A Wilderness So Immense (37 page)

The publication in 1799 of Talleyrand’s National Institute lecture,
Essai sur less Avantages a Tirer de Colonies Nouvelles dans Circonstances Présentes,
testified not only to its merits but to its author’s return to the highest levels of French political life. On July 18, 1797, two weeks after his second lecture, the Directory had invited Talleyrand to become its foreign minister. In that capacity, Talleyrand quickly developed a working
relationship with Napoleon rooted both in their shared interest in the conquest of Egypt and their mutual contempt for the Directory. Briefly forced from office by critics of his greed for bribes in what Americans called the XYZ Affair, Talleyrand was prominent among the conspirators who overthrew the Directory on November 9–10, 1799 (18–19 Brumaire) and established Bonaparte as first consul. Within days Talleyrand was reinstated as minister of foreign affairs. “He understands the world,” Bonaparte said. “He knows thoroughly the courts of Europe; he has
finesse
to say the least of it; [and] he never shows what he is thinking.”
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With slight differences in emphasis, Talleyrand’s and Bonaparte’s interests in colonies coincided. Both recognized their utility as pawns in the game of imperial warfare and diplomacy. The former bishop of Autun also valued colonies as a social safety valve, a place for malcontents to harmlessly exert and exhaust themselves. Napoleon was chiefly interested in their wealth and their produce—especially the sugar of St. Domingue.

Long a luxury enjoyed only by royalty, sugar by the end of the eighteenth century had become a staple in the European diet. Like flour, its scarcity had occasioned riots in Paris as early as January 1792 when its market price soared within weeks from 22 to 25 sous to 3 to 3½ livres per pound. Parisian crowds blamed both the shortage and the 280 percent spike in sugar prices on merchants and monopolists, whose shops and warehouses they raided. In fact, both were the direct result of the outbreak of civil war in St. Domingue, and more was at stake than sweets for angry housewives and their families.
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On the eve of the French and Haitian Revolutions, sugar processed in France and sold throughout Europe accounted for nearly 20 percent of the nation’s exports. The slave plantations of Martinique and Guadeloupe, with some help from Saint Lucia, Tobago, and French Guiana, provided about 30 percent of the raw sugar for this massive French industry—but 70 percent came entirely from St. Domingue. When the Haitian Revolution and British warships cut off the supply of raw sugar coming into French ports, the industry utterly collapsed.
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When Bonaparte thought about colonies, he focused on the Caribbean, sugar, and St. Domingue. When he thought about Louisiana, his musings followed the arguments advanced by Eléonore Moustier’s report in January 1789 and by French diplomats in their negotiations with Manuel Godoy’s representatives at Basle in 1795, at San Ildefonso in 1796, and again at Madrid in 1798. The familiar argument had three main points: First, the produce of the Mississippi Valley could support French sugar, coffee, and cocoa plantations in the West Indies. Second,
French possession of Louisiana would realign the balance of power in North America to the detriment of Great Britain and as a brake on American ambitions. Third (and the incentive for Spain’s agreement), France could do a better job of defending Louisiana from the United States or Great Britain than could Spain.
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By the end of the century, Spain and France were in basic agreement about the retrocession of Louisiana. For Carlos IV and Queen Maria Luisa (deprived for the moment of the advice of Manuel Godoy, who had been forced into a short retirement from politics),
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the only remaining question was, What could France offer Spain in exchange for Louisiana?

“Frankly,” Godoy’s temporary replacement, Mariano Luis de Urquijo, remarked to the Spanish ambassador in Paris,

Under the Directory, France had offered the most attractive swap that Spain could imagine, a promise to restore Gibraltar to Spanish sovereignty. The only hitch was that France did not own the strategic 2.3-acre rock that controls the straits between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. England had captured Gibraltar in 1704 and the United Kingdom has held it ever since. Godoy had always declined this and other mere promises from France.
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On July 22, 1800, Bonaparte and Talleyrand instructed their ambassador to Spain, Charles Jean Marie Alquier, to reopen negotiations for Louisiana, and in August Bonaparte dispatched his confidant General Louis Alexandre Berthier as minister plenipotentiary to augment the mission. Within a month Alquier and Berthier found the right price for the retrocession. In exchange for Louisiana and six Spanish warships, Bonaparte offered to create a kingdom in north-central Italy for Maria Luisa’s brother, Ferdinand, duke of Parma. On October 1, 1800, Spain secretly agreed to the Second Treaty of San Ildefonso ceding Louisiana back to France. A few months later, by the Convention of Aranjuez, signed on March 21, 1801, France took title to Louisiana and the fateful island of Elba in return for placing Prince Louis of Parma (the duke’s son and Queen Maria Luisa’s nephew and son-in-law) on the newly created throne of the kingdom of Etruria, which included Tuscany, Parma, Florence, and the principality of Piombino.
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The deal assuaged Maria Luisa’s family interests, delighted Carlos IV with the expectation of shifting to France the cost of maintaining his American frontier (a drain of about $337,000 a year on the Spanish treasury). The treaty pleased the French because it opened the way for the revival of the French sugar empire in the Caribbean. Both nations agreed to keep the retrocession secret for fear that either the British or the Americans would react by capturing Louisiana before Bonaparte could take possession.
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With arrangements in place for the recovery of Louisiana, Bonaparte threw his energies into two visionary schemes. One was his intended conquest of England. The other was the recovery of St. Domingue. Both would require large and expensive seaborne expeditionary forces. To buy himself an interval of “maritime peace” to prepare for these invasions, Bonaparte signed a truce with Great Britain on October 1, 1801—one year to the day after the secret retrocession of Louisiana—that was confirmed on March 25, 1802, as the Treaty of Amiens.
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For America, the important by-product of these developments was a linkage between the fate of Louisiana and the fortunes of the French expedition against Toussaint L’Ouverture. Bonaparte’s intended invasion of England never materialized, and his vision for the Caribbean would collapse with the defeat of his expedition by the rebellious slaves of St. Domingue. “Louisiana had been destined to supply the other colony with provisions, cattle, and wood,” the consulate’s secretary of the treasury, François Barbé-Marbois, wrote years later, “and as St. Domingo was lost to France, the importance of Louisiana was also diminished.”
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M
Y DEAR SIR
,” American diplomat William Vans Murray informed John Quincy Adams from The Hague on March 30, 1801, “I fear that we have another iron in the fire—that France is to have the Floridas and Louisiana!!!” A moderate Federalist congressman from Maryland prior to his appointment by President John Adams as minister to the Netherlands, Murray wrote that he was “endeavoring to ascertain the truth, but think, now, that there is great reason to believe it.”
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After five years of false reports and speculation about French designs in the Caribbean, it was not surprising that early hints of the actual retrocession of Louisiana were somewhat exaggerated. Spain, of course, had refused to surrender Florida and was at that moment doing its best to delay the surrender of Louisiana, too. Bonaparte had the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in hand, but all the Spanish ministers who had negotiated the deal were out of power. The royal favorite, Manuel Godoy, was once again in charge.

