Mostly he needed the cash as he was in the middle of a World War with the Brits and the rest of Europe at the time. Plus he simply did not have the resources to hold or maintain a huge possession that far away when he had to use all of his money and military power much closer to home. He had enough problems just getting his warships out of port in the face of the British blockade. There was zero chance that he could or would have tried to send them (and the large numbers of ground troops required) to the New World to hold Louisiana in the face of American Expansion on land and the British Navy at sea. He took the money and ran.
The French didn't give up on the New World though. They were still trying to hold Mexico right through the American Civil War.
also more:
The French did not feel all that strongly about Louisiana. Despite the French colonization, it had been the Spanish running the territory for decades. The French got it back primarily to give to the US, and the Spanish gave it up mostly because they were afraid of Napoleon taking over the Spanish mainland instead.
The French didn't really want it. They didn't have the ability to control it; they needed all of their troops in Europe to fight Napoleon's wars. So selling Louisiana to the Americans killed several birds with one stone:
It wasn't enough. The British navy had stomped the French one definitively a few years later, and Napoleon pretty much fought a land battle after that.
Still, the Battle of Waterloo was awfully close. It didn't help to have the British navy distracted by the War of 1812; those ships would have been better used for logistics from England. If the battle had turned just slightly differently, the sale of Louisiana to the US might be hailed as one of Napoleon's most fore-sighted achievements.
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