Although I am still deeply immersed in the Caribbean phase of Macintosh’s life, and will be so until I finish the chapter I am currently working on, I cannot resist the temptation to skip forward to glance at some of the material I will be dealing with later in the project, particularly that relating to the French Revolution and to Macintosh’s counter-revolutionary activities.

Macintosh’s writing on the Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars, for example, makes great play of his earlier on-the-ground experience in Italy and his knowledge of Italian politics. His opinions were, he told one correspondent in May 1796, “founded in a local knowledge, & studied observations on the principles of the people, in general, in the different States of Italy”. In 1790, when in Rome, Macintosh had shared his political analysis with Francesco Saverio de Zelada, the Pope’s Cardinal Secretary of State. On that occasion, Macintosh had warned de Zelada that Leopold II and Ferdinand IV were planning to “seize and annex the church territories in Italy”. “If the Court of Rome did not speedily change the mode, & soften the rigors of Government,” he told de Zelda, “the combustible matters were ready prepared to receive the matches, and that the public mind throughout his Holinesses [sic] dominions, was disposed to receive the Law from other Sovereigns, more tender & just towards the property & industry of their Subjects”.

By 1796, Macintosh’s assessment was that the annexation plan had been “hushed by the urgency of stemming the revolution in france [sic]”, and by Leopold II’s death in 1792; he nevertheless retained a deep suspicion of the government in Vienna, believing that it was advancing “an obstinate, systematic plan of secret-ambition”. In this respect, Macintosh subscribed to what was then emerging as a commonplace conspiracy theory: that the continent’s governments were “under the direction, & profound Machinations of a Select-Committee of Illumine’s [sic]”. Macintosh had written to London on this subject—the influence of the Illuminati—in 1794, but I have not yet located that report. As ever, there is a lot more digging still to do!

Although working out exactly where Macintosh lived in the countryside outside of Avignon in the 1780s is not, in any fundamental sense, vital to my research, it is a puzzle that I have found difficult to resist. Much of the impetus behind my desire to know where he was living comes from the fact that so much of his correspondence during this period was concerned with the house and with a long-running dispute with his landlords (the Messieurs Monery, father and son) over its quality and state of repair.

Thanks to Macintosh’s plans of the building, such as the one above, I have a fairly good sense of what it looked like internally, but where, precisely, it was has always been something of a mystery. Macintosh’s letters from the period are generally addressed to and from “Chateau Brun” or “Chateaubrun”, but in some documents the property is referred to as “Mas des Cannes”. The Napoleonic cadastre makes things clear, showing the chateau (where Macintosh lived) and the neighbouring farmhouse, the Mas des Cannes. Sadly, both buildings were razed during the 1930s to make way for the construction of the Avignon-Caumont aerodrome.