The Battle of Ponte Novu took place on May 8 and 9, 1769, between royal French forces under the Comte de Vaux, a seasoned professional soldier with an expert on mountain warfare on his staff, and the native Corsicans under Carlo Salicetti.

It was the battle that effectively ended the fourteen-year-old Corsican Republic and opened the way to annexation by France the following year.

Voltaire, in his Précis du Siècle de Louis XV, admiringly wrote about the battle: "The principal weapon of the Corsicans was their courage.

A slaughter resulted from the crossfire, the river ran red and the rest of the Corsican army retreated in disorder.

The accounts vary on this point but the courage and loyalty of the Corsican troops and their officers are clearly in question, with a suggestion of divisiveness regarding the French.

Discovering the foolishness of their choice, they attempted to retreat across the river but for an unknown reason were met by the volley fire of the Prussians.

One can only presume that Paoli had stationed his best and most loyal troops along the opposite bank and that, seeing the rout, they ran forward over the bridge to rescue the situation.

There appears to be no possibility, in this version, that they kept up a sustained fire by mistake, but evidence of collusion with the French, though a logical circumstance, did not survive.

In summary, it is probably safe to say that Corsica was not sufficiently unified for Paoli to make an effective defense, his top officers defected, his troops lacked motivation, and he relied on mercenaries of dubious loyalty to save the day against numerically superior and skilled French veterans and professional officers.