1772-03-17: (Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, Napoleon’s Brother-in-Law, the French General Sent to Reconquer Haiti With 40,000 Troops, Who Captured Louvertu…

1772-03-17: (Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, Napoleon’s Brother-in-Law, the French General Sent to Reconquer Haiti With 40,000 Troops, Who Captured Louverture Through Treachery but Could Not Defeat the Revolution, Dying of Yellow Fever on Tortuga as His Army Disintegrated Around Him): Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc was born on March 17, 1772, in Pontoise, a suburb of Paris. He entered military service in 1791 and became a political and military ally of Napoleon during the 1790s, marrying Napoleon’s sister Pauline on June 14, 1797. On December 14, 1801, Leclerc departed France with his wife and an expeditionary force of 40,000 troops, charged with crushing Louverture’s power and restoring French control over Saint-Domingue. He arrived in Haiti in February 1802. Leclerc exploited the deep animosity between Black and mulatto revolutionary factions to maneuver against Louverture, capturing him under a flag of truce in June 1802 and shipping him to France as a prisoner. It was the high-water mark of his campaign. When news reached Haiti that France had reestablished slavery in Guadeloupe, Black and mulatto revolutionaries who had been at each other’s throats united against the French with a ferocity that no European army could sustain. Yellow fever claimed 25,000 French soldiers during the summer of 1802, and the expeditionary force that had been the largest Napoleon ever sent across the Atlantic dissolved into sickness and defeat. Leclerc himself succumbed to yellow fever on November 1, 1802, on the island of Tortuga. He was thirty years old. Napoleon had sent him to reconquer a colony; the colony buried him instead.