In 1793, French minister Edmond-Charles Genet landed in Charleston instead of Philadelphia and began commissioning privateers and raising volunteers against Britain and Spain on American soil. This episode traces the Versailles-born prodigy who read seven languages by age 12 and was expelled from Catherine the Great’s Russia for his revolutionary views.

We follow how Genet defied Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation, named a ship the Anti-George, and managed to unite Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson against him. When the Reign of Terror turned on his Girondin patrons, Washington granted him asylum. We then follow his new life as a New York gentleman farmer, his marriage into the Clinton family, and his 1808 attack on James Madison.

• How Genet’s family worked inside the machinery of the French monarchy
• How letters of marque turned American shipowners into privateers against Britain
• Why even Jefferson, a supporter of France, refused to abandon neutrality
• Why Hamilton backed asylum for a man he had attacked in print
• The great-great-grandson who became the first American flier to die in World War I