Saint-Domingue expedition

• 1. Introduction

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  The Saint-Domingue expedition set sail from Brest on the 14th of December 1801, carrying tens of thousands of French soldiers toward a Caribbean island where they expected a swift reassertion of imperial authority. What followed instead was one of the most catastrophic military defeats in French history, ending with France losing more troops in Saint-Domingue than it would later lose at the Battle of Waterloo.

  The man Napoleon Bonaparte sent to lead this force was Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, married to Napoleon's own sister Pauline. The man they were sent to subdue was Toussaint Louverture, a black former slave who had risen to rule the island as governor for life. Between these two figures, the fate of an entire empire hung in the balance. What Napoleon did not fully account for was yellow fever, mass defection, and the resolve of an island that would refuse to be reconquered.

• 2. Toussaint and the Constitution

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  Toussaint Louverture's path from enslaved person to governor of Saint-Domingue ran through the upheavals of the French Revolution. In 1793, civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel abolished slavery on the island. The National Convention endorsed that decision six months later, extending it across all French colonies, including Haiti on the 29th of August 1793.

  France had recognised Toussaint as governor because of what he had accomplished. He re-established a fragile peace on the island, fought off both Spanish and British attempts to seize it, and began restoring the colony's prosperity. But two decisions cost him Napoleon's goodwill. On the 27th of January 1801, Toussaint moved against Don Joaquín García y Moreno, the governor who had remained in the formerly Spanish part of the island since the 1795 Peace of Basel. Then on the 12th of July 1801, Toussaint promulgated a self-rule constitution that named him governor for life. Napoleon read both acts as an unacceptable challenge to French authority over the colony.

  Toussaint had also expelled two prominent mulatto officers, André Rigaud and Alexandre Pétion, from the colony two years before the expedition, in the conflict known as the War of Knives. Both men would return to Saint-Domingue aboard the French fleet, a detail that would complicate the final stages of the campaign in ways no one fully anticipated.

• 3. Building the Fleet

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  Assembling the expedition required extraordinary logistical effort. The initial fleet that left Brest numbered 21 frigates and 35 ships of the line, including one vessel carrying 120 guns, all under the command of Villaret de Joyeuse. It carried between 7,000 and 8,000 troops.

  That first wave was only the beginning. Contre-amiral Ganteaume departed Toulon on the 14th of February with 4,200 troops. Contre-amiral Linois left Cádiz on the 17th of February with 2,400 more. In subsequent months, additional ships arrived carrying soldiers from the French Imperial Naval Corps, a Dutch division, and the 3rd Polish Half-Brigade. A Spanish fleet of seven ships under Admiral Federico Gravina joined the force, along with financial and material support from Spanish Cuba. By the time the full campaign was counted, 31,131 troops had landed on Saint-Domingue.

  Napoleon was calculating from the start. Toussaint commanded over 16,000 men, so Leclerc was given 30,000, drawn from nearly all units of the French Revolutionary Army as well as its disciplinary corps. Napoleon had also quietly shifted his intentions. What had begun as a plan to confirm Toussaint's officers in their ranks and offer Toussaint a role as Leclerc's deputy became, by October 1801, a secret directive to disarm the black-controlled government and deport its officers to France. As a gesture of goodwill that now reads as calculated misdirection, Napoleon had even sent Toussaint's two sons back to their father, along with their tutor, before issuing those hidden orders.

• 4. Fire and Surrender

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  Villaret de Joyeuse arrived before Cap-Haïtien on the 3rd of February 1802, and the assault by land and sea began two days later. Henri Christophe, commanding the island's northern region, carried out Toussaint's orders with brutal exactness: he set fire to the town and killed part of its white population before retreating. On the 6th of February, Donatien de Rochambeau landed in the bay of Mancenille and captured Fort-Dauphin.

  The French occupied the island's ports, towns, and much of its cultivated land within ten days. Toussaint retreated into the Arbonite massif with a few brigades under generals Jacques Maurepas, Christophe, and Dessalines, along with a large number of white hostages. The terrain worked against the French: narrow gorges thick with tropical vegetation made pursuit dangerous and ambushes easy.

