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).57 He was not about to fall for Leclerc’s fine words, and fighting broke out before Leclerc could implement the first stage of Napoleon’s plan. While Leclerc’s armada of fifty-four ships was on its way, l’Ouverture had put down an internal uprising, executing the ringleader (his own nephew) and 2,000 rebels. 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. His only reinforcements were a few Polish and Swiss conscripts.58 (Two Swiss brigades mutinied at Toulon the moment they learned where they were headed.) The war swiftly turned into a bloody campaign of racial extermination, for which the absent Napoleon must take a large share of the responsibility. Although there is no evidence to support the modern accusation that, as one historian recently put it, ‘Bonaparte hated black people’, he undoubtedly shared the widespread Western assumption of the day that whites were superior to all non-whites, and he expected Leclerc to prevail easily with such a large, well-armed force against native fighters, just as he had at the battles of the Pyramids and Aboukir.59 ‘If I were black,’ Napoleon said, ‘I would be for the blacks; being white, I am for the whites.’60 At Jaffa, as we have seen, he had executed several thousand non-European prisoners-of-war. Now he was harsh on miscegenation, ordering that ‘White women [in Saint-Domingue] who have prostituted themselves to blacks, no matter what their rank, will be sent to Europe.’61
On May 20, 1802, Napoleon passed a law reintroducing the slave trade (though technically not slavery itself) to all French colonies according to the rules pertaining in 1789.62 Britain – which punished the murder of a slave in Barbados in 1802 with a fine of £11 4 shillings, and retained slavery until 1834 – sent a large watching force to Trinidad in case either the slave revolt or Napoleonic imperialism spread there. In America President Thomas Jefferson, who also owned slaves, declared American neutrality, watching equally nervously.63
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 (etouffier) on board a ship in which volcanic sulphur was used to asphyxiate four hundred prisoners, before the ship was scuttled.64 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.65 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.’66 Napoleon did not respond directly to this, but certainly did not forbid it.
On November 27 Napoleon wrote to Leclerc about Pauline, who had bravely gone out on the expedition, saying he was ‘highly satisfied with the conduct of Paulette. She ought not to fear death, as she would die with glory in dying with the army and being useful to her husband. Everything passes rapidly on earth, with the exception of the mark we leave on history.’67 At the time he wrote, Leclerc himself was nearly four weeks dead from yellow fever. ‘Come back soon,’ Napoleon wrote to Pauline on learning of Leclerc’s death, ‘here you will find consolation for your misfortunes in the love of your family. I embrace you.’ Pauline – whom Laure d’Abrantès described as ‘a less-than-desolate widow’ – returned with the body on January 1, 1803, and by the end of August she was remarried, to the handsome and rich Don Camillo Filippo Ludovico Borghese, Prince of Sulmona and of Rossano, Duke and Prince of Guastalla, whom she privately thought ‘an imbecile’ and to whom she was soon wildly unfaithful.68*
The extermination on Saint-Domingue continued unabated after Leclerc’s death, as l’Ouverture’s lieutenants and successors continued the struggle against his exceptionally cruel second-in-command, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, who, despite receiving large numbers of reinforcements, managed to sail only 8,000 men back to France in May 1803. Twenty generals, 30,000 Frenchmen and possibly as many as 350,000 Saint-Dominguans (of both races) had died.69 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.70
‘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.’71 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.’72 The defeat in Saint-Domingue ended for ever Napoleon’s dreams of a French empire in the West.
14
Amiens
‘The French people need to support me with my flaws, if they find in me some advantages. My flaw is being unable to bear insults.’
Napoleon to Roederer, 1800
‘Ambassadors are essentially spies with titles.’
Napoleon to Eugène, 1805
At 9 p.m. on Monday, January 4, 1802, Napoleon’s brother Louis was married to Josephine’s daughter Hortense by the mayor of Paris’ 1st arrondissement. It was only one of a large number of marriages arranged by Napoleon, whose involvement in the nuptial lives of others was almost uniformly disastrous – certainly so in this case, as very soon Louis, who was in love with someone else at the time, could hardly bear to share a room with Hortense, and vice versa. Napoleon treated Hortense as his own daughter. Everyone liked her except the man Napoleon selected to marry her. (She later described her schooldays as the only happy time of her life; there can be no sadder statement.) Josephine was also to blame for the match, which tied her family closer to her husband’s at the cost of her own daughter’s happiness.
