accept. What is certain is that Napoleon added intimidation to the bribery
he had already employed.
Three commissioners had been appointed to supervise the election.
One of them, Morati by name, made the mistake of choosing to lodge the
night before the vote (31 March 1791) at the house of the Peraldis, well
known as opponents of the Bonapartes and supporters of Pozzo.
Napoleon's men simply arrived at the Peraldi house at dinner time and
abducted Morati 'to ensure his impartiality'. Next day, the election took
place in the church of San Francesco. 521 volunteers arrived to record
their preferences, but Pozzo di Borgo harangued them on the infamy of
the Bonapartes; for his pains he was pulled off the platform and narrowly
escaped a knifing. It is said that Pozzo, who had hitherto not been
Napoleon's rival, swore eternal vengeance by the code of vendetta; he
certainly made good his threat in later years. Then the voting started.
Qu enza received the highest number of votes and was elected the first
lieutenant-colonel. Napoleon, with 422 first and second preferences, was
a comfortable second and so found himself, not yet twenty-three, a
lieutenant-colonel of the Corsican volunteers. Since Qu enza had no
military experience, Napoleon was the effective commander and at once
evinced his ability to remember every last detail about the personnel and
organization of any body he commanded.
Although the royalists on Corsica had been decisively routed in a
political sense, they still retained the support of the Army in key
strongholds. Paoli and the Directory, the centrally directed administra
tion of Corsica, decided that the final stage in taking power in Corsica was
to replace these royalist troops with the volunteers, and an obvious first
target was the citadel at Ajaccio. General Rossi protested, but was
overruled by the Directory, supported by Paoli. In response the royalists
played the clerical card, counting on the monarchist sympathies of most
of Ajaccio. The National Assembly had already decreed that monasteries
and religious orders were to be dissolved, but in March 1792 a town
meeting in Ajaccio petitioned that the Capucin order be excepted. The
Corsican Directory reiterated the decree and added that the town meeting
had no authority, being merely an unlawful assembly.
This was the juncture at which Christophe Antoine Saliceti, already a
delegate to the National Assembly in Paris and a rising star in the
Corsican opposition to Paoli, first appeared in full Machiavellian skill. A
tall, sinister-looking man with a pockmarked face, Saliceti spread the
whisper that Paoli was a fence sitter who had secret sympathies with the
royalist rump in Ajaccio, and urged Napoleon to settle scores once and
for all with the diehards in that town. Accordingly Napoleon entered the
marcin
(Marcin)
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