John Adolphus (1768–1845)
Footsteps of blood: or the march of the Republicans: being a display of the horrid cruelties, and unexampled enormities committed by the French Republican armies in all parts of the world…
London: printed for J. Hatchard, 1803
Syn.7.80.114(1), frontispiece

This is the frontispiece to another English response to the invasion scare of 1803–4. Drawing on ostensibly impartial and even on French sources, the barrister and historian John Adolphus set out to ‘shew the cruelties, robberies, and profanations, of which the French have uniformly been guilty in every country which they have conquered by force of arms, or gained by hypocritical pretences of friendship’. The frontispiece shows the massacre on Napoleon’s orders of Ottoman prisoners taken at the siege of Jaffa in March 1799. The pamphlet may be an opportunist, commercial by-product of research carried out by the author for his substantial and scholarly Biographical memoirs of the French Revolution, and other anti-Jacobin writings. Summing up evidence of duplicity and savagery, Adolphus concluded that there was no negotiating with the French. Britons must instead ‘arm in overwhelming numbers’. They must show ‘a firm and magnanimous resolution to CONQUER OR PERISH’. Set on reaching a wide readership, his pamphlet was priced to sell in bulk—at nine shillings the dozen.