1808–1814: (French Designs on Haiti: Napoleon’s Agents and the Bourbon Commissioners): In 1808, Bonaparte had turned his mind back to Saint-Domingue, but the…

1808–1814: (French Designs on Haiti: Napoleon’s Agents and the Bourbon Commissioners): In 1808, Bonaparte had turned his mind back to Saint-Domingue, but the year was not opportune as his army in Spain was swallowed up by guerrillas at Baylen; it has been asserted but never confirmed that Rigaud’s escape in 1810 was engineered by Napoleon with the hidden objective of re-establishing the Tricolor over Saint-Domingue. In 1813 the Emperor sent a secret agent, one Liot — formerly a colon of Port-au-Prince — to spy out the country, but under his thin disguise as an American, Liot was recognized; where Henry would have shot him, Pétion profited by the occasion to take soundings and sent back the message that Haiti’s independence was irrevocable. As soon as Talleyrand had hoisted Louis XVIII back on the throne of France, an instant clamor arose in 1814 for the reconquest Napoleon had been compelled to forgo, but France, leached out by two decades of war, could hardly take on a task that had defeated the First Consul at his zenith. Instead, the Bourbon king sent commissioners: Colonel Jacques-François Dauxion-Lavaysse to deal with Pétion, Lieutenant Colonel Franco de Medina — a Spanish adventurer who had collaborated with Toussaint — to approach Henry Christophe, and Dravermann to contact Borgella through his white half-sister, with instructions from Malouet, Minister of Marine, that barely differed from those of Leclerc: persuade Pétion and Henry to submit to France, restore slavery, and “to restore as much as possible the old order of things in the Colony.”