderation, he soon fell into disfavour with the extreme men who seized on power.  After a sojourn in England and the United States, he came back to France, and on the suggestion of Madame de Stael was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs (July, 1797).  To this post he brought the highest gifts:  his early clerical training gave a keen edge to an intellect naturally subtle and penetrating:  his intercourse with Mirabeau gave him a grip on the essentials of sound policy and diplomacy:  his sojourn abroad widened his vision, and imbued him with an admiration for English institutions and English moderation.  Yet he loved France with a deep and fervent love.  For her he schemed; for her he threw over friends or foes with a Machiavellian facility.  Amidst all the glamour of the Napoleonic Empire he discerned the dangers that threatened France; and he warned his master—­as uselessly as he warned reckless nobles, priestly bigots, and fanatical Jacobins in the past, or the unteachable zealots of the restored monarchy.  His life, when viewed, not in regard to its many sordid details, but to its chief guiding principle, was one long campaign against French elan and partisan obstinacy; and he sealed it with the quaint declaration in his will that, on reviewing his career, he found he had never abandoned a party before it had abandoned itself.  Talleyrand was equipped with a diversity of gifts:  his gaze, intellectual yet composed, blenched not when he uttered a scathing criticism or a diplomatic lie: