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Even after the humiliating blow the Corsicans dealt to the French occupying forces during the week-long "Corsican Vespers," Theodore did not abandon the pretense at diplomatic conciliation. Within days of the bloody French retreat from Calenzana he sent an apologetic letter to Versailles by way of Lieutenant-General Louis de Frétat de Boissieux. He regretted, he wrote, the recent bloodshed, and claimed that there was still great love for France and her king among the Corsicans. He blamed the Genoese and their scheming negotiators at Versailles for misleading the French into crafting terms which were hateful to the Corsicans and had excited them to "intemperate action." He asked humbly for renewed French mediation, albeit with Corsican delegates at the table this time, and for the time being blithely "authorized" the French to remain in the positions which the Genoese had ceded to them in order to keep the peace.

It was inconceivable that the French, upon suffering hundreds of dead or wounded to Corsican arms, would subsequently reward the rebels by inviting their delegates to Fontainebleau, and Theodore presumably knew this. Indeed, Theodore was playing a game he had played before with Boissieux and would continue to resort to the rest of his life, in which he posed as the "reasonable" counterpart to the popular will as represented by the consulta or the Diet. Frequently, when an action had to be taken which was deleterious to the relations of Corsica with another power, Theodore would allow or encourage it to happen and then send his earnest regrets to the aggrieved party, claiming that he would have done otherwise had the "nation" not been so forceful. In a sense he was playing off the common stereotype of his own subjects as hot-blooded, violent, and impulsive; he was the lone civilized man on an island of savages, the only adult in a room full of truculent children, and that a refined German nobleman would struggle to control such a people had a certain intuitive sensibility to it in the continental mind.

For the moment, however, no amount of soothing words or diplomatic maneuvering could stop events that had been set in motion. Boissieux had been personally humiliated by the uprising; after nine months on Corsica, he had nothing to show for it but failed negotiations and dead Frenchmen, and Mari's constant complaints about Boissieux's inactivity were starting to find more receptive ears at Versailles. Although he was sympathetic to the Corsican cause, Boissieux was a French officer first and foremost, and needed to take strong measures to restore French honor and save his own career.

Boissieux's strongest force was with him in Calvi, but his maneuvers there were severely restricted. After the French defeat at Calenzana, the Corsicans had occupied the mountains above Calvi, and very soon a Moor's Head flag could be seen at the chapel of Madonna della Serra only a mile and a half from the citadel of Calvi. Standing upon a range of granite hills within extreme artillery range of parts of the town, it was the ideal command post from which to direct a siege. The chapel seems to have been occupied spontaneously, but within days the rebels there had been reinforced by a company of militia under Captain Paolo-Maria Paoli, one of the lieutenants of Captain-General Marquis Simone Fabiani, and they would not be the last to arrive.

Fabiani had not started the Third Battle of Calenzana, but he had seen to its conclusion, arriving on the scene by the third day with the Balagnese militia. He had effectively assumed command of all rebel forces in the vicinity, as was arguably his prerogative as governor of the Balagna, vice-president of the war council, and the highest ranking military officer in the kingdom.[1] In the wake of the Vespers, however, he had fallen out with Theodore over strategy. Fabiani wished to take the initiative and drive Boissieux and Mari into the sea; now, he argued, the rebels had the men, the money, the weaponry, and most importantly the will to invest the town and bombard it into submission. Calvi was a nest of filogenovesi; nothing would be lost by flattening it. Delay would only allow the French time to recover and reinforce their position.

Theodore, as mentioned, had only just sent a letter to Versailles authorizing the French garrisons to remain in place. It was hardly consistent to begin bombarding them. Although the king had boasted of his willingness to face any enemy and spoke proudly of the "victories" of the Vespers, he privately feared that the uprising had only enraged the French and prematurely pushed them from passive peacekeeping into active hostility. He had no desire to antagonize Boissieux further. But his position was precarious, for he could also not afford to be seen as weak, or worse yet pro-French; his prime minister, Marquis Luigi Giafferi, had only just published an edict against "traitors to the nation" which promised swift and pitiless justice to those who abetted foreign occupiers, whether Genoese or French. Neither could he afford to alienate Fabiani, who was in effective control of rebel forces in the northwest and one of his most able generals.

Theodore felt he could do little but let Fabiani pursue his own strategy. The king, however, did not endorse it himself, and his assistance to Fabiani was limited. The general's troops were provided with muskets, powder, and shot from the syndicate armory, but crucially Theodore withheld his artillery, citing the difficulties of moving large guns overland across the Agriate and Balagna. Nor did his regular forces, the Guard and the Foreign Regiment, take part, although his chief engineer and artillery officer Major Antone Nobile Battisti was present for at least part of the siege.

Although set back on his heels by the uprising, Boissieux still had a formidable force of 1,200-1,300 battle-ready French infantry at Calvi. Had he acted quickly, when the force at Madonna della Serra consisted of a few hundred irregulars, he might have pre-empted Fabiani's arrival. He hesitated to attack, however, as he had no reliable information on the numbers or disposition of the enemy. By the time the French made an attempt on the hills on the 8th of November, Fabiani and his militia had already been present and preparing their position for several days. The rebels had no artillery, but neither did the French. The initial French attack on the 8th, made by around 400 men, made good initial progress and took the western end of the ridge within 400 yards of the chapel. They found themselves heavily outnumbered, however, and were prevented from moving on the chapel itself by the danger of being flanked from the south. Boissieux sent his first communique to the rebels since the Vespers, demanding that they withdraw from the ridge and cease menacing the town or face imminent battle; Fabiani refused, and instead suggested that Boissieux consider honorable terms of a French surrender.

