At the start of spring 2022, the Corsican question is once again in the national news and during a presidential campaign overshadowed by the dramatic return of war in Eastern Europe. The attack on Yvan Colonna by an ex-jihadist sparked riots of rare violence on the island.
This strong student mobilization, high school and even college students, again raises the question of the political and institutional future of the island. The French government is now discussing with the elected nationalists, who are the large majority on the island, a degree of negotiable autonomy within a French Republic, one and indivisible.
Beyond this legal debaterecurrent for half a century, it is a question of understanding the commitment of young Corsican people in such expressions of violence.
Inserted into protective family frameworks which guarantee them often very decent standard of living, these young islanders display a vehement rejection of the French Nation, synonymous for them of an identity dissolution in an individualistic and atomized society.
The legacy of long-term violence
Supported by seasoned nationalist activists who have largely supported youth movements by participating in protest processionsthe island youth violently targeted the various representations of the State in Corsica, considering the latter, French state assassin (“French state assassin”), as the sole responsible for the aggression of Yvan Colonna in prison in Arles.
According to the police officer, the harassment they carried out against police forces in the streets of Corte, Ajaccio and Bastia Xavier Crettiez the same character as the rioting practices of black blocs in Western metropolises.
Read more: The black bloc: when the antisystem frightens
We must indeed wonder about the instrumentalization of the romanticized figure of the Rebel embodied by Yvan Colonna, a mix of identity claims and drawing inspiration in the form of South American revolutionary struggles, while his criminal act rather reveals the misdirection of a “lost generation” and prisoner of his utopias as many actors in nationalist struggles have declared.
Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/AFP
Ancient conflicts anchored in the heart of micro-societies
By learning about this gesture of victimhood, the new generations maintain a fraternal story and mythicized Corsican rural communities.
This phenomenon is understandable, however, from a long-term historical perspective. From the 1970s, historians or ethnologists sought to decipher the mechanisms of violence in Corsica.
By avoiding any essentialist trap, they interpreted these cycles of endemic violence through the prism of conflictualities within segmental micro-societies where community and interpersonal relations are essential.
Clientelism and clanism have long marked social relations on the island, as reported by journalist Paul Bourde in the late 19th century.e century talking about his meeting with a political personality from the island: “In the past, they would have followed us to war, today they follow us to the polls”.
In its contemporary history, the island has known only about forty years of civil peace, ranging from the eradication of rural banditry in the 1930s to the rise of nationalist claims in the late 1960s.
This short period of peace is associated with the culmination of a massive Corsican accession to the French Nation (by the oath of Bastia in 1938, one swears to “die French” in the face of Mussolini’s irredentist fascism), during which violence is channeled by the cycle of world wars and the culmination of one French colonial rule in which the Corsicans played a particularly active role.
–NIULINCU2 / Wikimedia
It is also illustrated by a golden age of powerful middle Corsicanin Paris or Marseille, from the 1930s to the 1970s with the French Connection, which largely contributed to channeling violence outside the island while intervening effectively in island political life.
A new cycle of violence
It was in a Corsica experiencing strong economic expansion during the 1960s that a cycle of violence reappeared. The new Corsica mass tourism, the agricultural development of the coastal plains and the demographic dynamism regained due to a strong migratory influx Migratory is shaken by a movement of identity challenge legitimizing the use of plastics and racketeering.
Political demands, economic and commercial interests of a mafia nature soon plague the entire social body of the island. The confusion reached its climax from the 1990s when nationalist factions engaged in criminal score-settling and the territorial predations of all kindsintimidation, racketeering, destruction of movable and immovable property, assassinations, extend to the entire economic and social fabric.
The rejection of French belonging and its paradoxes
Despite these excesses so well evoked by a new generation of artists like the author Jerome Ferrari or the director Thierry de Peretti, the Nationalists, a generic term to characterize the whole of the regionalist and nationalist movement, have acquired a political hegemony since their electoral success in Bastia in 2014.
The “great families” of the Gaullist right or of the radical party, guarantors of the right/left opposition have been swept away while the macronist current, so foreign by its sociological nature to the cultural and social fabric of the island, does not arrive not to replace it.
Island political life has consequently denationalized for the benefit of nationalist and Corsican parties. But paradoxically, the Corsican departments are also among the French territories more sovereignists, protesters and eurosceptics.
The nationalist current has gradually solidified its cultural and social hegemony in a society precarious by the tourist rent. With the support of the Socialists in the 1980s, he was able to conquer the spaces of public speaking, university, public media (FR3, RCFM) and private with the now unique daily, Corse-Matin, the whole making a “consent Volunteer to the vision of theisland identity.
Nationalist militants are best equipped to capture the regionalized public jobs (primary teachers, Corsican language teachers, university jobs, media and communication, political management) in a vigorous standoff with the State and which can explain the adhesion of young people in search of a future.
A new generation in search of identity
The sense of identity displayed by these young generations manifests the attachment to a rooted, organic, community society, imprinted with an assumed catholicity and much closer to the Italian identity schemes.
Conversely, they express their doubts about integration into a more individualistic, but also universalist, multicultural French society that is increasingly managerial and apolitical and now revealing its fragile cohesioneven his “archipelization”.
Read more: The autonomy of Corsica: a loophole for the Republic?
They also perceive the weakening of Corsican organic solidarities on the continent as evidenced by the reduction in the role of political circles Corsica in Paris or in the Provence-Côte d’Azur region since the beginning of the XXIe century just like the spectacular decline of the environment Corsica (especially in the prison space) for the benefit of new ethnic gangs whether they are maghrebiansBalkan or sub-Saharan.
Unlike their perfectly Corsican-speaking elders who until the 1970s managed to associate everywhere their dual French and Corsican identity, associated for the most educated with a good knowledge of the Italian world, the new generations, express in their use of violence the expression of an identity malaise that cannot be satisfied by an abusive use of national ideologies encompassing in fact in a real political confusionism, aspiration to autonomy, independence, or more simply to an existential and identity proclamation .
–
