Posted by
john on Saturday, December 13, 2008 1:02:02 PM
"With the end of the Terror, Talleyrand had been rehabilitated and returned to France. Hamilton knew that he was avaricious and regarded public office as a means of obtaining money. The cynical Frenchman once told a mutual friend that 'he found it very strange that a man of his [Hamilton's] quality, blessed with such outstanding gifts, should resign a ministry in order to return to the practice of law and give as his reason that as a minister he did not earn enough to bring up his eight children.' After Hamilton returned to New York, Talleyrand was en route to a dinner party one night when he glimpsed Hamilton toiling by candlelight in his law office. 'I have seen a man who made the fortune of a nation laboring all night to support his family,' he said, shocked. After becoming French foreign minister in July 1797, he rejoiced at the plunder placed at his fingertips. 'I'll hold the job,' he confided to a friend. 'I have to make an immense fortune out of it, a really immense fortune.' He proceeded to scoop up an estimated thirteen to fourteen million francs during his first two years as foreign minister alone."
Ron Chernow, "Alexander Hamilton", pp.548-49.
Obviously, I am in the process of reading Mr. Chernow's outstanding biography of the outstanding personage on the $10 bill (and making darn little progress!). The above (timely!) quote is from a passage describing an incident during the John Adams administration, in which the French foreign minister gave our new nation great insult by his refusal to negotiate in good faith relative to French privateering predation upon American shipping. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, of course, later becoming infamous for his role in the Louisiana Purchase ("You have made a noble bargain for yourselves and I suppose you will make the most of it.").
America's "Quasi-War" with France, though mostly forgotten, is instructive as a reminder of the intense partisan passions surrounding the question of which powerful wagon our fledgling nation should hitch itself to: France (the Republicans led by Jefferson), or Great Britain (the Federalists, best exemplified by Hamilton). In any case, both euro powers viewed our new nation as a rich cow to be freely milked, hence Talleyrand's grotesquely insulting terms for peace.
This period is also instructive in that it shows how different the realities of the present are from those of the past. Specifically, it is amazing how greatly the politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were dominated by a near-acceptance that our affairs would either be peacefully subsumed, or enveloped through conquest, by either Great Britain or France (see, e.g., 1812, War Of). Though many at the time did foresee America becoming the power it has, even the most optimistic did not see this as inevitable or a foregone conclusion.