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the revolution in Saint Domingue: “I have to reproach myself for the attempt at the colony during the Consulate; it was a great mistake to have wanted to subdue it by force; I should have contented myself to govern it through the intermediary of Toussaint.'7 And he went on to say that he had all the more reason to regret the error because he saw it even at the time, and acted “against his own inclination.” He “did nothing but yield to the opinions of his State council and his ministers, dragged along by the howling of the colonists, who formed a large party in Paris and who moreover were almost all royalists and sold out to the English faction.”8 The extent of his error may have begun to dawn on him in the summer and fall of 1802, but that did not influence him to show mercy to his prisoner, Toussaint Louverture.

If Napoleon's descriptions of his judgments and misjudgments regarding Toussaint and Saint Domingue come across as a little queasy, Toussaint confronted an even trickier task as he set about constructing his Fort de Joux memoir as a brief for the military trial he hoped would be held. Somehow he had to make it plausible that a war which had devastated the colony from one end to the other and already caused some twenty thousand deaths had all been brought about by errors of protocol on the part of Captain General Leclerc. A big challenge certainly, but he gave it his best shot.

“It is my duty,” he began, “to render to the French government an exact account of my conduct; I will recount the facts with all the innocence and frankness of an old soldier, adding such reflections as naturally present themselves. Finally, I will tell the truth, if it be against myself”9

This opening sally is rhetorically impressive without being especially credible; Toussaint, far from being a simple old soldier, possessed such sharp political acumen that he might well have given lessons to Machiavelli.

“The colony of Saint-Domingue, of which I was commander, enjoyed the greatest possible tranquility; agriculture and commerce were flourishing there. The island had reached a degree of splendor never before seen. And all that—I dare to say it—was my doing.”10

This paragraph is really the cornerstone of Toussaint's whole defense. He could claim with perfect justice that he had restored the colony from the ruins of the early 1790s to something approaching, if not actually exceeding, its magnificent prosperity before war and revolution ravaged it. Moreover, he had reason to believe that Napoleon was aware and at least to some extent appreciative of this achievement. The difficulty lay in finessing the fact that everything Toussaint rebuilt he later, and just as deliberately, tore down.

“However, since we were on a war footing, the commission had rendered a decree which ordered me to take all necessary measures to prevent the enemies of the Republic from penetrating into the island. In consequence, I had given the order to all the commanders of the seaports not to allow any warships to enter any harbor if they were not recognized by me and had not obtained my permission. Be it a fleet of whatever nation, it was absolutely forbidden to enter the port or even the anchorage, unless I had recognized for myself where it came from and what port it had sailed from.”11

Regarding this “decree,” it should be noted that the remnants of the civil commission in question were completely under Toussaint's thumb at this time. Roume, the last French representative still on the island, had been released from his Dondon chicken house just shortly before the decree was issued. Toussaint's strategy, however, is to argue that his resistance to the landing of Captain General Leclerc and his army derived from orders he had received from the French government itself.

The French fleet made its first landfall off Point Samana, at the easternmost extremity of the island. It is likely that Toussaint got his first glimpse of the warships there, though in his memoir he does not admit it. Instead he claims that he was on an agricultural tour in the interior of what