Pasquale Paoli was born in 1725 in Stretta in the municipality of Morosaglia on Corsica. His father, General Giacinto Paoli, was a kind of prime minister in the short-lived Kingdom of Corsica under King Theodore I of Corsica and went into exile in Naples in 1739 with his youngest son Pasquale. In 1755, Paoli returned to Corsica as a 30-year-old ensign in the King's Corsican Guard and fought the Genoese as commander at the head of the Corsican guerrilla. He managed to drive them out of the interior and trap them in a few port cities.
In the same year, Paoli gave Corsica a democratic constitution and temporarily governed Corsica. He made Corte the capital. Among other things, he was friends with the Buonaparte family, who fought with him against the Corsican enemy Marius Matra. Carlo di Buonaparte, Napoleon's father, worked on a Corsican constitution and became Paoli's right-hand man.
When the Genoese handed the island over to France on May 15, 1768 until it was redeemed, Paoli fought the French. In 1768, the French, who had landed with 10,000 men, had to withdraw. A year later, however, 22,000 men landed under the leadership of the Comte de Vaux and defeated the Corsicans in the Battle of Ponte Novu on May 9, 1769. Paoli laid down his arms and chose exile. In 1790, the revolutionary National Assembly decided on the final annexation of Corsica to France.