Fight Another Day
The highlands of the Agriate, with the Bay of San Fiorenzo and Cap Corse in the distance
Rumors of the defeat of Brigadier
Jean-Baptiste François, Marquis de Villemur at San Pellegrino had come to the ears of Lieutenant-General
Louis de Frétat, Marquis de Boissieux within days, but Boissieux initially dismissed them as contradictory and implausible. There were claims that the army had been all but wiped out and that their commander had been captured, no doubt owing to confusion between the captured Colonel
Armand de Bourbon, Comte de Malauze and Villemur himself. The loss was indeed not as staggering as the rumors had claimed, but Boissieux was nevertheless stunned by the actual scale of the defeat when Villemur's report finally reached him on the 17th.
Operationally speaking, the Boissieux’s plan was thoroughly ruined. He had intended for the Corsicans to be oppressed from all sides, threatened by advances from north, west, and south and unable to offer a coherent defense. The advance from the north, however, had been slowed to a crawl by bad terrain, poor logistics, and the resistance of the Corsicans, who forced Brigadier
Anne de Montmorency-Luxembourg, Comte de Montmorency et Ligny to pay for every inch of progress. With Villemur driven back from San Pellegrino, the advance from the south had been stopped cold as well.
Yet Boissieux soon got over his shock, and his course of action remained largely unchanged. By the time Villemur's report arrived, the general's deadline had recently expired and he had already ordered
Jean-Charles de Gaultier de Girenton, Marquis de Chateauneuf le Rouge, Seigneur de Rousset, to make final preparations for marching on the Nebbio. Strategically, Boissieux still believed his plan sound—to cut off the rebels from all succor and supply by ejecting them from the coastal regions. Such a strategy had already proved effective once before, as the imperial intervention of 1732 had followed a very similar trajectory: the Austrian forces had initially struggled against the Corsicans, but with the application of superior numbers they had been able to capture the coastal districts and compel the rebels to come to terms without having to actually invade the interior. All that had changed after San Pellegrino was that this strategy would have to be accomplished by one great advance from the west with Rousset's force, and given the poor Corsican performance against that force in the Balagna there was good reason to think it would still be a success.
While the morale of the Corsican troops was undoubtedly buoyed by their unambiguous defeat of a French army in the field, the Corsican prospects of holding the Nebbio remained grim. San Pellegrino had been fought against a diminished, disease-weakened force of no more than 1,500 men with no artillery and a trivially small detachment of cavalry, by a rebel force with at
least a 5:3 numerical advantage and the benefit of favorable terrain. In contrast, the Balagnese corps of Rousset was twice as large, possessed two hussar squadrons and a battery of field artillery, and would be much better supported by the Franco-Genoese naval forces. The Agriate, through which that force would have to pass, was congenial territory for guerrillas but was unlikely to mask a whole battalion as the Castagniccian woods had at San Pellegrino. Past those
maquis-covered hills, the French would descend into the Nebbio's landscape of farmland, orchards, and gently-rolling hills.
It was not just the physical geography of the Nebbio which posed a problem for the royalists. Its inhabitants, nearly as much as the people of Bastia, were largely uncooperative and frequently outright hostile to the rebels. Being on the northern coast and quite close to the Genoese capital of Bastia, the Nebbio had generally prospered under Genoese rule and its economy was tied closely to that of the colonial metropole. The rebellion had brought only hardship to most, and tensions were exacerbated further by Theodore's extractions of "contributions" from its people (justified on the basis that, since they were mostly
filogenovesi anyway, there was no harm in alienating them further) and the harsh rule of Colonel
Giovan Natali, the royalist governor of the Nebbio. Natali was a native of the province, but this was a two-edged sword; he knew the territory, but he also used his power to pursue old scores and personal grudges against various people and rival clans in the name of punishing "traitors to the nation." On the 16th of June, not long after Theodore had returned to the Nebbio with his victorious forces, Natali's enemies struck back; unknown assailants ambushed him and his bodyguards near Patrimonio and left him dying on the road, riddled with bullets. That the assassins were never caught despite this brazen attack in rebel-held territory is further testament to just how disgruntled and uncooperative the locals had become. Although Natali's death ended his abuses, it hardly helped matters in the district, which seemed to be spiraling out of control at the very moment when it was in greatest danger of invasion. The rebels themselves were now concerned about the prospect of rebellion.
