If the emperor pursued with anger the spirit of opposition in the salons, which he endeavored ceaselessly to rally around him, and if, above all, he feared their glorious representatives, Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand, he watched still more harshly the newspapers and the journalists. His revolutionary origin, and the early habits of his mind had rendered him hostile to that liberty of the press which flourished under the Constituent Assembly, withered away under the Legislative Assembly, and expired during the Terror in a sea of blood. When Daunou wished to insert the liberty of the press in the constitution of the year VIII., he encountered great opposition on the part of former Jacobins. They and their friends had secured the right of saying always what they chose, and knew the means of preserving what they had acquired at the price of many massacres; the liberty their adversaries demanded appeared to them dangerous and unjust. Such has always been in the main the revolutionary idea, and the Emperor Napoleon had not forgotten this theory and this arbitrary practice. However, he also knew what might be the influence of the periodical press, and he endeavored to submit to the discipline of his will the small number of newspapers which existed under his reign. "Stir yourself up a little more to sustain public opinion," he wrote to Fouché, on the 28th April, 1805. "Print several articles, cleverly written, to deny the march of the Russians, the interview of the Emperor of Russia with the Emperor of Austria, and those ridiculous reports, phantoms born of the English fog and spleen. Say to the editors, that if they continue in their present tone I will pay them off; tell them that I do not judge them hardly for the bad things they have said, but for the little good they have said. When they represent France vacillating on the point of being attacked, I judge that they are neither Frenchmen nor worthy to write under my reign. It is all very well to say that they only give their bulletins; they have been told what these bulletins are; and since they must give false news, why not give them in favor of the public credit and tranquillity?"