Leclerc comes to exterminate and restock, and dies of fever instead

Dupuy notes that Hegel wrote about the French Revolution but stayed silent on the fact that the enslaved of Saint-Domingue defeated the expeditionary army his hero Napoleon sent in 1802, an omission Tavares also remarked. Bonaparte's brother-in-law General Leclerc led that expedition and succeeded in arresting Toussaint Louverture and deporting him to France. Leclerc's objective, as Dupuy states it, was to exterminate all the Black population and begin again by importing Africans who had never known slavery or revolted against it in the New World. He died of yellow fever in 1802 and was succeeded by Rochambeau, who fared no better despite a taste for cruelty. That brutality had the opposite effect from the one intended: it convinced the mulatto forces under Petion that their survival depended on uniting with Dessalines rather than fighting him as they had under Rigaud in 1799.

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.

On 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.

Girard fixes the composition window precisely. Toussaint arrived at Fort de Joux on 24 August 1802 and asked for writing materials at once; the prison commander Baille supplied them against instructions. Within two months the prisoner wrote eight letters in his own hand, the most intense period of writing in his life. The memoir was produced between his arrival and 17 September, when Caffarelli came from Paris for a series of interviews and took the text away with him. Girard identifies four manuscripts: two secretarial drafts, a copy in Toussaint's own hand of twenty-one pages in small script, and a fair copy signed for the First Consul. Caffarelli's report shows the text was dictated to Jeannin, a clerk of the Pontarlier prefecture, who acted only as a copyist while Toussaint reread and corrected.