invaders.  But National Guards were enrolling by tens of thousands to drive out the Prussian and Austrian invaders; and when Europe looked to see France fall for ever, it saw with wonder her strength renewed as by enchantment.  Later on it learnt that that strength was the strength of Antaeus, of a peasantry that stood firmly rooted in their native soil.  Organization and good leadership alone were needed to transform these ardent masses into the most formidable soldiery; and the brilliant military prospects now opened up certainly knit Buonaparte’s feelings more closely with the cause of France.  Thus, on September 21st, when the new National Assembly, known as the Convention, proclaimed the Republic, we may well believe that sincere convictions no less than astute calculations moved him to do and dare all things for the sake of the new democratic commonwealth.[17]

For the present, however, a family duty urges him to return to Corsica.  He obtains permission to escort home his sister Elise, and for the third time we find him on furlough in Corsica.  This laxity of military discipline at such a crisis is explicable only on the supposition that the revolutionary chiefs knew of his devotion to their cause and believed that his influence in the island would render his informal services there more valuable than his regimental duties in the army then invading Savoy.  For the word Republic, which fired his imagination, was an offence to Paoli and to most of the islanders; and the phrase “Republic one and indivisible,” ever on the lips of the French, seemed to promise that the island must become a petty replica of France—­France that was now dominated by the authors of the vile September massacres.  The French party in the island was therefore rapidly declining, and Paoli was preparing to sever the union with France.  For this he has been bitterly assailed as a traitor.  But, from Paoli’s point of view, the acquisition of the island by France was a piece of rank treachery; and his allegiance to France was technically at an end when the king was forcibly dethroned and the Republic was proclaimed.  The use of the appellation “traitor” in such a case is merely a piece of childish abuse.  It can be justified neither by reference to law, equity, nor to the popular sentiment of the time.  Facts were soon to show that the islanders were bitterly opposed to the party then dominant in France.  This hostility of a clannish, religious, and conservative populace against the bloodthirsty and atheistical innovators who then lorded it over France was not diminished by the action of some six thousand French volunteers, the off-scourings of the southern ports, who were landed at Ajaccio for an expedition against Sardinia.  In their zeal for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, these bonnets rouges came to blows with the men of Ajaccio, three of whom they hanged.  So fierce was the resentment caused by this outrage that the plan of a joint expedition for the liberation of Sardinia from monarchical tyranny had to be modified; and Buonaparte, who was again in command of a battalion of Corsican guards, proposed that the islanders alone should proceed to attack the Madalena Isles.