586 Chapter XXIV
We may profitably contrast, with a little anticipation, this Corsican constitution
of 1794 with the constitution of the Cisalpine Republic of 1797.^41 The Cisalpine
constitution would proclaim the sovereignty of the people. The executive would be
chosen by the assembly, itself elected by voters in proportion to population. The
Cisalpine constitution would separate church and state; it would put no bishops in
positions of government. The figure of 6,000 lire would occur in both constitu-
tions. In the Cisalpine Republic, deputies would receive an annual salary of this
amount. In Corsica, they received no salary, and were required to have an income
of this amount from their own property. The Cisalpine Republic would embody
the democratic formula that public officers were wage- servants of the people. The
Corsican kingdom followed the principle that government should properly be
conducted by an upper class enjoying an independent income from land.
The regime set up under this constitution soon came to represent a cross- section
of the forces arrayed against French republicanism, briefly gathered in a kind of
happy isle of the European Counter- Revolution. Sir Gilbert Elliot took steps to
live in a state suitable to a viceroy, making arrangements for a salary of £8,000,
which fortunately for the Corsicans was to be paid from British funds, since it was
almost half as large as the whole proceeds of taxation in Corsica. It may be re-
membered that the first British governor in South Africa, the Earl of McCartney,
occupying Cape Town in 1795, received a salary of £10,000, a sum half as large as
the total revenue of the Cape Colony.
As his administrative secretary, the Viceroy chose Frederick North, a remark-
able linguist with a good knowledge of Italian, who, so far as his social origins were
concerned, was the third son of the Lord North of the American Revolution, and
hence in later years became the fifth Earl of Guilford. Positions as Anglican chap-
lain, and as aides to the Viceroy, gave employment to other suitable young men
from England. There were also British officers from the garrison and from the
fleet, including the future Lord Nelson. And there were French émigré noblemen,
who had lost their property after their emigration, and who now sought service
with the British in the hope of winning back their former position in France. As
Lady Elliot wrote to a friend in England, “We have dukes and princes as ensigns
and lieutenants who once enjoyed their £10,000 or £15,000 a year.”^42
The Viceroy had more trouble with some of his Corsican associates. Paoli was
crotchety, suspicious, impossible to cooperate with, and unable to accept anyone as
his superior or even as his equal in the conduct of Corsican affairs. In effect, the
Corsican prime minister under the Viceroy was Pozzo di Borgo. Descended from
an ancient Corsican landowning family, he was at this time a young man of thirty,
just entering upon a long career of half a century of opposition to the France of the
Revolution. Twenty years later, in 1814, upon the defeat of Napoleon, he was to
ride victoriously into Paris with the Russian Tsar.
Such were the more prominent of the persons now active in the Kingdom of
Corsica, unless one wishes also to add the Pope, who began to demand an influ-
41 For the text of the Corsican constitution in English see the Annual Register for 1794, 103–9; for
the Corsican and Cisalpine constitutions, A. Aquarone, et al., Le costituzioni italiane (Milan, 1959),
87–120, 715–20.
42 Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, 3 vols., 1874, II, 338.