Charles Leclerc

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Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc (Pontoise Val-d'Oise, France, March 17, 1772 - Saint Domingue, November 2, 1802) was a French general and a companion of Napoleon I of France.

Leclerc started his military career as a volunteer in the French Revolution and within two years had risen to a post of divisional chief of staff at the siege of Toulon. Following the revolutionary success there, he campaigned along the Rhine. He began serving under Napoleon Bonaparte in the Italian campaign and fought at Castiglione della Pescaia and Rivoli.

In 1797, the newly promoted General de Brigade Leclerc married Napoleon's younger sister Pauline Bonaparte, with whom he had a child.

After serving in the second unsuccessful French Army military expedition to Ireland led by Jean Joseph Amable Humbert in 1798, Leclerc gained the promotion to general de division, which allowed him to aide Napoleon Bonaparte's bid for power. He participated in the coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire (in November 1799) making Napoleon First Consul of France. More military campaigns followed on the Rhine and in Portugal and then in 1802 his brother-in-law appointed him commander of the expedition to re-establish control over the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haïti, where the black general Toussaint L'Ouverture had mastered a virtually autonomous state.

With a large expedition that eventually included 40,000 European troops, the French won several victories after severe fighting. Acting on Napoleon's surreptitious instructions, Leclerc tricked and seized L'Ouverture during a meeting and deported him to France where he died while imprisoned at Fort-de-Joux in the Jura mountains in 1803.

This treacherous act swung the tide inexorably against French hopes. Native insurgents began to fight the French, who were weakened by an epidemic of yellow fever. Leclerc's reports to France about his counter-insurgency campaign included such statements as, "Since terror is the sole resource left me, I employ it" and, "We must destroy all the mountain negroes, men and women, sparing only children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half the negroes of the plains..." (From C.L.R. James 'The Black Jacobins')

Leclerc died of yellow fever in November 1802. He was succeeded in command by General Rochambeau, whose brutal racial warfare only succeeded in drawing more people to the rebel armies, including black and mulatto army officers like Jean Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Pétion and Henri Christophe.

On November 18, 1803, Rochambeau's forces were defeated in the Battle of Vertières. Dessalines proclaimed the independence of Haïti on January 1, 1804.

[edit] Bibliography

• The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James (1938)

[edit] External links

• The Louverture Project: Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc
• Bob Corbett's Haiti Page – Online collection of resources on the revolution in Haiti. See especially links to the Haiti Mailing List and Corbett’s essays on the revolutionary period.