ambition, preparing his return to power by laying the foundation for a future policy. The United States, it said, were wholly English, both by tastes and by commercial necessity; from them France could expect nothing; she must build up a new colonial system of her own,—but "to announce too much of what one means to do, is the way not to do it at all." In October Bonaparte announced a part of it in sending to the Directory the Treaty of Campo Formio as a step, he wrote,[1] to the destruction of England, and "the reestablishment of our commerce and our marine."
France still coveted Louisiana, the creation of Louis XIV., whose name it bore, which remained always French at heart, although in 1763 France ceded it to Spain in order to reconcile the Spanish government to sacrifices in the treaty of Paris. By the same treaty Florida was given by Spain to England, and remained twenty years in English hands, until the close of the Revolutionary War, when the treaty of 1783 restored it to Spain. The Spanish government of 1783, in thus gaining possession of Florida and Louisiana together, aimed at excluding the United States, not France, from the Gulf. Indeed, when the Count de Vergennes wished to recover Louisiana for France, Spain was willing to return it, but asked a price which, although the mere reimbursement of expenses, exceeded the means of the French treasury, and only for that reason Louisiana remained a Spanish province. After Godoy's war with France, at the
- ↑ Correspondence, iii. 390.
