Napoleon's Louisiana Treachery

(Conspiracy Nation, 01/09/06) -- Lucien Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte (image, right), quarreled about Napoleon's secret plan to sell the Louisiana Territory. To sell Louisiana without consent of the Chambers, complained Lucien, would be against the French Constitution. "In a word," he declared, "the Constitution..."

In a fury, Napoleon interrupted. "Constitution! Unconstitutional! Republic! National sovereignty!" he raged. "Big words! Great phrases!" (Adams, Henry. History of the Jefferson Administration)

Napoleon "had but two rooted hatreds. The deeper and fiercer of these was directed against the republic -- the organized democracy, and what he called ideology, which Americans knew in practice as Jeffersonian theories..." (Adams, op. cit.)

Napoleon sneered at Lucien. "Do you think yourself still in the club of St. Maximin? We are no longer there, mind that! Ah, it becomes you well, Sir Knight of the Constitution, to talk so to me! You had not the same respect for the Chambers on the 18th Brumaire!"

 Image: Napoleon Bonaparte

This stung Lucien, for he had played a key role in the coup d'etat of the 18th Brumaire. It had been a coup d'etat within a coup d'etat. The Abbe Sieyes plotted the first coup, but Napoleon staged a second inner coup and seized power. At a crucial moment, Lucien had rushed outside the council chambers and told nearby soldiers the government was being terrorised by a group of deputies brandishing daggers. It was a "terrorist event!"

The French had wanted to entrench themselves in Louisiana. An army would be sent there. But first, the Island of St. Domingo, key to the line-of-supply, had to be secured.

The French Revolution of 1789 had had a ripple effect. Slaves in St. Domingo, under their leader Toussaint Louverture, had rebelled against their French masters. "Five hundred thousand negro slaves in the depths of barbarism," relates Adams, "revolted, and the horrors of the massacre made Europe and America shudder." (Herman Melville's short novel, Benito Cereno, is reminiscent of the affair.)

On October 23, 1801, Napoleon ordered General Leclerc to head an expedition to destroy the government of Toussaint Louverture and re-establish slavery in the Island of St. Domingo. The fighting was fierce, on both sides. "At St. Domingo, horror followed fast on horror. [French General] Rochambeau, shut in Port au Prince, -- drunken, reckless, surrounded by worthless men and by women more abandoned still, wallowing in the dregs of the former English occupation and of a half-civilized negro empire, -- waged as he best could a guerilla war, hanging, shooting, drowning, burning all the negroes he could catch; hunting them with fifteen hundred bloodhounds bought in Jamaica for something more than one hundred dollars each; wasting money, squandering men; while [Toussaint's associates] Dessalines and Christophe massacred every white being within their reach." (Adams, op. cit.)

Decimated by the fighting and by tropical illness, the French, assisted by Louverture's own traitorous lieutenants, tricked Toussaint into surrender. Toussaint himself had trusted the word of Bonaparte when, on May 1, 1802, "he put himself in Leclerc's hands in reliance on Leclerc's honor." (Ibid.)

Leclerc, writes Henry Adams, "seemed to be as much surprised that the word of honor of a French soldier should be believed as any bystander at seeing the negro believe it..." Only a month after trusting Leclerc, Toussaint was arrested, sent to Europe, and imprisoned secretly in the fortress of Joux, high in the mountains on the Swiss frontier. "The cold and solitude of a single winter closed this tropical existence." On April 7, 1803, Toussaint Louverture died, forgotten. (Ibid.)

The "prejudice of race alone blinded the American people to the debt they owed to the desperate courage of five hundred thousand Haytian negroes who would not be enslaved." The military disaster of St. Domingo ruined French plans to fortify the Louisiana Territory. To fund a European war, Napoleon decided to sell Louisiana to the Americans.

"The sale of Louisiana was the turning-point in Napoleon's career," writes Henry Adams. "No true Frenchman forgave it." Napoleon, however, was not worried. "We may hereafter expect rivalries among the members of the Union," he prophesied. "The confederations that are called perpetual last only till one of the contracting parties finds it to its interest to break them..." (Ibid.)

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