There was, Costa informs us, a lively debate in the war council upon Theodore's return. A number of Theodore's commanders, inspired by the recent success, urged that all forces be gathered for a defense of the Nebbio from Rousset's army. Colonel
Antonio Colonna, Costa's nephew, was one of them, as was Brigadier
Giuliani di Muro, who though still recovering from being wounded at San Antonino probably wanted to make another attempt at recovering his honor. Count
Gio-Giacomo Ambrosi di Castinetta, governor of Bastia, also voiced his support; his was a powerful position, and he was sure to lose it if the Nebbio fell, as Bastia would then become indefensible. Adjutant-General
Edward Sarsfield, Viscount Kilmallock, was not bullish on their prospects but believed that it was a necessary fight, for he thought the loss of such a prize—including the Genoese capital itself—would be too deleterious to morale.
Captain-General
Simone Fabiani, the most senior general and vice-president of the war council, was adamantly opposed to a grand confrontation for the Nebbio. If any lesson had been learned in the Balagna, he argued, it was that the French could not easily be opposed in the open field, and the forces which the royalists now possessed were even fewer than those he had commanded in the Balagna. Furthermore, he pointed out, the royal army had been fortunate to maintain its best troops in its retreat from the Balagna, and they might not be as lucky if subjected to another defeat. Speaking in his support was Colonel
Felice Giuseppe, the hero of San Antonino (who may have done so for no other reason than his contempt for Muro), as well as Theodore's cousins
Johann Friedrich Caspar von Neuhoff zu Rauschenburg and
Matthias von Drost, whose positions rather depended on the king remaining alive and in power, not beaten or dead on the field. Rauschenburg had also experienced the worst of a field battle with the French firsthand and was not eager to repeat the experience.
Theodore remained regally aloof from the initial discussion, but retained the final word, and in the end sided with Fabiani. Costa says that it was simply a matter of trusting Fabiani's judgment. Theodore, however, may have also felt that he had special knowledge which his councilors lacked. Unlike his subjects, Theodore
knew France (or at least thought he did). He had, after all, been raised to manhood in the French royal court, and alone of all his advisers and generals had served in the French army. His instinct was that the war for his crown would ultimately be won not on any Corsican battlefield, but in the halls of Versailles.
While it can be argued that Theodore consistently overestimated his own skill at foreign policy and frequently attempted the outlandish or impractical with little success—"a visionary and a madman," as Lord Carteret would describe him a few years later—his approach in this case was not without merit. The French would never run out of regiments, but King
Louis XV and his minister Cardinal
André-Hercule de Fleury could run out of will to continue the fight. So far the cost to the French had only been in blood, a commodity which Versailles spent rather freely, as the financial burden of the intervention had been borne solely by the Genoese. The French, however, had already sent the maximum force authorized and paid for by treaty; to ramp up their presence further would require either paying for it themselves or compelling the Republic to pony up more money, and neither was terribly palatable. Cardinal Fleury had assured the king that the Corsican expedition would be no drain on the finances of state, and the Genoese already considered the
existing price to be extortionate, to say nothing of new expenses. Exasperated by Boissieux's conduct, dismayed with French setbacks, and increasingly gripped by paranoia that the French would take the island for themselves, the Genoese senators were not in a cooperative mood, and their public finances were in a shambles already. It surely did not help that Ambassador
Jacques de Campredon, the old French hand in Corsica who knew better than anyone how to work the Genoese Senate, had recently been sacked.
Theodore presumably did not know the specifics of this fraying relationship—nor the details of the treaty of intervention, which was notionally a secret pact— but he was correct to assume that his enemies' greatest weakness was political, not military. His interest lay less in economic problems than the balance of power, for he had correctly ascertained that British influence in the Mediterranean was what the French feared most. Early in his reign he had sought to allay those fears by any means possible (while nevertheless still appealing to London for assistance), but as hope of an understanding with the French faded over the course of the intervention, he began to place his hopes more and more in the idea that the British could be convinced to step in and make France back down for fear of sparking a greater war. Fleury's grand aim, after all, was to preserve peace with Britain, and presumably he would not hesitate to leave his Genoese allies hanging if the Corsican war seriously endangered that peace.
Although Theodore never explicitly articulated a grand strategy, his approach to the war by the summer of 1739 was essentially Fabian in nature (appropriately enough, given that his chief general was Fabiani) - to attrit, exhaust, and wear down the enemy, through interminable marches and constant ambushes in the rugged interior, with the ultimate objective of either convincing the French that the maximalist terms of Fontainebleau were not worth enforcing or convincing Britain that the nascent Kingdom of Corsica was strong and sturdy enough to merit a gesture of support which would compel the French to moderate their position. The danger, of course, was that a Fabian strategy can plausibly succeed only when time is on the side of the one employing it. Theodore seems to have been relying entirely on the assumption that the patience of the rebel Corsicans, oppressed and besieged on their own island by a powerful army, would last longer than that of the French king and his ministers. In the summer of 1739, that was not the safest of bets.
