ABSTRACT
On 16 August 1798, the Gazette of the United States declared that ‘it is an undoubted truth that some of the Jacobin papers are under the direction of as great liars as ever escaped the hands of Justice in England, Ireland or Scotland.’1 Thus, a newspaper supportive of the US President John Adams, at a moment of dire controversy for the infant republic, with the Sedition Act fresh on the statute book and threatening to criminalize all political dissent, labelled the ‘Democratic-Republican’ opposition press as part of a transatlantic pattern of treacherous ideological radicalism. Some twenty years later, the Spanish government circulated a note to its fellow European powers, demanding joint action against a group of former Napoleonic soldiers (and imperial loyalists) who had set up camp on the border of Texas and the United States. Fearful of the political upheavals wracking their rebellious colonies in ‘the cause of a false and impossible liberty’, the Madrid ministry warned of global repercussions in light of endemic rumours of plots to rescue the emperor from his Atlantic prison: ‘The American revolution is the European revolution; all that remains is for the Bonaparte family to take a personal part in it.’2
