Petion defends Jacmel, then studies ballistics in France

Bellegarde has Petion serving as a non-commissioned officer under Rigaud during the civil war of 1800, which he attributes to the breach between Toussaint Louverture and the commander of the Southern Province. Petion defended Jacmel against a large force under Dessalines and made a sortie that military opinion of the time judged a remarkable operation. The mechanism of what followed was defeat turned into preparation. With Rigaud beaten, Petion went to France and used the enforced leisure to complete his knowledge of ballistics, which is why he returned two years later as head of an artillery battalion in General Debelle's division of Leclerc's expedition and took part in the siege of the fort at La Crete a Pierrot. Bellegarde presents the artillery expertise as the reason Dessalines wanted him in October 1802.

Talleyrand negotiated a peace agreement with the United States at Mortefontaine, ending the undeclared naval war that his own conduct under the Directory had provoked. Girard treats the settlement as the first condition for the later invasion, since the expedition would depend almost entirely on American merchants for supplies. The obstacle was that many of those merchants openly preferred Louverture, who had protected their ships from French privateers throughout the conflict, and were reluctant to feed soldiers they had recently fought. Girard shows the problem being solved politically rather than commercially, when a new administration in Washington proved sympathetic to French colonial interests. The sequence matters for his argument that the expedition was assembled through diplomacy across three capitals rather than by French naval power, which by 1801 could barely get grain traders out of Brest.

Bonaparte persuaded Spain to return Louisiana under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, with the transfer taking effect in 1802. Girard insists the purpose was economic rather than strategic. French colonies produced coffee, sugar, cotton and indigo but no wheat, so they bought flour, timber and dried cod from American merchants on terms French officials considered extortionate. General Claude Victor, who was to command the garrison for Louisiana, argued that supplying the colonies without foreign help would be an immense advantage. The result would have been a self sufficient empire running from Louisiana to Guyane. Three expeditions were fitted out in 1802, Leclerc with twenty thousand men for Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo, Richepance with thirty five hundred for Guadeloupe, and Victor with three thousand for Louisiana, though the last sat in Flushing and Dunkirk for want of troops and transports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reads the Louisiana retrocession as a food supply scheme for the sugar colonies, against readings that make it a strategic threat to the United States.

Russia, Prussia and Austria objected to a standing Polish army on French pay, so the First Consul reorganised the two legions into three demibrigades of roughly three thousand men each plus a cavalry regiment. The mechanism was administrative rather than military. Dropping the word legion removed the diplomatic irritant without disbanding the troops, and General Dabrowski was compensated with the empty title of Inspector General of Polish Armed Forces. Generals Wielhorski and Jablonowski lost their posts in the same shuffle. The units had already been shifted off the French payroll onto the Cisalpine Republic and the puppet Kingdom of Etruria, which paid them irregularly or not at all. Unpaid soldiers in a peacetime Italy that resented feeding them accepted colonial service in the Antilles as the lesser evil. The third and fourth demibrigades were consequently marked for Saint-Domingue, which is how Poles came to fight a war of black liberation.