French ship to enter the port of Cadiz, to the shouts of enthusiasm of the people who had watched the battle from the ramparts and the beach. After the battle, Dumanoir was reprimanded for failing to reinforce Linois. As soon as the Peace of Amiens was signed on 25 March 1802, Bonaparte set about taking back the rich French colony of Santo Domingo, which had been in revolt against France for more than eight years. It was the Santo Domingo expedition of which Dumanoir was a member. On 11 December 1803, Rear Admiral Dumanoir was made a member of the Legion of Honour. While stranded in Toulon on the Formidable, on 24 Brumaire in the year XII (16 November 1803) he asked his first cousin Georges René Le Peley de Pléville, then a senator, who had intervened on 6 Frimaire in the year XII (28 November 1803) with de Lacépède, Grand Chancellor of the Order and also a senator. First French Empire The French Empire was proclaimed on 18 May 1804 by the Constitution of the Year XII. Rear Admiral Dumanoir was promoted to Commander of the Legion of Honour on 14 June 1804. On the death of Admiral de Latouche-Tréville on 20 August 1804, he was aboard the Formidable and was provisionally in command of the Toulon squadron and hoped to retain command. However, the Emperor called Vice-Admiral de Villeneuve there. A letter from Napoleon dated 28 August 1804 gives the reasons for it: In 1804, Napoleon ordered Villeneuve, now a Vice Admiral stationed at Toulon, to escape from the British blockade, overcome the British fleet in the English Channel, and allow the planned invasion of Britain to take place. To draw off the British defences, Villeneuve was to sail to the West Indies, where it was planned that he would combine with the Spanish fleet and the French fleet from Brest and attack British possessions in the Caribbean, before returning across the Atlantic to destroy the British Channel squadrons and escort the Armée d'Angleterre from their camp at Boulogne to victory in England. After an abortive expedition in January 1805, Villeneuve finally left Toulon on 29 March with eleven ships of the line. He evaded Nelson's blockade, passed the Strait of Gibraltar on 8 April and crossed the Atlantic with Nelson's fleet in pursuit, but about a month behind owing to unfavourable winds. Dumanoir was thirty-five years old;