Everything about Charles Leclerc totally explained
Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc (
Pontoise,
Val-d'Oise,
France,
March 17,
1772 -
Saint Domingue,
November 2,
1802) was a
French general and brother-in-law of
Napoleon I of France.
Biography
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'd 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.
Footnotes
Bibliography
- The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James (1938)
Further Information
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