Officially the Prince of the Peace was the commanding general of the
Spanish armies, a post he accepted after declining Carlos IV’s invitation to resume his former position as chief minister. When Godoy had offered a list of alternate candidates, one Pedro Cevallos had caught the king’s eye. Asked for his opinion of the man, Godoy responded, “He’s my cousin by marriage.”

“So much the better,” the king replied. “I can then count on him not to reject your advice.” For the next seven years Godoy ruled Spain through the office of First Minister Pedro Cevallos, who carefully heeded his counsel and routinely forwarded state papers to the royal favorite, even during the Portuguese campaign. Godoy also maintained an intimate correspondence with Queen Maria Luisa. “Do not imperil yourself too much,” she pleaded. “Do not tire yourself…. Ah, Manuel, what battles my imagination conjures up!”
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Impatient to take possession of Louisiana, Bonaparte vented his anger at Godoy in a letter to his Spanish ambassador. “Tell the Queen and the Prince of the Peace,” he warned, “that if they continue this system [of procrastination], it will end with a thunderbolt.” Godoy countered by pressing for clarification of one important detail about the retrocession of Louisiana that his predecessor had left too vague in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso and its conventions. At Godoy’s behest, Pedro Cevallos formally requested a “guarantee not to sell or alienate in any manner the property and use of this Province.” In reply, on July 22, 1802, the French ambassador assured Carlos IV that

With that final assurance in writing, on October 15, 1802, Carlos IV signed at Barcelona a royal order authorizing the delivery of Louisiana to France.
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Godoy had been out of office when Carlos IV had naively accepted Bonaparte and Talleyrand’s verbal promise never to sell Louisiana. Oral contracts, the saying goes, are not worth the paper they are written on, but Bonaparte’s written assurances were not much better. Although sincere enough at the time, his pledge never to alienate Louisiana lasted about ten months.

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“Pauline was the prettiest and also the worst-behaved person imaginable,” one of Bonaparte’s officers said of the first consul’s promiscuous younger sister. “I’m on good terms with my brother,” she proclaimed shortly after the coup of 18–19 Brumaire. “He’s slept with me twice already.” True or not, Pauline’s lust was notorious and many of her liaisons were with men Bonaparte despised. “Before she left for Santo Domingo,” one of them wrote, “there were no fewer than five of us in the same house sharing Pauline’s favors. She was the greatest tramp imaginable and the most desirable.”
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One afternoon in May 1799 during a lull in the Italian campaign, Bonaparte was working in his study in the Baroque palace of Montebello outside Milan when he heard rustling noises behind a folding screen in the next room. Rising to investigate, Bonaparte discovered Pauline in the embrace of Colonel Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, a staff officer who had served with him since the siege of Toulon. A month later, on June 17, 1799, the handsome and promising young officer was married to Pauline. Along with a substantial dowry from her brother came a promotion in rank.
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On October 24, 1801—three weeks after the preliminary signing of the Treaty of Amiens brought temporary peace to the high seas—General Leclerc took command of a French expedition to recover St. Domingue. Gathering in the wings at Dunkerque were ships and provisions intended for a second expedition of four thousand men to take possession of Louisiana under the command of General Claude Perrin Victor.
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Delayed by foul weather in November, Leclerc launched his expedition on December 14, 1801, from the natural harbor at Brest, near the entrance to the English Channel at the westernmost tip of Brittany. With decent winds and the preliminary truce of Amiens in force, the warships of Leclerc’s squadron crossed the Atlantic and reached the coast of St. Domingue without incident, luffing their sails off Cap Français on Monday, February 1, 1802. Augmented by ships carrying troops from other ports in France and the Netherlands—three thousand each from Rochefort and Toulon, twelve hundred from Nantes, fifteen hundred each from Cádiz and Flushing, a thousand from Le Havre, and eight hundred from Guadeloupe—Leclerc’s invasion force was huge. Tobias Lear, the American consul at Le Cap and President Washington’s former personal secretary, reported that forty-six ships carrying forty thousand troops had arrived and twenty-five more ships and another twenty thousand soldiers were expected.
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