Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 by Arthur Bryant Page B

evidences of their incorrigible itch for intrigue and meddling in other people's business. He even accused them of plotting his assassination with the Royalist and Republican refugees whom they sheltered. For like most despots who have risen suddenly, Bonaparte was inordinately suspicious. The very gullibility of the English made him suspect them of sinister designs.
    He had a more tangible grievance. He was not in the habit of being publicly criticised; in France the excesses of Revolutionary licence had been succeeded by a censorship more rigid than that of the Bourbons. It was difficult for Bonaparte to conceive of a newspaper not being subject to police supervision. Yet, in England-, Opposition and refugee journals published the most outrageous things about him without the Government stirring a finger. He used to lie in his bath every morning and have them read by an interpreter ; at any particularly o utrageous passage he would bang the side of the bath with the guide rope and shout furiously " Il en a menti ! " 1
    This made for friction. The British Ministers, who suffered, poor men, from libels themselves, 2 listened with sympathy to Bonaparte's protests but pointed out that they were debarred by the Constitution from interference. This failed to satisfy Ins logical Latin mind, since under that Constitution any Government with a parliamentary majority was apparently all-powerful. He therefore demanded the suppression of the more offensive newspapers and the punishment of their writers, naming Cobbett, the editor of Windham's intemperate Porcupine, and Peltier, a particularly offensive emigre journalist. In its anxiety to appease him the Government consulted its law officers and, after one more than usually gross breach of international good manners, instituted criminal libel proceedings against Peltier. The Prime Minister also personally circularised outraged newspaper proprietors on the need for restraint. But, as Bonaparte capped every libel by dictating some still more scurrilous passage for the official French Press, the flow of " reciprocal Billingsgate," as Fox called it, grew rather than diminished. 3
    In more material matters the British gave little trouble. Throughout 1802 the First Consul was allowed to break one after another of the terms of the Peace. The status quo had been a fundamental condition of the armistice. Yet even before the definitive treaty was signed Bonaparte not only dispatched a force to the West Indies— ostensibly to subject the negro republicans of San Domingo to his rule—but claimed the American hinterland of Louisiana under a secret treaty with Spain. Simultaneously he embarked on a series of bloodless conquests in Europe as alarming as those made at the cannon's mouth. Ignoring his own guarantee of its independence, he partly dragooned, partly coaxed the delegates of the Cisalpine Republic to confer on him the Presidency of their puppet State, renaming it the Republic of Italy—an ominous hint to the remaining principalities in the peninsula. Thereafter his agents swarmed in every Italian capital, talking treaties and concessions, surveying forts and harbours and stirring up the populace to throw in their lot with their fellow-countrymen under the green, white and red
    1 Granville, I, 343-9; Farington, II, 38.
    2 One wag suggested that, as Ministers and the First Consul were equally calumniated, they should institute joint proceedings, it being the fate of greatness like theirs to be misunderstood by the vulgar.
    3 Pelle w, II, 75-6, 153-7; Castlereagh, I, 72-3; Auckland, rV, 160; Malmesbury, FV, 77. Lady Bessborough, a critic of the Government, wrote: "If Bonaparte choses to go to war for the newspapers a son loisir, w e must fight through thick and thin; but do not let us imitate Le Moniteur and begin a war because the French newspapers are impertinent" —Granville, I, 345.
    tricolour of the Cisalpine Republic whose authorities encouraged an appearance of popular licence long