Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c56.s3.6

v4.c56.s3.6

Napoleon and the Chauvinistic school of French writers have denounced Perron as a traitor to his native land. He was nothing of the kind. He had never written to the Government in France or to its representatives in India, offering himself as an instrument of French imperialist ambitions on the Indian soil, as René Madec had done repeatedly 25 years earlier. No official letter of the French ministers, no emissary of the Government of France, had succeeded in reaching Perron up to his surrender to the English (7 September 1803), while René Madec was in frequent correspondence with the ministers in Paris and the governors of the French settlements in India.* Marquess Wellesley himself admitted in a letter to Lord Hobart (20th November 1803), that Perron “had not yet been formally connected with the present Government of France.” [MM. iii. 467.]