Although Joseph had shown himself a skilful negotiator over the Concordat and ending the Quasi-War, and Napoleon was pleased with his youngest brother Jérôme, who had entered the French navy, his siblings were now becoming a mixed blessing to him in public life. Lucien, in particular, was hard to control. Napoleon was reportedly furious in November 1800 that Lucien, as interior minister, had permitted the publication of Louis de Fontanes’ pamphlet Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monk et Bonaparte which, although predictably sycophantic in its conclusion, Napoleon rightly feared would draw attention to the fact that none had come to power constitutionally. ‘There can be no comparison between me and Cromwell,’ he later stated. ‘I was three times elected by my people; and besides, in France my army has never made war on Fren
chmen, but only on foreigners.’1 (The fédérés of Toulon, people of the Vendée and the Paris Sections might have taken issue with that last remark.) Fontanes was one of Napoleon’s chief propagandists, so it is doubtful the publication came as a complete surprise; he may in fact have been feigning anger because the public reaction to the pamphlet, which effectively hinted by historical analogy that Napoleon should become an absolute ruler, was immediately hostile. Printing was halted and Lucien was sent off to Spain as ambassador soon afterwards. After Lucien’s first wife, Christine Boyer, died in May 1800, he married, again for love, the widow Alexandrine Jouberthon, by whom he was to have ten children. Napoleon disapproved of his second marriage because he would have preferred a more advantageous match for the family, upon which Lucien broke with his brother and retired to live in Rome.2
Reviving the old royal practice by which generals and senior dignitaries had to ask the head of state’s permission to marry, Napoleon attempted to marry his generals into Ancien Régime families. The marriages that Napoleon opposed, such as Lucien’s and Jérôme’s (to his first wife), tended to be happier than the ones that he and Josephine matchmade. Even when the marriages he had organized were successful, he did little to help them; when Murat asked permission to leave Italy to see his wife, Napoleon’s sister Caroline, and their new-born baby, Napoleon refused on the ground that ‘A soldier must remain faithful to his wife, but only wish to see her again when it’s judged that there is nothing left to do.’3 Napoleon’s difficult relations with some members of his family were undoubtedly self-inflicted.
• • •
At midnight on January 8, 1802, Napoleon left with Josephine for Lyons, where he was going to be offered the chief magistracy (that is, presidency) of the new Italian Republic, which would be made up of the Cisalpine Republic and those provinces of Italy taken from Austria by the Treaty of Lunéville. The next day Cambacérès, who was left in charge in Paris, wrote the first of what were to total 1,397 letters detailing everything of interest going on in France, allowing Napoleon to keep in close touch with events wherever he was in Europe. In an early letter, Napoleon learned that Les Halles central food market was well procured, the mayor of Brussels had apologized for condoning smuggling, General Belliard wanted a particular paragraph inserted in the Moniteur, the navy minister reported good winds at Flushing, a Senate commission had met to discuss constitutional reform, and Junot had received a report about the secret seditious activity of a tribune.4 In many respects these letters were the precursors of the reports that the ministry of police would send Napoleon daily between 1804 and 1814.
The Consultation of Lyons lasted for two weeks and was marked by many parties, parades, receptions and factory visits, but the key moment came on January 25 when Napoleon, after reviewing the troops that had returned from Egypt in the Place Bellecour, was elected chief magistrate of the Italian Republic at a meeting in the Jesuit College (today the Lycée Ampère). A Committee of Thirty, headed by Francesco Melzi d’Eril, proposed Napoleon’s name to the 450 Italian delegates present, with the gavel banged down immediately after the question was put just in case anyone had the temerity to demur.5 Melzi had organized the delegates into sections according to whether they had come from the Austrian, Piedmontese, Venetian or Papal areas, thereby deliberately maximizing disunity and minimizing the chances of opposition. Though it was humiliating that the new Italian Republic should be founded in France, where Talleyrand could better keep an eye on the delegates, this was the first time that the word ‘Italy’ had appeared on the political map of Europe since the collapse of Rome in the fifth century AD. Napoleon wrote a constitution that was a far cry from the universal suffrage favoured by the Revolution, with elective power resting firmly in the hands of landowners, clergy, professionals, academics and merchants voting in electoral colleges for the legislative bodies.
Back in Paris on March 18, while Napoleon examined medals of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar at the Louvre and handled the sword of Henri IV at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Cambacérès carried out a constitutional coup, purging the Legislative Body and the Tribunate through a sénatus-consulte.6 ‘One cannot work with an institution so productive of disorder,’ Napoleon had said of the Tribunate in a discussion in the Conseil shortly before leaving for Lyons. Those considered idéologues and ‘zealous republicans’ were therefore now excluded from it, including Chénier, Daunou, Benjamin Constant, the ex-Girondin Maximin Isnard and the political economist Charles Ganilh.7 Much of the liberal opposition to Napoleon was made up of Enlightenment thinkers and disciples of the late Marquis de Cordorcet, such as the philosopher Pierre Cabanis, Antoine Destutt de Tracy (who coined the term ‘ideology’), the history professor and editor Dominique Garat, the Constitutionalist bishop Henri Grégoire, the author Pierre-Louis Guinguené, and the lawyer-politician Comte Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, men who always played by the rules and didn’t plot assassinations.8 Although Napoleon took occasional action against them – he suppressed the Institut de France’s moral and political science section, exiling Constant and de Staël, for instance – he left the ones whom he called honnêtes gens (honest men) pretty much alone (except when he could persuade them to serve him, as Jean de Bry did as prefect of the Doubs department).9 Napoleon even had Cabanis buried in the Panthéon and Chateaubriand elected to the Institut, making it clear that he didn’t see the people he pejoratively termed idéologues as a serious political threat.
