French anti-insurgent campaigns failed and only strengthened rebel confidence that they were unbreakable.

Evidence

From outside Le Cap, bands of slave insurgents were watching. Although the April 4 decree was passed with the explicit intention of defeating the slave uprising, the commissioners had made little progress in doing so in the months after they arrived. Many of the French troops that accompanied them succumbed to disease; by one account half of them died within two months. In late October and early November 1792 a large and wellarmed expedition led by Rochambeau flushed insurgent bands out of the northern plain and captured their stronghold at Ouanaminthe, along the border with Santo Domingo. But most of the insurgents simply retreated into the mountains, and in the end the mission did little but “inflame the pride of the enemy,” who had realized that they could survive even when an impressive army was sent against them. The rebels remained “masters of the mountains, from which they could, at will, bring fire and iron to the plains.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 506