His animosity was naturally intensified on the resumption of hostilities. The theatres were forbidden to perform pieces containing allusions complimentary to England, while plays of an opposite character were ordered to be performed not only in Paris but at Boulogne, Bruges, and other ports where troops were being collected for the invasion. A corps of Irish interpreters was formed, and Chaptal was directed to get some invasion songs written and set to music. Pamphlets demonstrating the facility of the invasion or vilifying the English were likewise published. One of them was entitled, ‘The English people, swollen with pride, beer, and tea, tried by the tribunal of reason.’ This was a reprint of Montlosier’s articles, but issued without his consent. Caricatures were also multiplied. One of them represented George III. as dragged on the ground by his hair by a French soldier. His crown tumbles off, and the soldier, striking him with his fist, says, ‘Look to thy crown and defend thy coasts.’[164] The Bayeux tapestry was brought over to Paris to suggest the practicability or imminency of a landing in England, and the Joan of Arc celebration at Orleans, suspended since the Revolution, was revived. Even indeed in February, three months before the rupture, Napoleon had emphatically approved, if not suggested, the erection by the Orleans municipality of a statue of the heroine. This gave the Times a text for commenting on the anomaly of the glorification by a usurper of the maiden who restored the French crown to its rightful owner. Napoleon might, however, have rejoined that he had not usurped the crown, but had picked it out of the gutter of the Revolution. The teaching of English in schools, too, as Lamartine testifies, was forbidden. Yet it is but fair to say that French was discouraged, as Lord Malmesbury tells us, in English schools, and that the Times of January 4, 1803, contained the following curious article:—
The political ill-consequences of the spread of the French language throughout Europe are admitted; and we do not conceive that its bad effects upon the morals and character of other countries will be disputed. We have no hesitation to add, that a nation which adopts the language of a superior is prepared to admit its yoke. There is no better or quicker road to dominion, than by imposing the necessity, or compassing the mode, of making a language general. In this word are comprised the ideas, character, and love of the people whose idiom you prefer to your own.
We never heard it alleged as unwise in the Government of China, to intercept all communication between its subjects and foreigners.
Except as a first step and beginning of mischief, all apprehensions from the representation of a French Comedy are ridiculous. It is as the mali labes, the first spot and eruption, that we are induced to contend against anything so contemptible as the pic-nickery and nick-nackery—the pert affectation, and subaltern vanity of rehearsing to an audience that cannot understand, in a language one cannot pronounce!
Does any one advantage result to the community of Great Britain, from the practice of teaching French indiscriminately to every girl whose parents can send her to a boarding-school?
Does any advantage result from its being taught to shopkeepers’ sons, at a day-school, for fear foreigners should not pawn or buy, for want of understanding them?
Are not the great part of the female sex, and of the uninformed part of ours, exposed, by this practice, to the moral and political corruptions of another country? Is not the business of French Emissaries facilitated by the half-understanding of low and ignorant Englishmen?
Ought a girl to be able to read any book that her father cannot? Ought she to converse in a gibberish, which her mother cannot detect?
Ought the mass of a virtuous and happy people to be educated to form ideas different from the manners, habits, and institutions of their own country? Ought it to be in the power of an enemy to poison their minds, corrupt their principles, and seduce them from their allegiance and religion?
Napoleon’s letters show how jealously he watched over the detention of the English, and over everything relating to England. Thus in 1806 he ordered all Englishmen to be expelled from the Papal States, and this order perhaps accounts for Coleridge’s belief that he had a narrow escape from being seized on account of his articles in the Morning Post. It is extremely unlikely, however, that Napoleon ever heard of Coleridge. He likewise decreed that English civilians found in any country occupied by his troops should be prisoners, and all English property or merchandise confiscated. Even any neutral vessel which had entered an English port was also to be forfeited. Lord Oxford, Lord Mount Cashell, and General Morgan would have been arrested at Florence but for the refusal of the Queen Regent to act as Napoleon’s policeman. Again in 1806 Napoleon writes, ‘I do not know why English prisoners have been placed at Arras; no doubt to be near home so that they may escape.’ He writes eight months later from Posen: ‘Issue a circular and take measures that throughout the Empire all letters coming from England or written in English and by Englishmen shall be destroyed. All this is very important, for England must be completely isolated.’ In 1807 he complains that English prisoners still received letters. Two years later, on a report that the English at Arras and Valenciennes were meditating escape, he ordered their removal further inland. This measure was extended in 1811 to the prisoners at Brussels. The daily police report, which constantly spoke of the English prisoners, was evidently scanned by him, even when absent from Paris, with great attention; and seemingly anxious that no other eye should see these documents, he directed that during his absence in Russia they should be destroyed. There is consequently a gap of four months in 1812. Even to the last the prisoners were never forgotten by him, for on the 6th January 1814 he ordered their removal from Verdun to Orleans, manifestly to prevent their release by the allied armies. Only in one instance do I find his severity relenting. On the 12th November 1812 at Givet he remarked English prisoners (captured soldiers or sailors, of course, not détenus) who had been set to repair a swivel bridge. Eight or ten of them jumped with alacrity into a boat to help to make the mechanism work. He directed that these men should be picked out, presented with 100 francs each, and sent back to England. An English clergyman at Givet who had petitioned for a three months’ visit home was to escort them. A petition from another Englishman there was also to be favourably considered. It is pleasant to find Napoleon for once good-humoured and generous.[165] When, in 1812, he directed that the smuggling of coffee and sugar into Corsica by English vessels should be winked at, and that sugar and coffee seized in British bottoms should not, like British manufactured goods, be burnt, he was obviously inspired by more selfish considerations. French fishing-boats were forbidden to pass the night out at sea, lest they should smuggle English goods, yet they were authorised to smuggle (the French had adopted the word smogler) spirits into England. Fishing-boats on both sides were unmolested, unless indeed they had clandestine passengers on board; and the Times, running a light cutter in the Channel, procured from them Paris newspapers. Letters were probably conveyed occasionally in the same way. England had not retaliated against French products, for in 1807 the Monthly Review appealed to British patriots not to continue spending a million and a half a year on French brandies and other goods. But Cancale must have been unable to continue sending its oysters, one hundred and nineteen millions of which had been forwarded in the twenty months of peace. The export of oysters from Granville and St. Malo was, however, permitted by Napoleon in 1810.