The Cheese Priest of Corsica ft. Bennet Kavanagh
Ajaccio (Corsican: Aiacciu), Corsica — a French département since 1768, Genoese-built and still Italian-speaking in 1790 • France • 1790 CE
Ajaccio, Corsica, August 1790. Napoleon Bonaparte is twenty-one, broke, borrowing money from his mother, and home on suspiciously long leave while the island argues at knifepoint about whether it is French. Comedian Bennet Kavanagh arrives by boat as Pierre, a chevalier travelling with a mule, a mainland trading pass that marks him as a foreigner, and a wheel of Comté that has survived the crossing rather better than he has. The mission: get Pasquale Paoli to look kindly on the Bonaparte family before September's consulta decides which names on Corsica still matter.
Pierre's declared skills, in order: a love of cheese, a way with horses, a fierce charisma, and the ability to hold a drink. This is a man who has looked at the birth of the Napoleonic era and concluded that it is, fundamentally, a hospitality problem. The plan runs on Comté, wine, and the confidence of someone who has never once been asked to leave anywhere.
Corsica in 1790 was a wound that had not closed: France bought the island from the Republic of Genoa in 1768, broke the Corsican Republic at Ponte Novu the following year, and Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in Ajaccio that August a French subject by barely twelve months. Pasquale Paoli, the father of Corsican independence, had spent twenty years exiled in London and sailed home in July 1790 to a hero's welcome, which made the autumn consulta at Orezza the only room on the island worth standing in. The Buonapartes were minor nobility with a French education, no money, and a reputation for being French when it suited them. History records that Paoli came to loathe them and eventually ran them off the island altogether — but not for another three years, and not before somebody had to get through August.
If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.
Era: Modern | 1790 CE | Ajaccio, Corsica, France
Featuring: Bennet Kavanagh — musical comedian (Crank Up the Volume to a Reasonable Level, Edinburgh Fringe debut)
Contains: Mild language.
EPISODE LINKS
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Bennet Kavanagh: Instagram 👉 @bennetkav
Bennet Kavanagh 👉 https://bennetkav.com
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