Corse justice
JOHN McMANNERS
Pasquale Paoli: An Enlightened Hero, 17254 1807 Peter Adam Thrasher (Constable 63s) 'Sir, what is all this rout about the Corsicans? They have been at war with the Genoese for upwards of twenty years and have never yet taken their fortified towns . . . They might have. . . cracked the stones in their teeth in twenty years.' The armchair strategist was Dr Johnson; as Boswell was a leading enthusi- ast for the Corsican cause, the Doctor was scraping the bottom of his barrel for pro- vocative remarks. But four days later, on 10 October 1796, he met Paoli and was over- whelmed—lhe General had the loftiest port of any man he had ever seen.' At that time Pasquale Paoli was an exile from his home- land. It was the French who had driven him out, combining overwhelming military force with treachery (their own and the Corsican betrayals they had paid for). As for the Genoese, in his reign as General of the island for the past fourteen years, Paoli had pinned them down in a few coastal places, had harried them with an improvised fleet, until in despair they had ceded their sovereignty to the king of France—and the master of the greatest army in Europe was not going to be foiled for long by skirmishing monks and shaggy sharpshooters.
From Mr Thrasher's bibliography, it ap- pears that there has been no previous bio- graphy of Paoli in English. The reasons are not far to seek. His career seemed peripheral to European history. The writers of the En- lightenment went through a phase of infatua- tion for Corsica, but this was an adjunct to the cult of the 'Noble Savage', and shared its unreality. In high politics Corsica was dis- cussed only as a naval base. Even so, a daunting amount of material, of French, British and Italian provenance, needs sifting by the historian (archival sources have been looked at for this book, but as there are no formal references, it is impossible to evalu- ate them). And at the end of the investiga- tion, we still know little about Paoli's private life—no boyhood romance, no predestined bride in the clan, no mistresses in those twelve anonymous years as a subaltern in the Neapolitan army, no woman by his side when he ruled as General, no grandchildren to greet him when he returned from exile in 1790. 'One of those men who are no longer to be found except in the pages of Plutarch' he may have been, but not one for biogra- phers in search of romantic entanglements. Yet his story, skilfully told by Mr Thrasher, is instructive to the student of European history. Though weaker examinees for long have saved their bacon by answer- ing questions on the 'Enlightened Despots' of the eighteenth century, in fact, there weren't any. Sycophancy and irascibility apart, the writers of the Enlightenment did not believe in despotism: one of the few rulers of the age who fitted their true ideal was Paoli. While he manoeuvred to reconcile the vendetta-ridden glens and warring clans, he operated a liberal constitution that made the best of the somewhat sinister democratic tendencies of Corsican mores-, his university was meant to enlighten the clergy for their role of community leadership (a freethinker, Paoli was not an anticlerical, for the island clergy had no wealth, and were fanatical patriots). In a contemporary portrait (one of the many excellent illustrations to this volume) he sits, a heavy figure in a plain
dark suit, accompanied by a mongrel dog. and giving instructions to a trio of swarthy. villainous irregulars, the only 'philosophic' ruler of the century who had the true philo- sopher's gift for absolute simplicity. His motto might have been Patria, libertas. Frederick the Great sent him a sword en- graved with these two words—Frederick. who held his own people in contempt and was a general over an army of slaves.
During the French Revolution, the Cor- sicans showed 'revolutionary' enthusiasm to obtain the right to misrule themselves, and when France fell into civil war, Corsican clan rivalries slipped into the pattern of revolutionary factions. Provincial feuds have their importance in the interpretation of the Revolution: in Corsica, they were every- thing. Those in danger of succumbing to the mystique of Napoleon should contrast Paoli's endeavours with the mean arrivisme of the Bonapartes in their native habitat, before they found an imperial cadre. Early in 1791, Paoli had refused a request from a second. lieutenant, back on leave from France, for access to his papers to write his biography: the writing of history, he said, was no occupation for a young man. When he died in 1807, once again an exile in England, the artillery subaltern was master of Europe, the last, the greatest and the most fraudulent of the 'Enlightened Despots'.
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