Note 830 — SECTION XXXVIII: CHAPTER II
Reading edition
The history of this proclamation is curious. Clarke, or Napoleon himself, considered it too full of insults of a person who was, after all, the Emperor’s brother. So it had to be disavowed: Soult wrote to Paris that he had not authorized it, and Clarke had the ingenuity to print in the French newspapers that it was an invention of the English government, intended to disgust the Spanish partisans of King Joseph, and to advertise the ill feeling that prevailed between the French army and the Imperial family. See Vidal de la Blache, i. p. 138; as he remarks, the style is all Soult’s, and there is not a trace of foreign diction in it. No Englishman or Spaniard could have written it.