1798-1815 - Napoleon's French Colonies

When Napoleon was a schoolboy at Brienne, his vivid imagination became enamored of the heroes of antiquity, and ever dwelt in the society of the illustrious men of Greece and Rome. Indulging in solitary walks and pensive musings, at that early age he formed vague and shadowy, but magnificent conceptions of founding an empire in the East, which should outvie in grandeur all that had yet been told in ancient or in modern story. His eye wandered along the shores of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, as traced upon the map, and followed the path of the majestic floods of the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Ganges, rolling through tribes and nations whose myriad population, dwelling in barbaric pomp and Pagan darkness, invited a conqueror. " The Persians," exclaimed this strange boy, " have blocked up the route of Tamerlane, but I will open another."

By the two campaigns of 1790 and 1797, general Bonaparte had compelled the continental powers of Europe to make peace with France—a result ardently desired by the French, to allow their country time to recover from the deep wounds which she had suffered during the convulsions of the revolution, and trom the worthless administrations that had preceded it. The next object was to force England, also, to a peace, as she inflexibly opposed the general will of Europe, and Bonaparte was appointed commander in chief of an army destined for the invasion of England.

To cripple the power of England, in 1797 Napoleon formed the design of taking possession of the islands of the Mediterranean. "From these different posts," he wrote to the Directory, "we shall command the Mediterranean, we shall keep an eye upon the Ottoman empire, which is crumbling to pieces, and we shall have it in our power to render the dominion of the ocean almost useless to the English. They have possession of the Cape of Good Hope. We can do without it. Let us occupy Egypt. We shall be in the direct road for India. It will be easy for us to found there one of the finest colonies in the world. It is in Egypt that wc must attack England."

When struggling against the armies of Austria upon the plains of Italy, visions of Egypt and the East blended with the smoke and the din of the conflict. In the retreat of the Austrians before his impetuous charges, in the shout of victory which incessantly filled his ear, swelling ever above the shrieks of the wounded and the groans of the dying, Napoleon saw but increasing indications that destiny was pointing out his path toward an Oriental throne. When the Austrians were driven out of Italy, and the campaign was ended, and Napoleon, was receiving the homage of Europe, his ever-impetuous mind turned with new interest to the object of his early ambition. Upon his return to Paris, he was deaf to all the acclamations with which he was surrounded. His boundless ambition was such that his past achievements seemed as nothing.

After 1815, France was stripped of most of its first colonial empire, apart from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Ile de France, Madagascar and Guyana. Immediately after the treaties of Vienna, in 1815, what were precisely the long-neglected colonial domains of France? In the Gulf of Mexico, some of the Antilles (Martinique, Guadeloupe, and their dependencies); in America, French Guiana, which was restored only in 1817, and the two islets of Saint Pierre and Miquelon; on the coast of Africa, a few trading posts in Senegal; in the Indian Ocean, the Ile Bourbon, that had been amputated from the island of Mauritius; five posts in India, and nothing more. French colonial possessions were even less considerable than after the disastrous treaty of Paris in 1763. Moreover, this lamentable state of affairs did not attract public attention, so completely absorbed as this was in the politics of the Continent.

Military