The Spirited Revolutionary Who Led the Fight for Independence in Corsica Also Inspired America’s Colonial Rabble-Rousers

In 1755, tensions were beginning to rise in the American Colonies following the outbreak of the French and Indian War. Yet one of that year’s most consequential developments for American independence happened on a Mediterranean island more than 4,000 miles away: After more than two decades of struggle, the Corsican people declared independence from their Genoese overlords, who had laid claim to the island for 500 years. Would-be revolutionaries in America soon followed the situation in Corsica with interest. 

Colonial rabble-rousers were especially fired up by the exploits of Pasquale Paoli, chosen as the leader of independent Corsica. Particularly in the 1760s, Paoli became a media sensation in America, and inspired by this Paoli-fever, patriots went on to name towns, and even children, after the great Corsican. In 1767, the New-York Journal dubbed him “the greatest man on earth.” 

Paoli’s name thus became a byword in the Colonies, and with good reason. By any measure, he was a courageous innovator: With his return to Corsica, the island became independent for the first time since the early Middle Ages, and he even helped push through a constitution, likely the first ever written down. In ground-breaking fashion, Paoli’s constitution separated powers into executive and legislative branches and allowed (male) citizens above the age of 25 to elect representatives, regardless of race and whether they owned property. A woman could even vote—as long as she was over 25 and single or a widow. As Paoli declared in the preamble, Corsica’s new government, now “legitimately master of itself … having reconquered its liberty,” would “ensure the happiness of the nation.” Before independence, says Marcandria Peraut, a historian at the University of Corsica, eager American patriots “latched onto Paoli. He was a symbol, a small fish fighting an entire empire.” 

Outside the island itself, little remains in public memory of the Corsican Revolution today, but Corsica’s drive toward freedom proved a potent inspiration for independence efforts in the American Colonies, stirring up revolutionary spirit among rebels. This small island had shown that a humble vassal state could throw off an empire and write its own rules, building its independence on a foundation of inherent, universal ideals of equality.

Corsica’s strategic location between the Mediterranean, Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Seas had long attracted would-be conquerors. The Greeks arrived around 560 B.C. Then the Carthaginians and Etruscans vied against the Greeks for the island for more than 300 years, before Corsica entered the Roman Empire’s sphere of influence in 259 B.C. After the fall of Rome, Corsica was briefly part of the Vandal Empire beginning in 455, then came under the control of the Byzantine Empire early the next century (534). The Lombards, under the direction of Charlemagne, then took over in 774. During the ninth century, Corsica was the subject of a number of Saracen invasions. The island then passed through the hands of the pope and the bishop of the city-state of Pisa before falling, in 1284, under the influence of the maritime Republic of Genoa, which held the territory for nearly 500 years. 

When Paoli’s father, Giacinto, was born at the end of the 17th century, Corsican autonomy must have been a distant memory. Yet by the turn of the 18th century, discontent was rife and living conditions extremely poor, and Corsicans began to resent Genoese rule. Born in 1725, Paoli grew up in a land defined by rebellion. In 1729, Corsican peasants refused to pay taxes to Genoa after a poor harvest, and thus began the Corsican Revolution. Giacinto became one of its leaders in 1734. When Paoli was just 14, Giacinto went into exile and settled in Naples. Paoli went with his father, and in April 1755, at age 30, he returned to Corsica. In July of that year, leaders of the insurrection appointed him “général chef de la nation.” He then realized his father’s dream of making Corsica an independent state, and—perhaps most consequentially for his American followers—successfully enshrined the Corsican Constitution. 

A young James Boswell, the Scottish writer who became famous for his biography of Samuel Johnson, first wrote about Corsica during his Grand Tour of Europe, begun in 1764. He set out hoping to meet some of the most notable men of the age and secured audiences with two luminaries of French thought and literature, visiting Voltaire in France and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Switzerland. Rousseau, an avowed admirer of the Corsican experiment, wrote Boswell a letter of recommendation to present to Paoli, which Boswell considered invaluable. In October 1765, the 24-year-old Boswell made for Corsica. He spent just a few days in Paoli’s company, and only a month or so in Corsica overall. Traveling about the island would have been slow and complicated—there were very few roads on Corsica at the time—but the freedom inscribed in the country’s document inspired Boswell. 

He wrote a memoir of his trip: An Account of Corsica: The Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli was published in London in 1768. The book presented a glowing account of Paoli, his constitution, the Corsican Revolution and the island in general. It was a sympathetic, warmly propagandistic portrait of a people yearning to be free—while its depiction of Paoli was superlative and closely observed. As Boswell described their first meeting: “I had stood in the presence of many a prince, but I never had such a trial as in the presence of Paoli. … In consequence of his being in continual danger from treachery and assassination, he has formed a habit of studiously observing every new face. For ten minutes we walked backward and forward 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.” 

