In Corsica both parties fought with the same eagerness as in France,
and the execution of Louis XVI. had only made the contest more
violent and more bitter.
One of these parties looked with horror on this guillotine which had
drunk the blood of the king, and this party desired to have nothing
in common with this French republic, with this blood-streaming
Convention which had made of terror a law, and which had destroyed
so many lives in the name of liberty.
At the head of this party stood the General Pascal Paoli, whom the
revolution had recalled to his native isle from his exile of twenty
years, and who objected that Corsica should bend obediently under
the blood-stained hand of the French Convention, and whose wish it
was that the isle should be an independent province of the great
French republic.
To exalt Corsica into a free, independent republic had been the idea
of his whole life. For the sake of this idea he had passed twenty
years in exile; for, after having made Corsica independent of Genoa,
he had not been able to obtain for his native isle that independence
for which he had fought with his brave Genoese troops.
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