And yet, if he had now stopped to weigh well the lessons of the past, hitherto fertile only in failures and contradictions, he must have seen the powerlessness of his own will when in conflict with the forces of the age; for he had now severed his connection with the Corsican patriots, of whose cause he had only two years before been the most passionate champion.  It is evident that the schism which finally separated Buonaparte and Paoli originated in their divergence of views regarding the French Revolution.  Paoli accepted revolutionary principles only in so far as they promised to base freedom on a due balance of class interests.  He was a follower of Montesquieu.  He longed to see in Corsica a constitution similar to that of England or to that of 1791 in France.  That hope vanished alike for France and Corsica after the fall of the monarchy; and towards the Jacobinical Republic, which banished orthodox priests and guillotined the amiable Louis, Paoli thenceforth felt naught but loathing:  “We have been the enemies of kings,” he said to Joseph Buonaparte; “let us never be their executioners.”  Thenceforth he drifted inevitably into alliance with England.

Buonaparte, on the other hand, was a follower of Rousseau, whose ideas leaped to power at the downfall of the monarchy.  Despite the excesses which he ever deplored, this second Revolution appeared to him to be the dawn of a new and intelligent age.  The clear-cut definitions of the new political creed dovetailed in with his own rigid views of life.  Mankind was to be saved by law, society being levelled down and levelled up until the ideals of Lycurgus were attained.  Consequently he regarded the Republic as a mighty agency for the social regeneration not only of France, but of all peoples.  His insular sentiments were gradually merged in these vaster schemes.  Self-interest and the differentiating effects of party strifes undoubtedly assisted the mental transformation; but it is clear that the study of the “Social Contract” was the touchstone of his early intellectual growth.  He had gone to Rousseau’s work to deepen his Corsican patriotism:  he there imbibed doctrines which drew him irresistibly into the vortex of the French Revolution, and of its wars of propaganda and conquest.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III

TOULON

When Buonaparte left Corsica for the coast of Provence, his career had been remarkable only for the strange contrast between the brilliance of his gifts and the utter failure of all his enterprises.  His French partisanship had, as it seemed, been the ruin of his own and his family’s fortunes.  At the age of twenty-four he was known only as the unlucky leader of forlorn hopes and an outcast from the island around which his fondest longings had been entwined.  His land-fall on the French coast seemed no more promising; for at that time Provence was on the verge of revolt