The Che Guevara equivalent of the Enlightenment is, today, all but forgotten outside his native land. But go back to the mid-eighteenth century and the ultimate symbol of the physical and intellectual fight against tyranny was Pasquale Paoli, Corsican guerrilla commander and creator of the first modern written constitution. Thirty years before the American Revolution, Paoli fashioned a true representative democracy based on the sovereignty of the people and the natural right to liberty. Like Washington, Napoleon, Garibaldi and Guevara after him, Paoli sparked veneration on an industrial scale, the subject of innumerable portraits, poems, songs, novels and newspaper articles. His life inspired others who sought their own freedom, crucially in revolutionary America.
Majestically beautiful and steeped in romance, Corsica is a heady place. It certainly intoxicated the 26-year-old James Boswell, who arrived on its northern cape in 1765 in search of adventure and fame. A poor, obscure island engaged in a gruelling war of national independence against the Republic of Genoa, Corsica already invited admiration. Boswell’s book, An Account of Corsica, transformed Corsica’s fight into the universal battle of reason against unenlightened despotism, and Paoli into an international celebrity as the modern-day reincarnation of a hero from the pages of Plutarch. Ever on the hunt for a Great Man to worship, Boswell found the ideal candidate in Paoli amid the volcanic grandeur of Corsica.
The tension between heroic romance and the reality of politics is a starting point for rethinking Paoli
“I had stood in the presence of many a prince,” wrote Boswell of their thrilling first meeting, “but I never had such a trial as in the presence of Paoli …. For ten minutes he walked backwards and forwards through the room, hardly saying a word, while he looked at me, with a steadfast, keen and penetrating eye, as if he searched my very soul.” Paoli was then aged 40 and at the prime of his eventful life. His father Giacinto Paoli had been one of three “Generals of the People” who had risen against Genoa in 1729. Defeated in 1739, Giacinto and the young Pasquale went into exile in Naples. During his adolescence he drank deeply from the font of classical republicanism, reading classical texts, Machiavelli, John Locke and Montesquieu. As a young man he served in the Neapolitan military. Versed in the art of politics and war, he returned to his native island at the age of 29 as commander of the rebel forces. A year later, in 1755, he drafted a democratic constitution based on universal male suffrage, the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. In the resulting elections, he was elected as the first president of the Repubblica Corsa, Europe’s democratic pioneer. At that first meeting, Boswell won over a suspicious Paoli by declaring: “Sir, I … have lately visited Rome. I am coming from seeing the ruins of one brave and free people: I now see the rise of another.”
The legend of Paoli, the lion of liberty, was thus born. Boswell wrote that he no more expected to find a man who combined powerful good looks, military courage, intellectual sophistication and wisdom than he did to encounter a “sea of milk” or “ships of amber”. But here he was in front of him: Paoli the consummate Enlightenment Man who put into practice all those ideas that were buzzing about the salons of Paris or the drawing rooms of Edinburgh. “I looked upon him as a sage who was at the same time a hero.”
Paoli was the consummate Enlightenment Man
You get the picture: James Boswell’s Pasquale Paoli was a figure of mythic proportions and one of the great political literary creations of all time. Above all, Boswell stressed the strong personal connection between Paoli and the Corsican people, a form of political despotism that was not based on birth or privilege but on intense emotions. All over the world, people fell head over heels in love with the image of Paoli, the philosopher warrior. It might seem familiar to us now, wearingly so, but as the historian David Bell makes crystal clear in his book Men on Horseback: the Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (2020), Boswell was forging the ideal of the charismatic leader that has endured ever since. A good deal of modern politics, with its search for grand narratives and outsized figures, begins with Paoli.
The British public raised a small fortune to arm the Corsican resistance. Americans were hungry to emulate Paoli’s selfless republicanism and re-enact his experiment in classical liberty. They were on the lookout for his transatlantic version, and found it in George Washington. For the New York Journal, Paoli was simply “the greatest man on earth”. That other famous Corsican, Napoleon, became infatuated with Paoli after reading Boswell’s book as a teenager. It became his manual in political leadership. The rise of Paoli was, for Napoleon, that of the charismatic strongman bursting out of the chains of tyranny and liberating his people. Napoleon, however, required a stage bigger than that of Corsica.
Paoli, for his part, distanced himself from the Boswellian worship: “My character has not been that of a hero of romance … There is nothing more real than the object I pursue.” And that tension between heroic romance and the reality of politics is a good starting point for how we should rethink Pasquale Paoli.
The reason Paoli has faded from history is because he was a normal politician who compromised, made mistakes and failed to live up to his lofty principles. The myth was too big to sustain the reality, and the resulting fall from the pedestal made for painful viewing. In power, he was forced to centralise authority and row back on his democratic ideals. His prowess as a guerrilla fighter and military strategist was not as great as it has been portrayed, to put it kindly; his attempts to navigate the shark tank of European power politics left him looking hopelessly naïve. Having lost control of Corsica, Genoa sold the island to France, which immediately crushed the Paolists. Paoli served a long exile in London, where (among other things) he charged people to examine the bullet holes on his coat. The republican Paoli initially backed the French Revolution but ended up siding with the royalists. In 1793 he returned home in a doomed effort to found an Anglo-Corsican Kingdom with George III as sovereign. Betrayed by his idol, Napoleon abandoned his Corsican patriotism and tied his future to revolutionary France. By the time he died in 1807, Paoli was all-but forgotten.
For me, Paoli’s flaws make him a hero of liberalism more than his supposed virtues. If it is anything, liberalism is a way of negotiating the inevitable hard choices and trade-offs that dog life; it does not really do heroes or overarching theories because life is messy and best-fits are all we can really hope for. It is not faring well in an age of single-issue crusades, childish binaries and tribal dogmatism. This is where Paoli should be an inspirational figure. If he could not live up to the charismatic image, his achievements are no less impressive. Pockmarked by poverty, riven by clan feuds, vendettas and banditry, Corsica was hardly the obvious place to enact an experiment in liberty. Freedom was woven into Corsican culture, to be sure. It manifested itself as hostility to foreign domination and as the right of clans, families and local chiefs to exact their own, personalised forms of vigilante justice. The society that Paoli tried to wield into a free, modern nation was fragmented, lawless and unbiddable. In translating the instinctive love of licentious liberty into a national system of civil liberties and a unified judicial system, Paoli was at least working with the grain of Corsican culture. Corsica had a long and unique history of self-governing rural communes based on free elections. Paoli’s instinct was to fuse the high ideals of enlightenment republicanism with the traditions of Corsican village life. He did not try and impose abstract principles from above.
Paoli is still venerated in Corsica as the father of his nation. Not just a freedom fighter, he built institutions – including schools and a university – to form the bedrock of civic values. The dream of an independent Corsican identity that Paoli articulated has never gone away. Indeed, its survival – along with the wild beauty – helps to make Corsica one of the Europe’s most attractive destinations. The short time he ruled the island left an enduring mark.
It is in the drudge of politics, with all its pragmaticism and compromises that Paoli deserves recognition. His reputation was forged by others, who used him for their own ends and put him on a vertiginous pedestal. In our own times, divided by feuds, factionalism and misinformation, it is worth remembering that building and defending institutions is slow, unglamorous work. The tension between Paoli’s manufactured reputation and the reality of grubby politics helps clarify that truth. Liberty is fragile. It is maintained by a civic-minded society not by imaginary heroes: that is why Paoli means so much in Corsica to this day and why he deserves to be better known.
Ben Wilson’s two most recent books are “Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention” and “Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City”, both published by Doubleday