That suggestion was premature. Boissieux was not afraid to launch an assault; he was merely preparing for it. The probing attack had found that the "chapel," atop a granite outcrop and surrounded by a thick wall, was really more of a small redoubt than a church, and Boissieux had asked Giovanni-Battista de Mari to be able to requisition Genoese artillery to assist in its capture. In a rare moment of cooperation borne of mutual interest, the Commissioner-General had agreed, although his supply was not great; most of the citadel's guns were large garrison pieces which were not only too large to be practical but had no field carriages anyway, limiting the French to a handful of relatively light guns whose purpose had been to sweep the landward approach to the citadel with grapeshot.


The French launched their second attack on the 12th, sending around 600 men led by two companies of Auvergne grenadiers. They found resistance much stronger than it had been on the 8th, with a heavy musket-fire issuing from behind the cover of thickly-strewn granite boulders. The difficult approach tended to funnel the attackers together, making them even easier targets. Covering fire from the French artillery was devastating to the chapel, which was heavily damaged, but it was only modestly effective at suppressing the fire from the dispersed defenders. Still the unflinching grenadiers and much of the rest of the first wave behind them succeeded in ascending the hill and reaching the walls of the chapel. The "crest" of the hill, however, was something of a shallow bowl, with a second ridge behind the first. Here the Corsicans had made a fallback position and subjected the French to a murderous crossfire. Worse still, the French artillery had no line of sight on this second ridge and could no longer support the attack. The first wave soon retreated. A second wave did only marginally better, contesting the top of the hill with the rebels for some time, but was forced back by the more numerous militiamen. A simultaneous attempt to flank the defenders' position by way of a seaside trail with four fusilier companies was bogged down by rebel sharpshooters, and failed to make progress in a timely enough manner to help the main attack.

The French had made an honorable showing considering that they were assaulting a larger force in an elevated, prepared position without artillery support, but their efforts were not enough to dislodge the royalist militia, and the French had been mauled in the process. A French apothecary (medical officer) present, who kept an extensive journal of the campaign, recorded 86 dead and 177 wounded; Fabiani reported to Theodore that the Corsicans had lost only 36 men with around 80 wounded. For the time being, Boissieux made no further attempt at the rebel overlook. It was not long before Fabiani, against Theodore's wishes, brought two 12-pounder iron guns to the summit which he had possessed during the siege of Algajola. It was not possible to strike the citadel itself, but he could lay shot rather indiscriminately into the outskirts of the town, where the French soldiers were garrisoned because the Genoese refused to allow them into the citadel. That only sunk French morale further, which suffered from both defeat and idleness through the winter, and there were fights reported between the French and the Genoese garrison.

Not all was bad news for the French. The situation in the south near Ajaccio was more fluid, and the French commander there succeeded with a ruse de guerre against the Corsicans: Noting that the rebels had no uniforms, he procured Corsican costumes and dressed his men in them, and in this guise launched a surprise attack that resulted in more than a hundred militiamen killed or captured including two rebel captains. French gains there, however, were only slight; with two battalions it was not possible to either defeat the forces of Lieutenant-General Marquis Luca d'Ornano in the field or hold much territory against him. At Porto Vecchio, raids and counter-raids continued, and the French companies there did little but to make the Genoese feel freer to range further afield with their punitive strikes, which they felt quite free to do now that the truce had fallen apart.

Whether or not the Corsicans could have seriously threatened the French position at Calvi that winter is uncertain. Theodore never committed his artillery to find out. In his defense, however, the time to accomplish this was limited, it was now winter with all the attendant difficulties of the season, and Fabiani did not control a position which could either directly threaten the citadel or cut off its resupply by sea. At least the victory was a boost to the morale of the Corsicans, who could now claim that they had defeated the vaunted French army even without the benefit of surprise. The celebration was understandable, but premature, for soon they would face a mightier force. The Battle of Madonna della Serra convinced Boissieux that the island simply could not be reduced with the forces available to him, and certainly not without better artillery support. The "second wave" of French troops which would arrive on the island in January of 1739 included four more infantry battalions, one each of the regiments of Flanders, Béarn, Cambrésis, and Agenois, as well as several companies of the 1st and 3rd battalions of the Royal Corps of Artillery, bringing the nominal strength of the French force to around 5,500 men.


Footnotes
[1] While Fabiani did not have authority over generals in other theaters, he was the only person during the revolution whom Theodore gave the rank of Captain-General.

Timeline Notes
[A] A real quote, and an example of how widely known and commented on the Corsican revolt was at this time. Although the Anti-Machiavel was published in 1740, Frederick finished it by late 1739, so he was writing this as the French intervention was still ongoing and before Maillebois had completed the island's pacification. When he says "these English" in this quote, he means the ancient Britons, as he discusses their resistance to Roman rule in the previous paragraph.