  On the 17th of February, Leclerc launched a coordinated assault across multiple fronts. Rochambeau moved from Fort-Dauphin toward Saint-Michel, Hardy marched on Marmelade, and Desfourneaux pushed toward Plaisance. General Humbert was ordered to land at Port-de-Paix and climb Les Trois Rivières gorge from the coast. Despite the terrain and Maurepas's resistance, the plan succeeded. Desfourneaux's division entered a burning Gonaïves on the 23rd of February. General Boudet found Saint-Marc also on fire, its streets marked by killings carried out on Dessalines's orders. The fort de la Crête-à-Pierrot was attacked by Dessalines and then Toussaint before eventually surrendering, its interior yielding large stocks of arms and ammunition alongside the bodies of assassinated white residents.

  Running low on resources and territory, the rebel command began to fracture. Christophe offered to surrender under the same terms given to Laplume and Maurepas. His capitulation drew Dessalines and finally Toussaint himself into a settlement. Leclerc restored Toussaint to his rank and properties. By the end of April and the start of May 1802, trade had resumed at the ports and an uneasy peace had settled across the island. Leclerc still held Toussaint's sons as what the source describes as his "joker" in negotiations.

• 5. Yellow Fever and Betrayal

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  From house arrest at Ennery, Toussaint watched as yellow fever did what his army had not managed to do in the field. Around 15,000 French soldiers died of it in only two months. Toussaint kept corresponding with his former officers, urging them to stay ready, though some were reluctant to resume fighting.

  Leclerc sensed the danger. In June 1802, he summoned Toussaint to a meeting, arrested him, and put him on a ship bound for Europe, where he was imprisoned at the Fort de Joux. That same period brought other destabilising news: the Treaty of Amiens had returned Martinique to France, and the Law of the 20th of May 1802 confirmed that slavery would continue there. When word reached Saint-Domingue that slavery had been re-established on Guadeloupe, revolt threatened again. On the 3rd of September, Richepanse, the general stationed at Basse-Terre on Guadeloupe, died of yellow fever. Leclerc tried to disarm the black population of Saint-Domingue in response to the unrest, but this hardened resistance rather than ending it.

  By August 1802, mass defections of black and mulatto troops had begun eroding the French position. In October, Alexandre Pétion, Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines all deserted to the rebel side. French strength had fallen to between 8,000 and 10,000 effective soldiers. After Christophe massacred several hundred Polish soldiers at Port-de-Paix, Leclerc ordered the arrest of all remaining black colonial troops in Cap-Haïtien and had 1,000 of them executed by tying sacks of flour to their necks and pushing them off ships. Still-loyal officers were not spared: Maurepas, who had surrendered months earlier and remained in French service, was drowned along with his family in the harbor of Cap-Haïtien on Leclerc's orders in early November.

  Leclerc himself had taken refuge on the island of Tortuga to avoid the fever. It found him anyway. He died of yellow fever on the 1st of November 1802. His wife Pauline Bonaparte, who had accompanied him to the island, cut off her hair after his death, placed it in his coffin, preserved his heart in an urn, and arranged for the rest of his remains to be returned to France.

• 6. Defeat and Its Consequences

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  Rochambeau took command after Leclerc's death and attempted to suppress the renewed revolt by other means. He received a shipment of slave-hunting dogs from Cuba, but they proved a military failure, requiring coercion even to attack a restrained captive. The memory of their use has endured in Haiti as a symbol of the extremes of colonial rule.

  On the 18th of November 1803, near Cap-Haïtien, Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated the French at the Battle of Vertières. By the end of December 1803, the last French soldiers left the island. Rochambeau, on his voyage back to France, was captured by the British at the Blockade of Saint-Domingue and held as a prisoner of war in Britain for nearly nine years.

  The human cost was enormous. Fewer than 7,000 to 8,000 of the 31,000 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue survived, and more than twenty French generals died. Napoleon's ambition to build a French empire in the western hemisphere ended with this campaign.

  On the 1st of January 1804, Dessalines proclaimed the former colony the second independent state in the Americas, naming it Haiti. He was first made governor general for life and then, on the 6th of October 1804, crowned emperor as Jacques I. Over 3,000 whites, including women and children, were killed under his supervision in the 1804 Haiti Massacre. Dessalines was assassinated on the 17th of October 1806, after which Haiti divided: Henri Christophe ruled a northern kingdom as Henri I, while Alexandre Pétion governed a southern republic. In 1825, Charles X of France demanded 150 million gold francs from Haiti in exchange for recognising its independence. That sum was reduced to 90 million in 1838 and the debt was not fully paid off until 1947.