The reality was worse. In January 1802, Toussaint watched Leclerc’s troops disembarking. ‘We must perish,’ he concluded. ‘All of France has come to Saint-Domingue.’ Leclerc bungled his landing, but Toussaint ordered Dessalines and Christophe to destroy the town of Cap (once ‘Paris of the Caribbean’) and unleash ‘fire and destruction … Destroy and burn everything so that those who come to re-enslave us always have before their eyes the image of hell they deserve.’ The war was merciless: Leclerc ordered mass drownings of black prisoners and built a gas chamber on a ship using volcanic sulphur to suffocate 400 Haitians; Toussaint corkscrewed the eyes out of French captives.
Leclerc swung from genocidal fury to flaccid despair, barely coping with Pauline, though she was safe aboard his flagship; he told Napoleon that the surrounding chaos ‘wore her down to the point of making her ill’. Reduced to a brigade of 4,000 that included devoted white officers and African-born female fighters, Toussaint fought a guerrilla campaign, travelling in disguise, sleeping on a plank; whites were massacred. ‘Spare no one,’ he ordered. ‘We must conquer or die!’ The French suffered punishing losses. By March 1802, half the French were dead or sick of yellow fever. Leclerc proposed a policy of mass killing; Pauline begged Bonaparte to recall him. Tormented by Pauline, who took a series of lovers from the few French soldiers not dying in the epidemic, Leclerc begged her to go home, but she consoled herself that ‘Here I reign like Josephine; I hold first place.’ But she reigned over desolation.
Yet the French advanced. Toussaint haemorrhaged men, and his generals Christophe and Dessalines negotiated pardons and then defected. Toussaint, forced to negotiate, met Leclerc, afterwards celebrating the ceasefire at a banquet attended by the commander and four future Haitian rulers. Toussaint retired to one of his estates, but Bonaparte demanded his capture. Leclerc, aided by his nemesis Dessalines, suborned a trusted ally to lure Toussaint to his estate where he was arrested and, along with his wife, sons (including Placide, who had joined the fight against the French) and devoted mixed-race servant Mars Plaisir, handed over to Leclerc. The chained Liberator was dispatched to France.* Between May and July 1802, Bonaparte restored slavery in some Caribbean territories, which sparked a new war of liberation in Saint-Domingue. This was led by Dessalines, who was elected commander-in-chief and joined by Christophe, Boyer and Pétion. Dessalines slaughtered Toussaint’s white and black supporters. The French, Leclerc proposed to Bonaparte, should ‘destroy all the negroes of the mountains, men and women, and keep only children below twelve, destroy half the blacks on the plains and leave not a single man of colour who has worn an epaulette’. But then he himself perished of fever.
In November, Pauline sailed back to Paris with his body;* his replacement, Donatien, vicomte de Rochambeau, son of Washington’s ally, deployed terror – mass drownings and public burnings, crucifixions and feeding humans to dogs. He held a ball in Port-au-Prince for elite mixed-race women, who banqueted in a black-lined hall after which their host opened doors to a chamber where their husbands, just executed, were displayed. Rochambeau ordered genocidal measures, the killing of every black adult over the age of twelve and the import of new African slaves. But on 18 November 1803, at Vertières, Dessalines vanquished the French. Next day, Rochambeau opened negotiations. Dessalines gave him ten days to evacuate 8,000 men. France’s richest colony was lost: Bonaparte was astonished – ‘the greatest error I ever committed’ – reflecting later that he should just have appointed Toussaint as viceroy. In the third of the three great revolutions, Toussaint and Dessalines had changed the world: after the death of 30,000 French and 350,000 Haitians, Dessalines had defeated a European great power. But it was decisive in another way too: it convinced Napoleon to sell the interior of America.
Jefferson had first supported Bonaparte’s crushing of Toussaint’s rebels, but when he discovered that the consul had regained Louisiana, the core of north America, this Francophile plotted to remove the French, convinced that America needed the port of New Orleans. Jefferson threatened Bonaparte that he would ally with Britain if he did not get it. He dispatched James Monroe to Paris just as Bonaparte realized that he was losing Haiti.
