Charles Emanuel to return to his throne so as to ensure stability in
northern Italy. Charles Emanuel refused, so Napoleon, not wishing to
leave a dangerous gap between France and the Cisalpine Republic,
annexed Piedmont - a move that was welcomed by the majority
republican party of the Piedmontese. In r8oz he also revised the Swiss
constitution along federal lines and regulated relations between France
and Switzerland by an 'Act of Mediation'. Again this angered the British
who, as in Piedmont, were in league with the reactionary and aristocratic
factions; Windham had even been sent with money to foment trouble
among the aristocracy in Switzerland.
To the oft-repeated assertion that these two actions constituted
unbearable 'provocation', three counter-arguments seem appropriate. In
the first place, Switzerland and Italy were within the Austrian sphere of
influence, not the British; if Napoleon's actions there gave cause for
concern, it was for the signatories of the Treaty of Luneville to react, not
those of the Treaty of Amiens. Secondly, for precisely this reason the
Treaty of Amiens contained no accords about Switzerland or Italy and
said nothing whatever about affairs there. As Napoleon correctly stated:
'All this is not mentioned in the treaty. I see in it only two names,
Taranto, which I have evacuated, and Malta, which you are not
evacuating.' Thirdly, it was hardly in order for the English to speak of
imposing constitutions, allegedly against the will of the majority, when
they had just (r8or) incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom,
incontestably against the will of the Irish.
Napoleon also raised the question of the vile propaganda cartoons
about him being printed in the English newspapers, portraying him as a
tyrant and ogre. The Morning Post had just described him as 'an
unclassifiable being, half African, half European, a Mediterranean
mulatto'. In cartoons he was usually portrayed as a pygmy with an
enormous nose. Other organs portrayed Josephine as a harlot and claimed
that Bonaparte was sleeping with her daughter Hortense. When taxed
with this, Whitworth disingenuously claimed that press liberty was part
of the traditional English freedoms and the government could not
interfere; this from a creature of Pitt whose repressive 'Two Acts' of 1795
had silenced all pro-French newspaper opinion. Nor did Whitworth
admit that he had been sending to London dispatches that were the
purest fantasy, alleging that nine-tenths of the population in France
opposed the First Consul.
Finding Whitworth intractable, Napoleon published in Le Moniteur a
long article by Colonel Sebastiani, who had recently been on a mission to
Turkey and the Near East, which warned that if Britain did not honour
marcin
(Marcin)
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