In accordance with this strategic vision, the priority of the nationals now became the evacuation of the Nebbio. Since the arrival of the "syndicate armada," most of the war materiel disembarked in the Nebbio which was not immediately distributed had remained in that province, predominantly at San Fiorenzo or Theodore's "northern capital" of Murato. If the Nebbio was to fall, however, it would all have to be removed—dozens of artillery pieces, thousands of small arms, more than a hundred thousand pounds of gunpowder, tens of thousands of pounds of shot, and so on—or else be lost to the French. In fact this had already begun under Fabiani's orders following the fall of the Balagna, when it was feared the French would launch an immediate follow-up attack, but Villemur's advance up the eastern coast had threatened to cut off the ongoing withdrawal. Fortunately, Villemur had been stopped less than a day's march from the Golo valley, the chief artery for the transport of Corsican heavy weapons into the interior by mule-back. After San Pellegrino, efforts were redoubled and given all available resources. Boissieux was undoubtedly correct that the rebellion, cut off from the sea, would eventually wither and die, but with the powder, weapons, and money Theodore still held in reserve he could potentially prolong his survival for months, perhaps even years.
A secondary logistical difficulty was what to do with the French prisoners. The Corsicans held nearly 500 French soldiers, enough to populate an entire French battalion, and feeding and guarding them proved to be no easy task. Some had been held at Bastia and San Fiorenzo, but if the northeast district was to be evacuated they could not remain there. Once more, Theodore send a message to Boissieux offering an exchange, not merely for Corsican militiamen but the eminent hostages at the Chateau d'If. His highest ranking captive, Colonel
Armand de Bourbon, Comte de Malauze, seemed likely to be a good bargaining chip. In the meantime, as Theodore awaited a response, Malauze was reportedly well-treated by the man he referred to as the "King of the Rebels," who invited him to dinner regularly. Some of his officers were baffled as to his preference for the Frenchman's company, but Theodore, starved for news from the continent and interested in any political developments he might turn to his advantage, was eager to hear the latest gossip from Paris.
News from the rest of Corsica was less than encouraging. It was reported that the Franco-Genoese force at Ajaccio had captured Cinarca and that the western province of Vico, previously the domain of the
indifferenti, was on the cusp of defecting to the French; the brigade of Maréchal de Camp
Louis-François Crozat, Marquis du Châtel seems to have been substantially outperforming its envisioned role of merely acting as a force-in-being in Ajaccio to keep Lieutenant-General
Luca d'Ornano occupied. There were rumors that d'Ornano himself, Theodore's foremost commander in the
Dila, was in negotiations with du Châtel or Boissieux. That was a danger not only because of the psychological impact of such a high-profile defection, but because it would expose the interior to attacks from both the north and south.
On June 22nd, Rousset's brigade entered the Agriate. A comparatively rich agricultural region, the province was nevertheless almost deserted; most farming had been carried out by the Genoese and done seasonally, with few permanent residents, and since 1730 this seasonal exploitation had been infrequent. The dense maquis was then interspersed with weed-filled fields, overgrown olive groves, and pasture turning slowly into wild land, and dotted with
pagliaghji, the drystone dwellings for farmers and livestock characteristic of the region. Using the mountains and the maquis as their refuge, Colonel Giuseppe's militiamen of Caccia and Canale harassed the French columns, but their effectiveness was limited. Rousset had chosen to take the coastal route, which was longer but kept him further from the mountains and secured at least one flank against the raiders. By the 26th, the French had reached the Torre di Mortella at the mouth of the Bay of San Fiorenzo. Although formerly occupied by the rebels, the Corsicans did not have much faith in the ability of a single six-pounder gun to hold back Rousset's whole corps, and the French found the tower abandoned. On the next day, the first French battalions marched into San Fiorenzo. The rebels had stripped most everything of worth from the town and burned their little fleet, including the Genoese galley which they had captured during the siege of the town. Its charred timbers were still smouldering on the beach when Rousset's men raised the Genoese flag upon the citadel.
While the rebels would not contest the plain, they retained the mountainous fringes of the Nebbio. The French were now in the same strategic position that the ill-fated Genoese Colonel Marchelli had been in 1736, and Marchelli's attempts to break through the mountains to Bastia had ended in disaster. The royalists were more numerous, better armed, and better prepared than they had been in 1736, but the French army was not the Genoese army, and Rousset was not Marchelli.
Situation in Corsica around the end of June 1739
Green: Royalist controlled
Red: Genoese controlled
Blue: French or joint Franco-Genoese occupation
White: Unknown, neutral, or uninhabited
