Within the space of a year, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon had made peace with Austria, Naples, Turkey, Russia, Britain and the émigrés — and now that the Atlantic Ocean was safe to cross, France was going to send an expedition of 12,000 men from Rochefort and Brest ‘to re-establish order on Saint-Domingue’ (present-day Haiti).
In the early 1790s the produce of this former slave colony of 8,000 plantations was greater than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies combined, providing 40 per cent of Europe’s consumption of sugar and 60 per cent of its coffee, and accounting for 40 per cent of all of France’s overseas trade. By 1801, however, because of the slave revolt led over the course of the previous six years by Toussaint l’Ouverture, sugar exports were a mere 13 per cent of their 1789 total and cotton 15 per cent.
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The Jacobins who had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1794 were either dead, in disgrace or in prison. Napoleon was keen to return to the days when Saint-Domingue produced 180 million francs per annum for the French treasury, gave employment to 1,640 ships and thousands of seamen, and kept the French Atlantic ports thriving. He hoped it might even provide a strategic springboard for a new French empire in the western hemisphere, especially now that France had exchanged Tuscany for Louisiana.
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He ordered Leclerc to follow a three-stage plan: first, to promise the blacks anything and everything while he occupied the key strategic positions on the island, secondly, to arrest and deport all potential opponents, and only then to embark on the reintroduction of slavery.
The charismatic and ruthless Toussaint l’Ouverture, a black freeman who had himself owned slaves, had imposed a constitution on Saint-Domingue in May 1801 that made him dictator for life, ostensibly in the name of the French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality. He had also created an army of 20,000 former slaves and taken over the whole island, expelling the Spanish from the eastern half (the present-day Dominican Republic).
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His plan to defeat the French was to destroy any resources they might find on the coast and then to retreat into the mountainous jungle interior to conduct guerrilla warfare.
Leclerc had failed to take into account the horrific ravages that malaria and yellow fever would wreak on his army. Once a shortage of supplies and the outbreak of those diseases struck he faced impossible odds.
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‘If I were black,’ Napoleon said, ‘I would be for the blacks; being white, I am for the whites.’
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The fighting on Saint-Domingue was brutal. Plantations were torched, massacres and torture were common, towns were razed; there were mass drownings; corkscrews were used to draw out the eyes of French prisoners, and the French even constructed a makeshift gas chamber (étouffier) on board a ship in which volcanic sulphur was used to asphyxiate four hundred prisoners, before the ship was scuttled.
Toussaint l’Ouverture finally surrendered on May 1 on terms whereby the freedom of Saint-Domingue’s blacks was officially guaranteed, black officers were accepted into the French army, and l’Ouverture himself and his staff were allowed to retire to one of his several plantations.
However, on June 7, on his own initiative, Leclerc suddenly reneged on the deal, kidnapped l’Ouverture and sent him to prison in France. The guerrilla war continued, and on October 7 Leclerc wrote to Napoleon: ‘We must destroy all the mountain negroes, men and women, only keep children under twelve years old, destroy half the ones of the plains, and so not leave in the colony one coloured man who wears the epaulette.’
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Twenty generals, 30,000 Frenchmen and possibly as many as 350,000 Saint-Dominguans (of both races) had died. Toussaint l’Ouverture, ‘the Black Spartacus’, died of pneumonia on April 7, 1803 in a large cold cell that can be visited today in the Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains.
‘The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’ One lesson he did learn was that blacks could make excellent soldiers, and in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers, made up of men from Egypt and the Caribbean under a black battalion commander, Joseph ‘Hercules’ Domingue, to whom he gave a special award of 3,000 francs. By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’