• • •
On Thursday, March 25, 1802, after nearly six months of negotiations, the Anglo-French peace treaty, to which France’s allies Spain and Holland were also signatories, was finally signed in the hôtel de ville at Amiens. Discussions had ranged over the Falkland Islands, whaling, Barbary pirates, salutes to flags on the high seas, and so on, and had been characterized by mutual suspicion of bad faith, not least when the British came up with the idea of having a Bourbon appointed grand master of the Knights of St John of Malta.10 Nonetheless, there was great public rejoicing in France, and colour engravings were made of angels and female representations of France crowning busts of the ‘pacificator’ Napoleon with laurel leaves, above poems stating: ‘The whole world reveres / the Hero of France / He is the God of War / He is the Angel of Peace.’11 This impression was further underlined on June 26 when Napoleon signed another treaty, with Turkey, that opened up the Dardanelles to French trade.
The provisions of Amiens were substantially similar to the preliminary treaty, with Britain promising to leave Malta and declare it a free port within three months of ratification, returning the island to the Knights of St John, and to cede its control over Pondicherry, and France regaining her colonies for the price of evacuating Naples, Taranto and those parts of the Papal States such as Ancona that were not in the Italian Republic. Yet Amiens was almost as important for what it left unsaid as for what it actually stipulated. There was no mention of commerce, and although the treaty provided for ‘an adequate compensation’ for the exiled Prince Willem V of Orange-Nassau for the loss of his Dutch estates and revenues when Holland had become the Batavian Republic in 1795, there was no mention of the futures of Holland, Switzerland or Piedmont, or any recognition of the Italian, Ligurian or Helvetian republics. There had been a Franco-Dutch convention in August 1801 which stipulated that French troops would leave Holland when the general peace was signed, and the Peace of Lunéville guaranteed Swiss independence, so the British didn’t feel the need to address either in the treaty itself.
The lack of a commercial treaty attached to the political one meant that the powerful British merchant class soon came to oppose a peace that gave them no privileged access to the markets of France, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa and (later) Etruria. This has been regarded as a deliberately hostile act by Napoleon, and contrary to the ‘spirit’ of Amiens, but no state is required to enter into a commercial treaty she knows would work to her disadvantage.12 Napoleon wanted to levy tariffs on British imports, and the fact that he didn’t int
end to return to the conditions of the badly skewed 1786 Anglo-French trade treaty delighted French merchants in places like Rouen, who could continue to operate behind the French protective tariff – which made British goods more expensive – but also with newly opened seas free of the Royal Navy. France now saw a flourishing of her maritime economy, with raw cotton supplies flooding in from abroad. The prisoner-of-war exchanges were popular in France, since by then there were nearly 70,000 French prisoners-of-war in Britain, almost all sailors captured in the dozens of minor naval engagements Britain had won since 1793, many of whom had been kept for years in extremely bad conditions on crowded and insanitary prison hulks moored off the south coast and in the Thames estuary.13*
When Joseph returned to Paris from Amiens, Napoleon ushered him to the front of the state box at the Opéra to receive the cheers of the audience. France had kept all her ‘natural’ frontiers up to the Rhine and the Alps, retained hegemony over western Europe, and had all her colonies restored to her. Yet in a sense Joseph and Talleyrand had been too successful: because Britain gained so little, her commitment to the peace was correspondingly weak. Britain was obliged to return Malta to the Knights of St John after the election of a new grand master overseen by the Pope within three months of the treaty’s ratification; the neutrality and independence of the island were then to be guaranteed by France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Spain and Prussia, with no French or British to be admitted into the Order, which was now based in St Petersburg as the former grand master had been the assassinated Tsar Paul. But although the Pope appointed an Italian nobleman, Giovanni Battista Tommasi, as grand master in March 1803, the British refused to recognize his rights and exiled him to Sicily. France evacuated all of the possessions stipulated in the treaty even before the three-month time limit, but Britain prevaricated over Pondicherry and Malta, partly because she (wrongly) feared that France and Russia were preparing to dismember the Ottoman Empire.14 Pondicherry stayed in British hands until 1816.
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