A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla

Author:Jon Kukla [Kukla, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49323-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

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.”44

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.45

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.46

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.

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