on the 15th of May 1768 signed a treaty selling the
sovereignty of the island to France.

French conquest.

The Corsicans, intent on independence, were now faced with a more
formidable enemy than the decrepit republic of Genoa. A section of the
people indeed, were in favour of submission; but Paoli himself declared
for resistance; and among those who supported him at the _consulta_
summoned to discuss the question was his secretary Carlo Buonaparte,
father of Napoleon Bonaparte, the future emperor of the French. Into the
details of the war that followed, it is impossible to enter here; in the
absence of the hoped-for help from Great Britain its issue could not be
doubtful; and, though the task of the French was a hard one, by the
summer of 1769 they were masters of the island. On the 16th of June
Pasquale and Clemente Paoli, with some 400 of their followers, embarked
on a British ship for Leghorn. On the 15th of September 1770, a general
assembly of the Corsicans was summoned and the deputies swore allegiance
to King Louis XV.

Corsica and the revolution of 1789.

Revolt under Paoli.

For twenty years Corsica, while preserving many of its old institutions,
remained a dependency of the French crown. Then came the Revolution, and
the island, conformed to the new model, was incorporated in France as a
separate department (see Renucci, ii. p. 271 seq.). Paoli, recalled from
exile by the National Assembly on the motion of Mirabeau, after a visit
to Paris, where he was acclaimed as "the hero and martyr of liberty" by
the National Assembly and the Jacobin Club, returned in 1790 to Corsica,
where he was received with immense enthusiasm and acclaimed as "father
of the country." With the new order in the island, however, he was
little in sympathy. In the towns branches of the Jacobin Club had been
established, and these tended, as elsewhere, to usurp the functions of
the regular organs of government and to introduce a new element of
discord into a country which it had been Paoli's life's work to unify.
Suspicions of his loyalty to revolutionary principles had already been
spread at Paris by Bartolomeo Arena, a Corsican deputy and ardent
Jacobin, so early as 1791; yet in 1792, after the fall of the monarchy,
the French government, in its anxiety to secure Corsica, was rash enough
to appoint him lieutenant-general of the forces and governor (_capo
comandante_) of the island. Paoli accepted an office which he had
re