Corsica during the time of the French…
October 1793 CE
The Corsican leader Pasquale Paoli, who had been exiled under the monarchy, had become something of an idol of liberty and democracy, and, in 1789, was invited to Paris by the National Constituent Assembly, where he was celebrated as a hero in front of the assembly.
He was afterwards sent back to Corsica with the rank of lieutenant-general.
However, Paoli eventually split from the revolutionary movement over the issue of the execution of King Louis XVI and threw in his lot with the royalist party.
He did not make these views generally known, but when the revolutionary government ordered him to take Sardinia he put his nephew in charge of the expedition with secret orders to lose the conflict.
In this case he was acting as a British agent, as the British have an interest in Sardinia they cannot pursue if the French occupy it.
He had however also sent Napoleon Bonaparte as a colonel in command of two companies of Corsican guard (unofficially reinforced by six thousand revolutionaries from Marseille), which had participated in the assault on La Maddalena Island in February 1793.
It failed because the commander, Pietro Paolo Colonna-Cesari, failed to take appropriate military action, because the island had been reinforced just prior to the attack, and because the defenders seemed to know exactly where and when the revolutionaries were going to strike.
Accused of treason by the French National Convention, he summons a consulta (assembly) at Corte in 1793, with himself as president, at which Corsica's formal secession from France is declared.
He requests the protection of the British government, now at war with revolutionary France, and suggests the Kingdom of Ireland as a model for an autonomous kingdom under the British monarch.
For Britain it is an opportunity to secure a Mediterranean base.
Locations
Groups
Austria, Archduchy of
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Netherlands, United Provinces of the (Dutch Republic)
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Habsburg Monarchy, or Empire
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Spain, Bourbon Kingdom of
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Britain, Kingdom of Great
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Netherlands, Southern (Austrian)
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Sardinia, Kingdom of (Savoy)
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Naples and Sicily, Bourbon Kingdom of
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French First Republic
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Topics
Regions
West Europe
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