Britain signs off and the expedition swells to forty-three thousand

Once Talleyrand obtained British approval the expedition grew into a seven port operation of forty-three thousand men, half of them sailors. Transporting the army mobilised two thirds of the serviceable units in the French navy, including twenty-eight of its large ships of the line together with dozens of frigates and corvettes. Girard notes that no expedition of that size ever left French ports again while Bonaparte ruled. He also records the price of British consent. Bonaparte refused to give up an inch of French empire in the London negotiations while offering the British Dutch Ceylon and Spanish Trinidad, and Spain was asked to help pay for a fleet whose Brest squadron alone had passed three point three million francs, funded by borrowing against the following year's budget. Girard notes that police reports from the winter found the French population lukewarm about the venture and pessimistic about its chances of success.

Fick records the tightening that followed a widespread revolt of farm workers in the North in October 1801, assumed to have been inspired by Toussaint's nephew General Moise, who as agricultural inspector for the North was known to oppose his uncle's land policy. Under the proclamation of 25 November 1801, district military commanders were to prepare nominative censuses of every farm worker on every plantation in their jurisdiction and forward them to the generals and the governor. People who were not farm workers had to prove their occupation and carry a passport, and anyone found without one was automatically arrested and thrown back into plantation labour. Soldiers were forbidden to mingle with workers, and managers and overseers risked arrest and imprisonment if they failed to report runaways from other estates immediately.

Louverture had pressed Roume for months to authorise a takeover of the Spanish half of the island, accusing his neighbours of kidnapping black Dominguians and staging public demonstrations to manufacture outrage. When the Spanish governor investigated and gave assurances, Roume withdrew his earlier decree. Louverture then imprisoned the French agent and invaded anyway, on hearing that Paris was about to forbid it. Girard's finding concerns what did not happen next. The documents Louverture published to justify the invasion say nothing about the fate of Dominican slaves, and the proclamations he issued on the march promised to respect his neighbours' religion, lives and property. During the handover negotiations he complained that Dominican exiles were leaving with their slaves, on the ground that this stripped the territory of workers. He treats the silence of the record as the finding, since a governor eager to be seen abolishing slavery would have said so in print. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard says the record is far from clear that Louverture abolished slavery in Santo Domingo after invading, contradicting the common assertion that he did so at once.

By early 1804 Davenport had sold the figures to new proprietors who set up in New York. The collection grew to seventy or eighty pieces, many carried over from the previous year, but Louverture is absent from the list and near his old position there is now a scene from Othello. White concludes that the figure was converted. The alteration is legible because wax artists had no aversion to gore, staging the execution of Louis the sixteenth with spouting fake blood, the killing of Marat, and a general dying under tomahawks. Louverture had been shown without any violent scene because he was attached to no single atrocity, unlike Dessalines. Her reading is that a hyperrealistic likeness of a black man governing was harder to display in a slaveholding society than a licensed Shakespearean murder, and that the change came in the very year independence was declared. Where this account departs from the standard one: White locates the silencing of the revolution in objects as well as texts, arguing visual culture was even more restrictive than the written record.