Siege of Toulon (1793)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Siege of Toulon in 1793 is remembered today chiefly because of one man: Napoleon Bonaparte, then a young artillery captain who arrived almost by accident and left as a general. But the siege was far more than a footnote in one man's biography. A major French naval port that sheltered roughly a third of France's ships of the line had fallen into the hands of Royalists and foreign troops. For the French Republic, still raw and fighting for survival, losing Toulon was not merely a military embarrassment. It was an existential threat. Could a government that could not hold its own harbours claim to govern at all? That question drove weeks of bitter siege work, daring night assaults, and a harbour fire visible for miles. And when it was over, the city that had defied the Republic would be stripped of its very name.

• 2. A City Turns Against the Republic

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  On the 2nd of June 1793, Jacobin deputies were arrested in Paris, and within days the ripple effects reached the south of France. Lyon, Avignon, Nimes, and Marseille all erupted in what became known as the Federalist revolts. In Toulon, the local Jacobin chapter was physically expelled from the city. The Federalists who took over were soon outnumbered by French Royalists who saw a greater opportunity in the moment. Xavier Lebret d'Imbert, commanding the Royalist forces in Toulon, watched Republican troops retake Marseille and read the accounts of the reprisals that followed. He moved quickly to invite foreign protection before the same fate reached his city. On the 28th of August, a combined Anglo-Spanish fleet under British Admiral Sir Samuel Hood and Spanish Admiral Juan de Langara sailed into the harbour carrying 13,000 troops from Britain, Spain, Naples, and Sardinia. D'Imbert handed the port to the Allies. Within weeks, on the 1st of October, the city hoisted the royal flag, the fleur de lys, and proclaimed the eight-year-old Louis XVII king of France. The Republic's response would be relentless.

• 3. Napoleon Finds His Siege

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  Bonaparte arrived at Toulon almost incidentally. He had been escorting a convoy of powder wagons toward Nice when he stopped in to pay his respects to his fellow Corsican, the deputy Antoine Christophe Saliceti. The chief of Republican artillery, Elzear Auguste Cousin de Dommartin, had just been wounded at Ollioures. Saliceti and Augustin Robespierre, both special representatives of the National Convention holding powers of life and death, imposed the young captain on Dommartin in his place, despite a genuine antipathy between the two men. Bonaparte had been present in the army since the Avignon insurrection in July 1793, so he was not unknown, but the appointment was still a matter of personal connection rather than formal selection. What followed was a display of relentless energy. He requisitioned guns from Marseille, Avignon, and the Army of Italy. He blackmailed the local population, which had itself recently rebelled against the Republic, into supplying animals and provisions. He compelled retired artillery officers from the surrounding area to re-enlist, aided by the Robespierre connection that could back demands with mortal consequences. In the end, he assembled 100 guns for the besieging force and then personally trained infantry soldiers in artillery practice because trained gunners were still too few.

• 4. The Little Gibraltar Problem

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  Bonaparte's strategic eye fixed on the hill of Cairo, which commanded passage between the small and large harbours of Toulon. Controlling it would sever maritime resupply to the defenders, making the city impossible to hold. He proposed capturing it. General Jean Francois Carteaux, the Republican commander, was reluctant and sent only a weak detachment under Major General Henri Francois Delaborde on the 22nd of September. The attack failed. Alerted to the threat, the Allies built Fort Mulgrave on the summit of that same hill, named after the British commander Henry Phipps, 1st Earl of Mulgrave, and supported it with three smaller forts named Saint-Phillipe, Saint-Come, and Saint-Charles. The French nicknamed the entire fortified cluster "Little Gibraltar." Bonaparte pressed forward anyway, establishing a battery called the "sans-culottes" on the shore at Bregallion. Hood tried to silence it from the sea and could not. Bonaparte was promoted to Chief of Battalion on the 19th of October and organised a grand battery on the hill of Arenes, facing the large fort of Malbousquet, whose capture he judged essential to taking the city. He grew so frustrated by incompetent superiors that he wrote directly to the Committee of Public Safety, requesting help and proposing that a general be placed above him on the artillery chain of command, someone who could, in his words, command respect and deal with the crowd of fools on the staff.

