ulty that the lives of the prisoners were saved by the efforts
of the militia officers. The garrison really sympathized with the
insurgents, and would not obey orders to suppress the rising by an
attack. In return for this forbearance the regular soldiers stipulated
for the liberation of their officer. In the end the chief offenders
among the radicals were punished by imprisonment or banished, and the
tumult subsided; but the French officials now had strong support, not
only from the hierarchy, as before, but from the plain pious people
and their priests.

This result was a second defeat for Napoleon Buonaparte, who was
almost certainly the instigator and leader of the uprising. He had
been ready at any moment to assume the direction of affairs, but again
the outcome of such a movement as could alone secure a possible
temporary independence for Corsica and a military command for himself
was absolutely naught. Little perturbed by failure, he took up the pen
to write a proclamation justifying the action of the municipal
authorities. The paper was dated October thirty-first, 1789, and
fearlessly signed both by himself and the other leaders, including the
mayor. It execrates the sympathizers with the old order in France, and
lauds the Assembly, with all its works; denounces those who sold the
land to France, which could offer nothing but an end of the chain that
bound her; and warns the enemies of the new constitution that their
day is over. There is a longing reference to the ideal self-determination
which the previous attempt might have secured. The present rising is
justified, however, as an effort to carry out the principles of the
new charter.[21] There are the same suggested force and suppressed
fury as in his previous manifesto, the same fervid rhetoric, the same
lack of coherence in expression. The same two elements, that of the
eighteenth-century metaphysics and that of his own uncultured force,
combine in the composition. Naturally enough, the unrest of the town
was not diminished; there was even a slight collision between the
garrison and the civil authorities.

[Footnote 21: For the text see Napoleon inconnu, II,
92.]

Buonaparte was of course suspected and hated by Catholics and military
alike. French officer though he was, no one in Corsica thought of him
otherwise than as a Corsican revolutionist. Among his own friends he
continued his unswerving career. It was he who was chosen