>One can add to the mix the virulent anti-French/anti-Bonaparte campaign in the English press that consisted of a series of articles and caricatures attacking both Bonaparte and his family, which by all accounts irritated and possibly even hurt him. He had his secretary, Bourrienne, read out the British papers during his morning ablutions.97 The Morning Post, for example, described him as a ‘Mediterranean mulatto’>It is true that Addington asked newspapers, unoffi cially, not to publish defamatory articles against Bonaparte, but this could hardly have the desired impact. A leading émigré journalist, JeanGabriel Peltier, was prosecuted for criminal libel as a sop to Bonaparte, but that was the extent of it. The foreign secretary Lord Hawkesbury tried to reassure the First Consul that the British government would deport royalists involved in distributing anti-Bonaparte propaganda, but this was never done. Instead, the government paid lip-service to freedom of speech, and protested its impotence regarding the expulsion of émigré journalists, claiming that it lacked the authority to do so. In contrast, pro-French journalists were expelled from Britain using the Alien Act without so much as the pretence of a trial>The French consequently perceived London’s position as hypocritical. Bonaparte responded by waging a campaign to silence the hostile press in England by trying to bribe émigré journalists – with some notable successes – and by putting diplomatic pressure on governments to pursue journalists hostile to the Consulate. If the British government did little to placate Bonaparte, it is because it did not want to, exacerbating an already tense situation and creating a climate in which compromise was impossible
>Mediterranean mulattobit redundant innit
