Corsican Constitution

The Corsican Constitution was the founding charter of the independent Corsican Republic. Its first version was adopted in 1755 and remained in force until France annexed Corsica in 1769. Written in Tuscan Italian, the language of elite Corsican culture at the time, it was drafted by Pasquale Paoli and drew inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been commissioned by the Corsicans in 1763 to write the Projet de constitution pour la Corse. The historian Linda Colley credits Paoli with writing the first written constitution of a nation state. A second Corsican Constitution followed in 1794 for the short-lived Anglo-Corsican Kingdom of 1794 to 1796; it introduced suffrage for all property owners and was considered a highly democratic constitution for its time, predating many of the written national constitutions later adopted elsewhere in Europe.