The book proved a roaring success. In Britain, it sold thousands of copies and became a best seller. But its publication in the Colonies later that year, just three years after the Stamp Act was imposed, resonated all the more among a population chafing under British taxes. American newspapers reported eagerly on events in Corsica, even quoting liberally from Boswell’s memoir. 

But Corsica’s independence was already slipping. On May 15, 1768, just three months after Boswell’s Account of Corsica was published, Louis XV of France annexed the island, and Paoli fled. Yet even while Paoli was on his back foot, support for him in the Colonies seemed only to increase.

Ebenezer Mackintosh—one of the Boston-based leaders of the Stamp Act protests, perhaps most famous for parading an effigy of a British tax collector through the streets—welcomed a son in 1769, naming him Paschal Paoli Mackintosh, after his revolutionary hero. In the same year, an entrepreneur inspired by Corsican independence founded the General Paoli Tavern, around which grew a town, today known as Paoli, Pennsylvania. In the century and a half that followed, towns named Paoli would appear in Oklahoma, Colorado, Indiana and beyond. Benjamin Franklin offered enthusiastic praise for the rebellious spirit of the Corsicans and lamented that France, “while it boasts of enjoying freedom itself, would ruin [Corsica] for vindicating their common right to it.” George Washington, too, stayed abreast of the developments from Corsica, thanks to Andrew Burnaby, the English travel writer then serving as chaplain to the British mission in Livorno, Tuscany, who sent the future first president news of the island, even reporting in one letter that “the French common soldiers” were “desert[ing] to [Paoli] in great Numbers.” Founding father John Hancock named one of his merchant ships the Paoli in 1769. “The vogue for Paoli gave educated elites in the Western world a new way to envision political leadership,” writes David A. Bell, a historian of France, in his 2020 book, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. “For a brief moment in the 1760s and 1770s, Paoli stood out as one of the most revered and well-known figures in the Western world and the most important exemplar, before George Washington, of a new and potent form of political charisma.”

But ideals require power in order to spread, and Corsica’s strength was limited. Once French forces defeated Paoli’s troops at the Battle of Ponte Novu, in May 1769, Paoli fled to Britain in exile. Corsican independence, after 14 short years, was over. 

France’s occupation of Corsica didn’t dampen American interest in Paoli, including among the future founding fathers. In 1775, Alexander Hamilton and fellow students at Kings College (later Columbia University) were part of a militia initially known as the Corsicans.

And though the founding fathers didn’t explicitly cite Paoli’s constitution as an inspiration, the American Constitution, written in 1787, bears marked similarities to Paoli’s 1755 document. Both were based on Enlightenment principles—Paoli, through his close collaborator Matteo Buttafoco, had even asked Rousseau to help draft the island’s new laws, which the great thinker undertook but didn’t publish during his lifetime—and separated powers into executive and legislative branches, with representatives, elected by a remarkably free vote for the period, enacting the will of the people. 

Of course, the Corsican struggle for independence was hardly over. In 1790, after the beginning of the French Revolution, Paoli returned to Corsica, where he was instated as the president of the regional government. By 1792, though, his relationship with French revolutionaries was turning sour, and in April 1793 the French government ordered his arrest, alleging that he had conspired to hand Corsica over to Britain. Two months later, Corsica was in full rebellion against France, and by September 1793, the republicans were left with only a few positions on the coast. 

Corsica was clinging to independence by a thread; in the age of empire, Paoli needed the protection of a bigger partner. He wrote to British Prime Minister William Pitt; Captain Samuel Hood, then commander of a ship in Britain’s fleet; and George III, asking for military support. Finally, in June 1794, Paoli allied with Britain to form the Anglo-Corsican Kingdom, a constitutional monarchy under the British Empire. 

The arrangement was not to last. In 1795, Paoli was forced back into exile in Britain, where he lived until his death in 1807, and the island fell back under the sway of France, which resumed control in 1796. Corsica remains a part of France today. 

News reports on Corsica seem to have dried up in the newly formed United States of America after the Revolution. Nonetheless, four towns named after Paoli are still there. Paoli, Pennsylvania, has kept particularly close links with Corsica, and in 2025, even organized visits to Morosaglia, where Paoli was born, for the 300th anniversary of his birth. The American visitors donated a plaque on behalf of the town, and one of their civic leaders, Edward Auble, declared that Paoli had “embodied an ideal of liberty, an example for Americans fighting for their own independence. … For us, Paoli’s name symbolizes democracy.”