April 1793 found Corsica at crisis point. Saliceti saw his chance to
topple Paoli and become the number one man in the island. He opened a
formidable propaganda campaign against the 'father of Corsica' by
playing on French suspicions of Paoli's Anglophilia, nurtured by the
twenty years' exile after 1769. The Convention was irritated by Corsica's
ambiguous status, supposedly loyal to France yet paying no taxes,
sending no volunteers to fight in the wars and in a permanent state of
anarchy. Saliceti kept the pot boiling by insinuating in his dispatches that
this state of affairs would never end while Paoli was top dog in Corsica.
His initial aim was to get the pro-Paolista volunteer regiments disbanded
and replaced by regulars from the mainland but, although he and his two
fellow Commissioners (Deicher and Lacombe St-Michel) had plenipoten
tiary powers from the Convention, the snag was that it was Paoli's writ,
not the Convention which ran in Corsica. Accordingly Saliceti and the
two Commissioners spent two fruitless months trying to make contact
with their enemy, who hid away in a mountain fastness.
Unknown to Napoleon, his brother Lucien had been a major catalyst in
the deepening crisis. In March, at the Jacobin club in Toulon, he
denounced Paoli as a traitor who was preparing to sell out to the English.
All the evidence suggests that Paoli knew of this denunciation when he
met Napoleon at the convent of Rostino, but Napoleon did not. On 7
April 1793 the Marat faction in the Convention decided to summon Paoli
to Paris to answer serious charges laid against him by Lucien and others -
for soldiers returning from the Maddalena fiasco were now openly saying
that the expedition had been sabotaged by Paoli - on pain of outlawry
should he fail to appear. The declaration was an arrest warrant in all but
name. On 18 April the Convention's formal decree to this effect was
promulgated in Corsica, prompting Napoleon to write to Qu enza that this
made civil war on the island certain.
However, Paoli played the cleverest of clever hands. On 26 April he
wrote a dignified letter of reply to the Convention, regretting that 'old age
and broken health' made it impossible for him to come to Paris. This was
calling the Convention's bluff with a vengeance. With so many calls on
their manpower, they baulked at sending the numbers of troops to
Corsica necessary to bring the Paolistas to heel. The Convention saved
face by rescinding the arrest decree and appointing two more (this time
pro-Paoli) Commissioners from the mainland. The initiative therefore
shifted back to Paoli.
Irritated at this turn of events, Saliceti and the two other Commis
sioners already on the island colluded with Napoleon to force a military
solution before their tame colleagues arrived to patch up a peace that
marcin
(Marcin)
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