Revolt in Toulon

Toulon the most important naval base in the Mediterranean for France had seen simmering tensions between Jacobins and moderates since the beginning of the Revolution.  These would escalate when the Girondins were evicted, arrested and hunted down in the spring of 1793.  Soon the Jacobin club within the city were shut down and their members arrested, put on trial and executed.  The two representatives on a mission were also imprisoned.

Soon in August 1793 royalists seized control and opened the harbour to Admiral Samuel Hood and the British Royal Navy.  Soon thousands of British, Spanish and Piedmontese troops filled the streets.   The city would be besieged without success for some time.  A young officer named Napoleon Bonaparte suggested to the representatives on mission Saliceti, Gasparin, Augustin Robespierre, Barras and Fréron a suitable plan for ending the foreign dominance.  Bonaparte identified that the key to the harbour was the promontory overlooking the harbour.  The British were not unaware of this threat and had established a series of forts which had been nicknamed “Little Gibraltar” due to their seeming impregnability.

Bonaparte would attack these forts in December capturing a British general and receiving a wound in the thigh.  Having been promoted to Colonel Bonaparte proceeded to bombard the British fleet forcing them from the harbour.  Without their naval support the town would be quickly overrun.  Bonaparte had taken his first steps on the road to further successes.  

Many of the royalists fled to waiting British ships and left French soil.  Sidney Smith the British naval commander would attempt to destroy many of the French ships.  With the fall of the city hundreds of the counter revolutionaries were executed by Fréron.  The National Convention would call for the eradication of the city however only the leaders of the counter revolutionaries houses would be destroyed.