Saint-Domingue expedition | |||||||
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Part of the Haitian Revolution | |||||||
The French used Cuban Mastiffs to kill Haitian prisoners |
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Belligerents | |||||||
Rebel Haitians United Kingdom |
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Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Charles Leclerc † Vicomte de Rochambeau Jean Boudet Louis de Joyeuse Louis René de Tréville Federico Gravina |
Toussaint Louverture Henri Christophe Jean-Jacques Dessalines John Duckworth |
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Casualties and losses | |||||||
80,000 dead |
The Saint-Domingue expedition was a French military expedition 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 taken by the former slave Toussaint Louverture. It landed in December 1801 and, after initial success, ended in a French defeat at the battle of Vertières and the departure of French troops in December 1803.
The French Revolution led to serious social upheavals on Saint-Domingue, of which the most important was the slave revolt that led to the abolition of slavery in 1793 by the civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel, in a decision endorsed and spread to all the French colonies by the National Convention 6 months later. Toussaint Louverture, a black former slave who had been made Governor by France, re-established peace, fought off Spanish and British attempts to capture the island, and reestablished prosperity by daring measures. However, he went too far in hunting down governor Don Joaquín García y Moreno (27 January 1801), who had remained in what had been the Spanish part of the island following the 1795 Peace of Basel. Toussaint had also challenged French imperial interests by promulgating a self-rule constitution on 12 July 1801, which declared himself governor for life.