• 5. The Night Assault

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  Carteaux was dismissed on the 11th of November and replaced by Francois Amedee Doppet, a man who had formerly been a doctor. During an attack on Fort Mulgrave on the 15th of November, Doppet witnessed his aide-de-camp killed beside him and panicked, ordering a retreat just as the assault was gaining ground. He was replaced on the 17th by General Jacques Francois Dugommier, who arrived and immediately saw the validity of Bonaparte's original plan. New batteries went up in rapid succession through late November and into December. On the night of the 16th of December, Dugommier, La Poype, and Bonaparte, now carrying the rank of colonel, launched a general assault on Little Gibraltar. The fighting began around midnight and continued until morning. During the assault, a British sergeant wounded Bonaparte in the thigh with a bayonet. When dawn came, the French held the position. General Auguste Marmont placed artillery there and turned it on the British-held promontories of l'Eguillette and Balaguier, which the British evacuated without further battle on the same day. General La Poype simultaneously took the forts of Faron and Malbousquet. The British general Charles O'Hara had already been captured in an earlier sortie and counter-attack led by Dugommier and Bonaparte together. A council of senior Allied officers agreed on the 18th of December to evacuate the city.

• 6. Fire in the Harbour

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  Commodore Sidney Smith arrived in Toulon just as the evacuation was being ordered and took on the task of destroying the French fleet before the Republicans could reclaim it. Spanish Admiral Langara ordered Don Pedro Cotiella to lead three ships into the arsenal for that purpose, and Smith volunteered to join him with his ship Swallow and three British vessels. The work was chaotic and dangerous from the start. Two hulks held the entire fleet's powder stores and lay anchored at some distance from the city because of the explosion risk. Eight hundred former galley slaves, recently freed, were manning the dock gates; their sympathies lay with the advancing Republicans, and Smith kept his guns trained on them throughout to prevent interference. Republican batteries on the heights spotted Smith's boats and began firing. At 20:00, Captain Charles Hare brought the fire ship HMS Vulcan into the New Arsenal. Smith halted it across a row of anchored French ships of the line and lit the fuses at 22:00. Hare was badly wounded by a premature detonation as he tried to leave the ship. Warehouses, mast houses, timber and hemp stores all caught fire together, and Vulcan's guns fired a last salvo as flames spread through the dockyards. As Smith's boats withdrew, the powder hulk Iris exploded unexpectedly, blasting debris across a wide radius and sinking two British boats. On Britannia all crew survived; the blast killed the master and three men on Union. Smith realised the Old Arsenal had not been destroyed. He turned Swallow back toward it but found Republican soldiers already in control, and their musketry drove him off. He settled for setting fire to two dismasted prison hulks, Heros and Themistocle, after persuading the French Republican prisoners aboard to accept safe passage ashore.

• 7. Flight and Aftermath

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  As Smith's boats retired, the second powder hulk, Montreal, also exploded without warning. None of his men were struck. While the destruction in the harbour was underway, Hood ordered HMS Robust under Captain George Elphinstone and HMS Leviathan under Captain Benjamin Hallowell to pull Allied soldiers off the waterfront. HMS Courageux under Captain William Waldegrave, which had been undergoing rudder repairs inside the Arsenal, managed to warp out of the harbour with the replacement rudder being towed behind between two ship's boats. By the morning of the 19th of December, Elphinstone's squadron had retrieved every Allied soldier from the city without losing a single man. Robust, the last ship to leave, carried more than 3,000 civilians from the harbour. Another 4,000 were recorded on board Princess Royal in the roads. The British fleet rescued 14,877 Toulonnais in total. Witnesses described scenes of panic on the waterfront, with stampeding civilians crushed or drowned in their rush to escape the approaching Republican troops, who fired into the fleeing crowd. Republican forces entered Toulon on the 19th of December. The subsequent suppression, directed by Paul Barras and Stanislas Freron, saw between 700 and 800 Royalist prisoners shot or killed by bayonet on the city's Champ de Mars. Bonaparte, recovering from his wound and treated by surgeon Jean Francois Hernandez, was not present. On the 22nd of December he was promoted to brigade general and was already travelling to Nice to take up command of artillery for the Army of Italy. The Convention, as a final act of punishment, erased Toulon's name entirely and renamed it Port-la-Montagne. A gate in the old city walls, now bearing a commemorative plaque, still marks the road Bonaparte took as he left. It is called the Porte d'Italie.