What was Nelson's perspective on the Siege of Toulon?
There we disagree.
She is a lady with a colourful past. You've put down here, strumpet.
Well, okay. I mean, she was. Yeah. Yeah, am I wrong? Tell me I'm wrong. No, but you know, a girl's got to do what she's got to do. And again, we mentioned Goethe. Goethe's a big fan of her. She does these kind of classical poses. She's very brave. She's very loyal. She's very warm hearted. And I think above all, she is fun.
She's also narcissistic, cruel, attention seeking and incredibly annoying. Well, you can't be everything. We're going to do a future episode on this. Let's not get bogged down. This is clearly going to be the point at which the rest of this history falls apart. They really take to Nelson. They think Nelson is brilliant. And they promote his interests with the king and queen.
They say, come on, make sure you give him everything he needs. So off he goes back to Toulon. When he gets back to Toulon, he discovers... Oh no, terrible scenes. A fellow called Bonaparte, Corsican artillery officer, has got all these guns up to the heights. He's bombarding the forts. The defences of Toulon are cracking. Nelson's not there to see the fall of the city.
Hood sends him off to patrol the coast of Italy, but he's in Livorno. Leghorn. Leghorn, as the British call it. where the first boatloads of refugees arrive. And he is shocked by their condition. He writes to Fanny. He says, fathers are here without families, families without fathers. Terrible scenes. They've had to evacuate Toulon. The French have seized it.
And of course, the French, they sack the city. Well, because it's full of counter-revolutionaries. And this is the kind of the peak of the terror. So actually, I thought this might be a chance to think about those two characters, because Nelson and Napoleon are often thought of in opposition to each other, aren't they?
Well, you know, the Abel Gantz films. The famous black and white film. And there's a sequence where Napoleon is fleeing Corsica with his family and a Royal Navy ship. An officer sees it through his telescope and says, should we fire? And his captain says, no, let's not. Let them be. They won't do any harm. It's Nelson. It's Nelson. And Nelson had wanted to finish off Napoleon.
So even in France, I guess there's a kind of recognition that Nelson is perhaps Napoleon's only worthy adversary.
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