The Maurepas family is flogged to death from a ship's yards

Maurepas was one of Toussaint Louverture's officers and commanded the department of the Northwest. In 1802 his wife shared his end. In the channel between Tortuga and the mainland the whole family was hoisted and hung from the great yards of a ship and flogged until they died, and the bodies were then thrown into the sea. The account records that Madame Maurepas spent the time urging her husband and her children to die like heroes rather than complaining. The same pages list Madame Chevalier, who put the noose around her own neck on the deck of the Duquesne, Madame Paul Louverture, taken by night with her children and drowned in the roadstead of Cap, and Louise Rateau, who kept a house in Port-au-Prince where men plotting against Rochambeau could meet. General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon that it had to be seen with what spirit both men and women went to meet death.

During the years Louverture governed Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte instructed him to have regimental flags inscribed with a formula crediting the French people alone with recognising the freedom and equal rights of black soldiers. Girard records that Louverture never carried the order out. The reasoning he attributes to Louverture is precise and cynical. If the troops were told in stitched letters that their liberty came from Paris, they would look to Paris rather than to their own commander, and they would also stop worrying about what France might do next. Leaving the flags blank kept the black majority uncertain about French intentions, and that uncertainty was politically useful to him. The episode supports Girard's larger claim that the tricolor had become the emblem of the one European power that had abolished slavery, which is why the rebels of 1802 and 1803 built their own banners out of it rather than out of British, Spanish or American models.

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.

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.