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The Saint-Domingue expedition was a large French military invasion sent by Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul, under his brother-in-law Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc in an attempt to regain French control of the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola, and curtail the measures of independence and abolition of slaves taken by the former slave Toussaint Louverture.
Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the Antilles" – one of the richest colonies in the world in the 18th-century French empire. It was the greatest jewel in imperial France's mercantile crown. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe.
Napoleon eventually decided to send an expedition of 20,000 men to Saint-Domingue to restore French authority. [46] Given the fact that France had signed a temporary truce with Great Britain in the Treaty of Amiens, Napoleon was able to plan this operation without the risk of his ships being intercepted by the Royal Navy.
Charles Leclerc was born on 17 March 1772 in Pontoise, Île-de-France.In 1791, he volunteered to join the French Royal Army, serving as a second lieutenant in the 12th Regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval before becoming an aide-de-camp to Jean François Cornu de La Poype.
The blockade of Saint-Domingue was a naval campaign fought during the first months of the Napoleonic Wars in which a series of British Royal Navy squadrons blockaded the French-held ports of Cap-Français and Môle-Saint-Nicolas on the northern coast of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, soon to become Haiti, after the conclusion of the Haitian Revolution on 1 January 1804.
The campaigns in which he was involved include the Saint-Domingue expedition. He was made a grand officer of the Légion d'honneur on 2 June 1809 and a knight of the Order of the Iron Crown, as well as a Comte de l'Empire in 1808. His name is engraved on the 16th column of the east side of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
The Battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres (Haitian Creole: Batay Ravin Koulèv), fought on 23 February 1802, was a major battle of the Saint-Domingue expedition during the Haitian Revolution. A French division under General Donatien de Rochambeau was advancing down a ravine (the Ravine-à-Couleuvres), towards Lacroix, Artibonite , where they attacked ...
This was particularly sensitive in Saint-Domingue, where the Haitian Revolution had raged since 1791. First Consul Bonaparte ordered the Saint-Domingue expedition, under General Leclerc, to curtail the separatist tendencies of General Toussaint Louverture. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Amiens proved to be an unsuitable settlement of Franco-British ...