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Precisely as Vaublanc predicted, the campaign soon ran into serious trouble. Headed by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, 35,000 French troops had invaded the rebellious colony in February 1802. An officer of little worth, Leclerc completely ignored local opinion and badly mismanaged the conduct of the war. After months of desperate fighting, Toussaint L’Ouverture was persuaded to sign a peace treaty with the French that would have given the blacks their freedom and amnestied all those who had fought against the French, but, under orders from Paris to restore slavery, Leclerc reneged on the deal and kidnapped L’Ouverture, who was promptly deported to France where he died in prison a year later (in circumstances, incidentally, that are less than creditable to Napoleon: the Haitian leader was kept in terrible conditions and left without proper food or medical attention). In response, the blacks rose in revolt again and the war resumed. Waged with the most revolting cruelty, it was still going on the following spring with no sign of French victory. Leclerc and thousands of his men had succumbed to the dreaded yellow fever, and reinforcements sent to the Caribbean were dying as fast as they arrived.

This frightful struggle Napoleon never abandoned per se. In April 1803, however, French policy in the western hemisphere was revolutionized. Throughout the winter of 1802-3 an expedition had been fitted out in the Dutch port of Helvoetsluys preparatory to sailing for Louisiana and establishing a French presence on the mainland of the Americas. There is no reason to believe that Napoleon was anything but serious in his determination to restore the western branch of French colonialism. However, almost literally overnight, French policy changed. Ever since Spain’s retrocession of Louisiana to France, American diplomats had been working desperately to get Paris to sell the territory to the United States, but thus far they had been continually rebuffed. Yet all of a sudden it was announced that Louisiana was up for sale after all. Hardly able to believe their luck, the Americans snapped it up, and on 30 April the whole territory - an area over four times the size of France, stretching all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian frontier, embracing modern-day Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska - duly passed into the orbit of the Stars and Stripes at a price of $80 million. At a stroke Napoleon had cut his losses in the West while at the same time filling his war chest in Europe and hamstringing Britain. It was beyond doubt a major coup and one that makes it even harder to acquit Napoleon of blame for the events of May 1803. According to Madame Junot:

The sale was very painful to him, and those who are so carried away by passion that they continue to uphold erroneous ideas and attack him for what took place, should remember that, if he really had been the man bent on personal gain of their imagination, his interest would surely have been to hang on to a province whose possession would very shortly have become a major threat to the United States.59

In the end, the evidence is incontestable. Napoleon may not have been a driven man in psychological terms, but as a ruler he depended above all on glory. In political terms, military success was also necessary to him, while his reorganization of France stimulated his sense of superiority and created the conditions in which war might bring fresh rewards. This is not to say that Napoleon deliberately sought a rupture of the Treaty of Amiens. Indeed, though he may have believed that war with Britain and the other powers was inevitable in the end, he had no desire for the breathing space he had obtained in Europe to come to an end after only one year. Yet he never ceased to risk war. Far from respecting the very favourable balance that had been secured at Lunéville and Amiens, he continued to expand French influence in the most