Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [121]
So very delicately balanced, Napoleon's decision finally tipped the wrong way. Many details of Toussaints conduct in 1801 helped to turn the first consul against him, not to mention the pressure which the vociferous colonial lobby could bring to bear in Paris. Since in hindsight Napoleon saw plainly enough that the colonists were “almost all royalists and sold out to the English,” it is something of a mystery how they were able to capture his attention at the time. Though the French Revolution had put him on the road to power, it was power pure and simple that interested Napoleon most of all.
In public he maintained an antislavery position, against the colonial lobby which clamored for the restoration of slavery in the colonies. But his private opinions were probably more ambivalent. Real racial egalitarians like the Abbe Raynal, the Abbe Gregoire, Brissot, and Son-thonax were comparatively rare even in the most left-leaning phases of the French Revolution; Napoleon likely shared the well-established European view of black Africans as something just a little less than human. He was recently married to Josephine Beauharnais, a Creole from Martinique, who had lost her family properties (at least for the moment) to the slave insurrection there. A famous courtesan long before she drew Napoleon into her sphere, Josephine undoubtedly had an unusual degree of influence on the first consul, and her sentiments were naturally in favor of the other dispossessed colonists of the French Caribbean islands.
By the fall of 1801, Napoleon had already been seriously provoked by the leak of Toussaint's treaties with the British and by his taking possession of the Spanish side of the island. In treating with the British Toussaint had usurped French national authority, and in occupying the former Spanish colony he had flouted direct orders from the home government. Napoleon quietly annulled the black occupation of Spanish Santo Domingo almost as soon as he learned of it, and in March 1801, Toussaint Louverture was secretly expunged from the rolls of the French army.
But Vincent's arrival in Paris was the last straw—as Vincent himself had predicted. “He was bearer,” Napoleon recalled at Saint Helena, “of the Constitution which Toussaint had adopted on his sole authority, which he had had printed and put into execution and of which he now notified France. Not only the authority, but even the honor and dignity of the Republic were outraged: of all the ways of proclaiming his independence and raising the flag of rebellion, Toussaint L'Ouverture had chosen the most outrageous, the one which the metropole could least tolerate. From that moment on there was nothing more to deliberate; the chiefs of the blacks were ungrateful rebellious Africans, with whom it was impossible to establish a system. The honor, along with the interest of France, required that we make them go back into nothingness.”41
That, however, was easier said than done.
Toussaint's motives during this period are somewhat obscure, but it seems plain enough that he did not really want to make Saint Domingue independent, for if he had he could well have done so. President John Adams of the United States supported the idea of independence. England, whose unease at the idea of a nation of free Africans so near to Jamaica was overbalanced by the tremendous damage to France