At an earlier juncture in his lengthy letter of 10 July 1820, Clarkson had occasion to remind Christophe that in 1814, ‘soon after the restoration of the Bourbons, and when Monsieur Malouet was the Minister of the Marine and Colonies, it was determined to reduce Hayti to a slave colony by force of arms, but the Treaty of Vienna, and other circumstances put a stop to these proceedings’ (168). This one sentence of Clarkson's about France's, and specifically Malouet's, efforts after the fall of Napoleon to destroy the independent nation of ‘Hayti’ and restore the slave colony of ‘Saint- Domingue’ contains, in nuce, the sordidly predictable story of colonial (re)conquest that I will be expanding upon in this second section of the Introduction in order to set the scene for Vastey's emergence into print in October of that momentous year.

Between 1804 and 1814, following upon the final defeat in November 1803 of Napoleon's forces in French Saint-Domingue, ‘relations between Haiti and France were almost totally broken off’ (Brière, 52). Toward the end of that period, however, with Napoleon's fortunes flagging in Europe after the Russian campaign of 1812 and recent defeats in Germany (October 1813), and with the signing of a European peace treaty and perhaps even the collapse of the Napoleonic regime apparently in the offing, both Christophe and Pétion sensed that this relatively quiescent state of affairs was not likely to last much longer, and that it might be time to take the initiative in securing the future of Haiti (or, more exactly, the two Haitis). In his polemical writings of 1815 directed against the southern republic, Vastey repeatedly accused Pétion of sending secret agents to France in the final months of 1813 and negotiating a treaty with Napoleon that would have resulted in a restoration of French rule (see, e.g., 1815b, 72; 1815c, 14). Notwithstanding Vastey's sarcastic invectives at the expense of those ‘amphibian-like’ agents of Pétion's and their ‘perfidious’ mission across the seas (1815b, 74), Napoleon's changing fortunes also induced Christophe to send his own secret agents to France in March 1814, not, certainly, to negotiate a return to French rule but to sound out the conditions for French recognition of Haiti's independence.