After much screaming and sobbing, the first consul forgave Josephine’s infidelities (while embarking on many of his own with enthusiasm but never virtuosity: ‘Three minutes and it’s over,’ he told his staff). They moved into the royal apartments of the Tuileries. Bonaparte enjoyed their transformation. ‘Come on, little creole,’ he joked, lifting his wife into Antoinette’s boudoir, ‘get into the bed of your masters.’ Josephine had the decency to confess, ‘I can feel the queen’s ghost, asking what I’m doing in her bed.’
The consul now turned to the anti-French coalition, as the Austrians took the offensive in Italy. Bonaparte led his army over the Alps, a Hannibalesque exploit with cannon instead of elephants, then, by superb manoeuvring and pure luck, defeated the Austrians at Marengo, pulling off a peace with both Austria and Spain that won France more territories – including the interior of America, Louisiana, which he planned to make the centre of a new empire. It gave Bonaparte a chance to consider what to do with France’s rebel slaves.
TWO GENERALS: TOUSSAINT AND NAPOLEON
Toussaint had also emerged with a fancy new title along with the leadership of his country. Winning a vicious War of Knives in which he fought against a rival biracial warlord, André Rigaud, in July 1801 his Assembly approved a constitution entitled ‘
Protector Toussaint was keen to preserve the wealth of the plantations that were now disintegrating without slave labour: he and his generals Dessalines and Christophe now ran their own estates (Dessalines owned thirty), while imposing martial law to enforce indentured labour. Toussaint even discussed importing indentured labourers from Africa. But his regal powers inspired opposition, led by his own venal nephew General Moyse. When the latter tried to seize power, Toussaint had him shot and forty rebels fired out of cannon.
Toussaint assured Consul Bonaparte of the colony’s loyalty, but ‘under the administration of a black man’. Bonaparte approved, briefly. While he was in Egypt, Josephine had requested the return of her plantations. Toussaint restored them, sending her the income; Josephine entertained Toussaint’s sons for dinner, and became fond of Placide. Bonaparte told the young men their father was ‘a great man who’d rendered eminent services to France’ and decided to recognize him as captain-general, hoping that he would lead a French army against British Jamaica and possibly America. Instead the Protector appeased the US and Britain; meanwhile, given that Spain was now a French ally, his occupation of Santo Domingo interfered with Bonaparte’s Spanish relations
Canvassed by the slave masters’ lobby, Bonaparte decided to restore slavery and destroy Toussaint, warning that his rule failed to recognize the ‘sovereignty of the French people’. Refusing to ‘tolerate a single epaulette on the shoulders of these negroes’, Bonaparte told the Council of State, ‘I’m for the whites, because I’m white and for no other reason … How could we have granted freedom to Africans, these men without civilization?’ He added, ‘If the … Convention had understood what they were doing and known about colonies, would have they abolished slavery? I very much doubt it.’ He mustered an army of 20,000, later finding 23,000 reinforcements, his biggest overseas expedition, under Victoire-Emmanuel Leclerc, to whom he had married his most beautiful sister, Pauline. Bonaparte gave Leclerc detailed secret orders to first charm Toussaint, then, if he resisted, to eliminate him while publicly threatening that persons of colour who resisted would be ‘devoured by fire like dried sugar cane’. Yet travelling with the French were two Saint-Domingue generals, and future leaders of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, both sons of French
