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Welcome to the Age of Napoleon.

Episode 17, A Nation in Arms.

Thanks for joining me.

We left off last time on June 13, 1793. The whole Bonaparte family had just landed at the port of Toulon.

They were refugees twice over, fleeing the general persecution of revolutionary sympathizers

on Corsica and the personal vendetta of Pasquale-Powley.

They settled in the town of La Vallet, about 30 miles or 50 kilometers from Marseille,

the largest city in southern France, and home to a community of Corsican

exiles.

The family was in dire financial straits once again, maybe even worse off than they had been after Carlo's death.

Napoleon was still getting his captain's salary from the army, and Salacheti managed to get them

into a government program to compensate Republican refugees, but the

Bonaparte women had to take in work, washing, and mending clothes to make ends meet.

This would have been unthinkable for members of the gentry in years past, but

the exigencies of the revolution forced many families to violate those old outdated social

conventions. Once the family was settled, Napoleon left for the city of Nice, the main base of operations for the Republican forces in southern France.

The revolutionaries had named the largest of these forces the Army of the Alps.

But in the summer of 1793 invading Italy was nothing more than a distant fantasy.

The Army of the Alps was fighting desperately just to maintain control of its home bases.

When we last checked in on the government in Paris and the wider war, the revolution was facing existential threat,

under attack on all sides by an alliance of foreign powers known as the Coalition,

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