come within an ace of success, and was thwarted only by storms; Spain
went over to the French side in the same year, causing the Royal Navy to
withdraw from the Mediterranean; and at home there was financial crisis
and a possible harbinger of general social unrest in the shape of the Nore
and Spithead naval mutinies, which struck at the heart of Britain's
traditional first line of defence. Pitt made it clear that Napoleon's actions
in Italy were a sticking point, and this was played up in royalist
propaganda.
Napoleon had three principal weapons of counter offensive. In the first
place he had his own press and his own tame organs of propaganda. His
two newspapers, distributed free to soldiers in the Army ofltaly and even
smuggled into France itself and distributed widely and gratis there too,
were Le Courrier de l'Armee d'Italie ou le patriote and La France vue de
l'Armee d'Italie, of which the former was edited by an ex-Jacobin who had
been involved in the Babeuf conspiracy. Le Courrier was aimed at the
crypto-Jacobites in the Army ofltaly and stressed the way the revolution
was being betrayed by the rightward swing in France; La France, on the
other hand, was aimed at moderate opinion and stressed the qualities of
Napoleon himself as leader and thaumaturge. The very real achievement
in the Italian campaign was exaggerated tenfold, to the point where all
Napoleon's errors were 'deliberate mistakes' designed to lure the enemy
to his doom; it has been well said that the Napoleonic legend was born,
not on St Helena, but in Italy.
The Bonapartist press liked to portray known opponents of Napoleon,
like Dumolard and Mallet du Pan, as English agents in the pay of Pitt. By
the time the Right appeared as the ascendant power in France in May
1797 Napoleon had founded a third newspaper, this time in Paris, using
the vast booty he had accumulated in Italy. This one was called Journal de
Bonaparte et des hommes vertueux. He kept in reserve the secret that his
spies had intercepted correspondence from the most important royalist
agent, the comte d' Antraigues, implicating Pichegru and other rightist
figures in France. For the moment he contented himself with a formal
letter of protest to the Directory, complaining that he was being
persecuted by jealous souls purely because of his great services for the
Republic. Accusing Dumolard of being a stalking horse for the emigres,
he enclosed with his letter a dagger, symbolizing the dagger aimed at his
heart by the Five Hundred.
The second major weapon of retaliation against the Right was the
alliance Napoleon built up with Barras, using as middleman the newly
returned French ambassador to the U.S.A. Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand. The wily and Machiavellian Talleyrand, whose name would
marcin
(Marcin)
#1