The Corsica conflict is a conflict which has flared intermittently on the Mediterranean island of Corsica since the 1970s. It has its roots in the complex ethnic and political identity of the people of the island. Historically Corsica was closer to Italy than France, with the island controlled as part of the Republic of Genoa for centuries between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries and much of the population here being comprised of people of Ligurian or Tuscan background. Furthermore, prior to the advent of French rule in the late 1760s, there had been a short-lived Corsican Republic between 1755 and 1769. The unrest which broke out in the 1970s harked back to this Corsican nationalist tradition. It has primarily been led by the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC), which seeks to establish an independent Corsica free of French rule. The conflict peaked in the 1980s and had seemed to have ended in the 2010s, but has flared again recently with riots and protests against the government in 2022.[1]
Corsica conflict chronology of eventsCorsica conflict chronology of events
The island of Corsica has always had closer ties historically to Italy than to France. For instance, it was ruled as a province with Sardinia by the Romans and was not associated with southern France administratively. In the sixth century CE, the Lombards, a Germanic people who had conquered northern Italy and after whom the Plain of Lombardy is named, occupied the island. In subsequent centuries it became a fief of the Papacy in Rome and later a territory of the Republic of Pisa in Tuscany. Finally, in the thirteenth century, the Republic of Genoa conquered it from the Pisans and it remained a Genovese colony until the middle of the eighteenth century. Throughout this complicated history, many Italian groups from Liguria and Tuscany colonized the island, while Corsican developed as a local Italo-Dalmatian dialect. A clear indication of the strong connections between Corsica and mainland Italy is that about 80% of all modern Corsican surnames are Italian in origin.[2]
This ethno-political situation was complicated in the late 1760s when France purchased the island from the Republic of Genoa. Despite an aggressive program of Gallicization, the islanders retained a strong independent streak. This had been further augmented by the creation of a Corsican Republic in 1755, one which existed for fourteen years down to 1769 under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli, a figure who was viewed as a great hero of Corsican nationalism. All of this ensured that Corsicans have remained both aware of their own distinct Corsican nationalism and that their culture is broadly more Italianate than Francophone.[3]
Corsican nationalism and resistance to French rule remained an undercurrent of Corsican society throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of developments in the 1960s caused a major surge in nationalist sentiment. For instance, the government decided to grant lands in Corsica to the ethnically French pied-noirs who were leaving French Algeria at the end of the war of independence there in the early 1960s. Secondly, the government of Charles de Gaulle decided in 1960 to utilize the old silver mines at Argentella on Corsica as a site for the testing of France’s nuclear weapons. These developments created the very real sense that Corsica was under attack by the French state and being colonized by outsiders. Numerous Corsican nationalist groups, some committed to armed resistance, formed as a result.[4]
Out of these movements of the 1960s, the National Liberation Front of Corsica emerged in the 1970s and entered into a terrorist campaign against the French state from 1976 onwards. Bombings, attacks on French gendarmerie and hijackings of airplanes flying in and out of Ajaccio airport followed in the 1970s and 1980s. The FLNC ultimately wanted to acquire independence for Corsica through these actions. The scale of the violence was considerable. Hundreds of bombings occurred, with action extending to the French mainland and attacks in Paris in the 1980s. A truce in 1988 only led to a temporary cessation in hostilities as the FLNC split into different factions, some of which refused to honor the ceasefire.[5]
The Corsican conflict has never been fully resolved. Indeed, in the 2000s the different factions within the FLNC reconciled, leading to a fresh wave of violence. Despite repeated efforts to bring about a lasting solution to the unrest, incidents have continued to spark renewed conflict. The most recent came in 2022 after news spread that Yvan Colonna, a Corsican nationalist who was sentenced to life in prison in 2007 for his role in the 1998 assassination of a senior French official on the island, had been badly attacked in prison, from which incident he later died. News of this sparked riots in Ajaccio, Bastia and other towns. In 2024 talks progressed to granting semi-autonomy to Corsica.[6]
Extent of migration associated with the Corsica conflictExtent of migration associated with the Corsica conflict
There have been different forms of migration associated with the Corsican conflict. On the one hand, efforts at Gallicizing the island by the French state have led to sporadic colonization of Corsica by ethnically French people. Perhaps the foremost example of this occurred in the early-to-mid-1960s when some 18,000 pied-noirs, French Algerians, were given lands on Corsica and encouraged to settle their by the government as they abandoned Algeria.[7] The reverse of this was a huge exodus of Corsicans from their homeland, a movement which could be viewed as part of the enormous Italian diaspora of the period from 1860 to 1920. These early Corsican émigrés headed in large numbers for South America and the Caribbean, with Puerto Rico being a particularly popular destination. Later, between the 1920s and 1950s, large numbers of Corsicans headed for mainland France and the city of Marseille became a major center of the Corsican diaspora.[8]
Demographic impact of the Corsica conflictDemographic impact of the Corsica conflict
The long-term demographic impact of the Corsican conflict is that about 50,000 of the island’s 340,000 people are ethnically French, while a further 50,000 people are either from North African countries like Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco that were also formerly French colonies, or from mainland Italy or Portugal. The Corsican diaspora off the island is understood to now be much larger than the Corsican population on Corsica itself. There are over a million people of Corsican heritage in mainland France. Over 10% of the population of Puerto Rico, some 350,000 people, are believed to have Corsican heritage, which given the subsequent spread of the Puerto Rican diaspora in recent decades means that many people in a great number of countries in the Americas, most notably the United States, will be able to trace their ancestry back to Corsica in the two and a half centuries since the Corsica conflict began.[9]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Corsican conflictExplore more about the Corsican conflict
- Filae Family Trees records collection on MyHeritage
- France, Vital Records Index records collection on MyHeritage
- France, Births and Baptisms records collection on MyHeritage
- France Deaths records collection on MyHeritage
- France Newspapers & Periodicals records collection on MyHeritage
- Finding French Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/eureka/the-corsican-paradox-a-strange-superimposition-of-opposing-ideologies
- ↑ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30393118
- ↑ https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/biographies/paoli-pascal-philippe-antoine-also-known-as-pasquale-paoli/
- ↑ https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/eureka/the-corsican-paradox-a-strange-superimposition-of-opposing-ideologies
- ↑ https://academic.oup.com/book/9950/chapter-abstract/157298140?redirectedFrom=fulltext
- ↑ https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240312-france-talks-pave-way-towards-corsica-autonomy-emmanuel-macron
- ↑ https://www.refworld.org/reference/countryrep/mrgi/2018/en/65102
- ↑ https://www.campus.uni-konstanz.de/en/mediterranean-networks-corsican-clans-and-the-transit-point-marseille
- ↑ https://minorityrights.org/communities/corsicans/
[{Category:France]]